Anti-Climacus

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING: In which I abuse the form in order to share a few things I've had on my mind:

First, from Eliot, "The Literature of Politics":

"For the question of questions, which no political philosophy can escape, and by the right answer to which all political thinking must in the end be judged, is simply this: What is Man? what are his limitations? what is his misery and what his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?"

I love this, not only because it strikes me as entirely right (even in the ordering of the questions, which asks about the limitations of man before his greatness), but also because the 'question of questions' is in fact four separate questions. Brilliant.

Also from Eliot, "American Literature and American Language":

"Most of us, we know, have a pretty good chance of oblivion anyway; but to those of us who succeed in dying in advance of our reputations, the assurance of a time when our writings will only be grappled with by two or three graduate students in Middle Anglo-American 42 B is very distasteful."

"Oh, snap" as the kids say. But entirely fair. And we'll connect this with something in Dante (Purgutorio XXVI):

"I put myself forward a little towards him that had been pointed out and said that my desire offered a place of welcome for his name, and he readily began to speak: 'So much does your courteous question please me that I neither can nor would conceal myself from you. I am Arnaut, who weep and sing as I go. I see with grief past follies and see, rejoicing, the day I hope for before me. Now I beg of you, by that goodness that guides you to the summit of the stairway, to take thought in due time for my pain.' Then he hid himself in the fire that refines them."

Eliot readers will recognize the last line, in its Italian form (Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina). The passage carries a lot with it: commentators will point out that Arnaut is one of the very few people in the Commedia who speaks in his own language, not Italian. But there are three reasons I've always liked this passage perhaps best of all of Dante. In the first place, the image of this moment of purgutory, the refining fire, seems to me an excellent metaphor for the this-worldly process of sanctification. It's not that you become something else: because of the fire, you become more yourself, more pure. The second is that Arnaut is a romantic poet, and I sometimes think that it is the task of singleness to see with grief your past follies while hoping for the day in which you can rejoice.

The third is the manner in which Dante draws out the implications of writing as an act of creation. The sin applied to at least certain writers in the Inferno (I am thinking here of Brunetto Latini as one of the 'literary sodomites') and the Purgutorio is lust. The urge to write is a desire to create a legacy that survives one's physical body in the world, and to do that by binding up one's work with an intense form of love. The thing I write I bring into being of my own energy, and make the world different because of it (and this is to say nothing of the desire of having followers to carry on one's work after death--the bond of affection between Latini and Dante is obvious).

When I finished my exams this past fall, I was obsessed with questions of structure and composition, fascinated by the creative process and its various failures (8 1/2, I think, is the perfect movie to watch when thinking about one's dissertation). To the extent that I have brought forward my project, it is largely by placing the larger questions about what I am doing and why off to the side. I certainly hope it is not simply amour propre, but I think Dante gives me the ability to ask that question honestly, and think about the implications of my answer.