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In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love. Joseph Luzzi
Читать онлайн.Название In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008100643
Автор произведения Joseph Luzzi
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015
First published in the United States by Harper Wave in 2015
Copyright © Joseph Luzzi 2015
Joseph Luzzi asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
In a Dark Wood is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Sheldon Serkin/EyeEm/Getty Images
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008100667
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780008100643
Version: 2016-05-17
For Isabel
l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
Every grief story is a love story.
Contents
CHAPTER 1 An Hour with the Angels
CHAPTER 5 The Gears of Justice
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
In the middle of our life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood.”
So begins one of the most celebrated and challenging poems ever written, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a fourteen-thousand-line epic about the soul’s journey through the afterlife. The tension between the pronouns says it all: although the “I” belongs to Dante, who died in 1321, his journey is also part of “our life.” We will all find ourselves in a dark wood one day, the lines suggest.
For me that day came eight years ago, on November 29, 2007, a morning just like any other. I left my home in upstate New York at eight thirty a.m. and drove to nearby Bard College, where I am a professor of Italian. It was cold and wet, the air barely creased by the gray light. After my first class ended, I walked to my office to gather materials and then made my way to a ten thirty a.m. class.
I was joking with my students as we all settled in, when I noticed something unusual out of the corner of my eye: there was a security guard standing at the door.
“Look, they’re coming to arrest me,” I said, laughing. But the beefy security guard was not smiling.
“Are you Professor Luzzi?”
I’ve done nothing wrong, was my first thought.
“Yes—why?”
“Please come with me.”
I edged outside the classroom and saw the associate dean and vice president of the college racing up the stairwell. I started running too, down the stairs and out of the building. There was a security van waiting for me.
Joe, your wife’s had a terrible accident.
The words came from somewhere close, but they sounded muffled, as though passing through dimensions. Time and space