Midway In Our Life's Journey

Midway In Our Life’s Journey

Divine Comedy II: Purgatory. As If!

by Annie Fox for Mr. Rowles’s AP English 22 May 2023

“You want to start in the middle, my darlings? Well, you’ll have to get up early in the morning to beat Dante Alighieri.”

Thus spake the notoriously halitoxic Sherman H. H. Rowles, a once-upon-a-dream Yale Younger Poet now, at sixty-something, taxed with a Sisyphean uphill roll: turning twenty wildly self-indulgent prep school juniors into Writers. “Listen hard, keeds,” Mr. Rowles went on. "This is John Ciardi’s translation of the Divine Comedy, and I defy you to find a truer one.” 

He clutched a book in his good left hand, a hairy-knuckled index finger marking the page where Canto One began, but as you, prescient reader, have doubtless divined, he knew the words to a faretheewell, he was ready to exhale them on the drop of a dime. 

“‘Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

from the straight road and woke to find myself

alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,

so rank, so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives a shape to fear.’”

Outside our arched classroom windows, the lambent mid-May air seemed to shudder and lose its glow. Trust me–me, Annie, the Lit Rag editor on whose desk is emblazoned “Metaphor is Less,” I exaggerate not. Nor do I foolishly suggest that Dante’s words had the physical heft required to wreak atmospheric change. But. Something happened. Call it the power of suggestion, if you must. Or fluff it off as mere coincidence. No matter. I aver: Something happened. Even on Connecticut country day school campuses, Something may now and then happen.

I felt the others feel it and instantly rush to deny their own perceptions. Janet Abel sneezed. Marissa Kohn God-blessed her, though all of us knew that Janet professed secular humanism and disappreciated being God-blessed when she sneezed. Honeybee Westerhaus asked a bit pettishly why Dante opened with the first person plural and then switched to the first person singular; was there a gender identity subtext to consider?  

“I mean, right, ‘went astray from the straight road,’” chimed in Honeybee’s mini-me, the unfortunate Blanche Newfield. “And then describing the place where he found himself as ‘rank’. Sounds a bit vagiphobic, no? Of course this presupposes that for Dante, gay was straight. But that’s how it was in the old world, non e vero?”

And then there was Vianna Nichols, as usual so well prepared with an appercu, one oould easily believe the rumors about her and Sherman H. H.; semi-colons were only the half of it.

“One thing has always puzzled me. And everyone else, no doubt,” she added with her trademarked smarmy speciousness. “Dante was born in 1265 and died in 1321. Which means he lived only to fifty-six. Yet every reference to the Cantos states the narrator’s age as thirty-five. So what’s with the ‘midway in our life's journey’? I may not have made the cut for AP math, but even I know that thirty-five is way more than half of fifty-six. I mean, it’s like thirty-five fifty-sixths, right?”

“Beautiful thinking, my darlings!” crowed Sherman H. H. Rowles. “Virgil himself did not shine a brighter light into Dante’s infernal darkness. But what would Einstein say?”

The answer that all but exploded from my mouth couldn’t have originated in my brain, and yet rational analysis precludes any other source. “It’s all about the spacetime curvature,” I blurted into the spellbound silence. “The years of Dante’s birth and death are only two of the metrics in the Einstein tensor. If you want to understand what the poet meant by ‘midway,’ you have to factor in the where with the when. Where was Dante born? In Florence. Where did he die? In Ravenna. What is the distance between them? One hundred sixteen miles on glorious Scenic Route 302 Brisighellese-Ravennate, the shortest span as the crow flies but traffic is often grumous. Or there are train and train/bus options.” 

A good thing I was sitting down; my knees were shaking insanely. I was only relieved when Vianna took over as if I were simply the warm-up for her next star turn. 

“Exactly!” she chirped, with a predictable paperback romance toss of her butterscotch hair. “Whether you travel by car or train, on your way from Florence to Ravenna you'll likely want to break for lunch in Bologna, which can be an ideal stopping-off point to experience the cuisine of Northern Italy. For those of you who didn’t have the advantage of a two-week homestay in the Emilia-Romagna region last summer, there’s a lot more to the cucina di Bologna than tortellini in ragu and mortadella. Click here for my personal top ten favorite restaurants.”

“And so we come to your assignment for tomorrow,” Mr. Rowles announced gaily into the thick hush that followed Vianna’s word glut. “You will write a short story in which Dante is traveling from Florence to Ravenna and decides to stop in Bologna for lunch. Please choose one of these subtopics. 1) Dante has made a date for the midday, midway repast with Beatrice, who’s gluten-allergic. 2) The year is 1968, and Dante, a Sarah Lawrence student doing a semester at the University of Bologna, has lost his American Express Card. 3) Dante’s father has little use for poetry; he demands that Dante spend his gap year apprenticed to a Chianti winemaker with ten beautiful daughters and learn how to put a cork into a bottle, nudge nudge wink wink. 4) Dante harbors grandiose notions about the power of his second serve and plans to stow away on a cruise ship from Ravenna to Croatia, where he will cement Beatrice's admiration by shmooshing Novak Djokovic in the July 2023 Plava Laguna Tennis Open."

Mr. Rowles grinned sadistically as the bell rang. “One thousand to three thousand words. No no no ChatBot or that ilk. Oh, needless to say, your story must start in the middle. And must feature a glaring absence of beginning or ending. Since that’s how you all seem determined to write, you might as well learn how to make it a feature, not a bug. Buon appetitio, my darlings. Corragio.”

Divine Comedy I: Hell. Yikes, It’s Hot in Here.

by Vianna Nichols for Mr. Rowles’s AP Inglese 22 May 2022

Sensitivity alert! Hell is not for the faint of heart. No insult intended if you happen to be weak, just a warning that maybe you should stick to AA Milne.

A middle a muddle

A brown and yellow puddle

Life’s a freaking riddle

Hey dildo diddle

How will it end?

When did it start?

Why does time bend?

Who stole my heart?

Dante’s mother 

Baked his brother

Into a torta di pere

A pear and frangipane tart

A fiorelli pear Sicilian almond 

frangipane tart

Pasta frolla for the crust

Type “0” flour is a must

Leopards wear leotards

Lions wear pride

She-wolf is coming

Best run and hide

Shelter inside

The Styx is way wide

Can’t swim when you’ve died

—Children’s jump rope song, circa 1948, suburban Hartford, Connecticut

“Please, Mama,” Dante said for the umpeenth tine. “I don’t need a sandwich. We’ll be having lunch in Bologna.” Although he did his best to conceal his impatience, he saw hurt seep into her rheumy gray eyes.  

“Lunch in Bologna, dio volente,” she said, reminding him for the umpteenth time that nothing happened unless God willed it. “What if your mule steps on a thorn? Or eats bad mushrooms and shits diarrhea?”

“Mama, Mama. Nothing will keep me from Bologna. Destiny has ordained that I arrive there by one o’clock for a life-changing meal with Beatrice at Osteria del Sole.”

“Oh, Dantino. Always the dreamer.” Mama Alighieri untied her apron strings and disengaged the splattered cloth from her capacious bosom and lap. “This Beatrice you met on the Internet, how do you know she’s not one of your poetic fantasies? And I may be just your uneducated old Mama, but take it from me that Osteria del Sole won’t open until 1645. Beside, everyone knows they serve only wine. You have to buy your lunch in the market and bring it inside as if you were a shepherd. I suppose you think in big fat fancy Bologna you’ll find better sandwiches than mine?” Tears trickled across the creases of her face. “Before you met your so-called guide Virgil, you used to tell the world that my sandwiches were fit for the gods.”

“Enough with the sandwiches, Mama! How many times do I have to tell you? Beatrice is allergic to gluten. She’s the one who coined the GF motto. ‘Lips that have tasted wheat will not tatste mine.’ Do you get it?” 

“Allergic to gluten? Dio mio, how I pity that poor child! Go now, Dantino, with my blessing. Whilst you wend your tortuous route from hell to heaven, I shall pave the way for rice to make its way here from Asia. And I, your uneducated old Mama, will invent the all-important risotto, that your beloved may grow strong and bear you many bambini. Buon viaggio, figlio mio. Send a postcard of the two towers. Remember to rub them if your erection falters.”

Divine Comedy III: Paradise. 6-7, 7-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-6 

by Blanche Newfield for Sherman “Herman Hesse" Rowles’s AP English May 22, 2023

“Hi, folks, it’s Honeybee Westerhaus reporting from the Plava Laguna Croatia Open Men’s Finals, where Novak Djokovic is neck and neck in the fifth and championship set against Dan Allegro, the heart-stoppingly handsome unseeded Italian player who seemed to come out of nowhere. After pulverizing previous winners Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner and then homegrown star Marin Cilic, Dan has held his own against the numero uno world supreme Novak Djokovic, sending clouds of red clay into the pristine Aegean blue day. Hard to tell which of the players seems more astonished. I myself have lost my usual legendary neutrality and ice maiden affect because Dan Allegro is the most sublime hunk of humanity I've ever beheld. Here we go again, serve and volley, serve and volley, both players too exhausted for much more, and of course there’s no merciful tiebreak in the last set, and omigod, Dan Allegro is up 7-6, and now it’s 30-love, yes, it's love, this time I really think it's love, and omigod, omigod, with one point to go Dan Allegro plops his serve into the net and then follows it with a second serve that has to be off the charts, yes, it’s officially clocked at 165 miles an hour, faster than Sam Groth’s previous world record of 163.7 mph, and the crowd is going crazy as Novak and Dan head for the net, and I myself am having multiple orgasms, and omigod is Novak refusing to shake Dan’s hand? What’s that he’s shouting in Serbian? ‘путник кроз време?’ Time-traveller?? And now in English, ‘Mother-humping risotto-eating time traveller?’ And the crowd is booing and applauding and let’s get the microphone to Dan Allegro, who scored two astounding triumphs today! Three, if you count the shattering of my New England reserve. Congratulations, Dan. Well, how do you feel? And why are you looking at me that way?” 

Dan Allegro smiled and smiled until circles of light embraced him and Honeybee Westerhaus, three rainbow circles that were one. “Thank you, Bee. It’s awfully nice. It’s paradise. If you should care for me.”