Just inside the cut, Martin and Mandelbaum face off in what should be an exhilerating match of prowess and manhood. Let's join the action already in progress…

Tuirgin: how short a time the fire of love endures in woman
if frequent sight and touch do not rekindle it.
Purgatorio VIII.77-78, trans. Hollander

shishno2: quite.

Tuirgin: Whoever said, "Absence makes the heart grow stronger," was a blubbering idiot. Or else a woman writing to a man away at war, trying to convince him she was not writing from the bed of his crippled best friend with hands that lit her on fire.

shishno2: mark twain?

Tuirgin: He said that?

shishno2: no, i thought you were quoting

Tuirgin: Oh. No. That's just me. I'll take that as a compliment. :D

shishno2: heh

Tuirgin: You've made me proud... I'm going to post the last little bit. :P

shishno2: what hath I wreaked?!

A bit of Dante's Purgatorio that really caught my attention yesterday. Dante and Virgil are climbing Mt. Purgatory, and are passing by the negligent or lazy. Canto 5, verses 10–21; I quote the Mandelbaum translation.

Virgil speaks:

"Why have you let your mind get so entwined,"
my master said, "that you have slowed your walk?
Why should you care about what's whispered here?

Come, follow me, and let these people talk:
stand like a sturdy tower that does not shake
its summit though the winds may blast; always

the man in whom thought thrusts ahead of thought
allows the goal he's set to move far off—
the force of one thought saps the other's force."

Could my reply be other than "I come"?
And—somewhat colored by the hue that makes
one sometimes merit grace—I spoke those words.

…always / the man in whom thought thrust ahead of thought / allows the goal he's set to move far off— / the force of one thought saps the other's force.

…sigh…

This had me laughing out loud at one point, and I just thought I should share it with all of my 1½ readers.

The following excerpt is from Charles Martin's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book I, the first section on Jove & Io. Io by now has already been turned into a cow by Jove and she's fled and is licking her father's hand and begins to cry. I take up with line 896:

If words would just have come, she would have spoken,
telling them who she was, how this had happened,
and begging their assistance in her case;
but with her hoof, she drew lines in the dust,
and letters of the words she could not speak
told the sad story of her transformation.

"Oh, wretched me," cried Io's father, clinging
to the lowing calf's horns and snowy neck.
"Oh, wretched me!" he groaned. "Are you the child
for whom I searched the earth in every part?
Lost, you were less a grief than you are, found!

"You make no answer, unable to respond
to our speech in language of your own,
but from your breast come resonant deep sighs
and—all that you can manage now—you moo!

"But I—all unaware of this—was busy
arranging marriage for you, in the hopes
of having a son-in-law and grandchildren.
Now I must pick your husband from my herd,
and now must find your offspring there as well!

"Nor can I end this suffering by death;
it is a hurtful thing to be a god,
for the gates of death are firmly closed against me,
and our sorrows must go on forever."

I can see this all in my head—tragic, farcical. It makes me think of British humor. Poor Io, seduced by Jove, is then turned by the king of gods into a cow so that Juno doesn't catch him with his godly knickers down. Io's beautiful voice is now a bovine "moo". She catches up with dear old dad, and is crying and seeking solace and sympathy, and all dad can think about is grandkids, be they gods or cattle. Hillarious! Poor him—he even wishes he could die, meanwhile she's stuck in the shape of a heifer. Moo.

Martin, Charles, trans. Metamorphoses. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005. 41-42.

Yes, ok. It's one of these cheezy quizilla things. But I thought the outcome was interesting. I happen to be just finishing up the book that I am.

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a mystery novel dealing with theology, especially with catholic vs liberal issues. You search wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that learning is essential in life.

Which literature classic are you?

Update

I was commenting on this with a friend and had the following exchange.

J. says:

i hold the belief that what we are drawn to is ultimately what is most important to us... whether we realize it or not

J. says:

so that makes sense

Tuirgin says:

Yeah, of modern authors Borges and Eco seem to be the most important to me -- and I see a lot of corollaries between them.

Tuirgin says:

Interesting as neither are terribly spiritual writers. But they are writers of mystery, the absurd, and encyclopedic knowledge.

J. says:

somehow i think that fits

Tuirgin says:

Yeah. Maybe it's the mature me. The one that is beginning (just beginning) to feel comfortable in my own skin. The one that senses that the urgent life and death spiritual questions need to take a backseat, not out of lack of importance, but because they are comprehended best in an oblique fashion.

J. says:

yeah, i like that interpretation

Update

I should clarify what I mean by "backseat". Unfortunately, the best clarification I can think of is a passage of Doctor Zhivago in which Z contrasts Pushkin and Chekhov with Gogol and Dostoevksy, the unfortunate bit being that I don't currently have the text at my fingertips. Essentially Z concludes that G & D were focused on the "big questions" while P & C, though not ignorant or avoiding the questions, focused instead upon the business of their personal craft.

In English letters we have a somewhat similar contrast between Lewis and Tolkien. My choice is to take Tolkien as a model over Lewis. Got it? Ok.

J—, I left work today with a headache. But instead of staying at home I went to the library to pick up my reserved copy of Battleship Potemkin and a video series on the Byzantine Empire. I got to the library before they opened and so went to Barnes & Noble for some coffee. I sat and read Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog.

Reading Doctor Zhivago I feel that *awakening* sensation, wherein I see things differently, feel them more alive, but as a subject, an art, and not merely machinery.

I am realizing that I have been mostly dead, and that the sign and cause of death is didacticism. It is so easy to choke out the life which Christ offers us. DZ is an important work for me at this moment.

LD struck me deeply, too. Have you read it? Why is adultery such a common topic? It is a fearful one. It is one which threatens me with madness. There is something to this—I feel it but it has not come to surface, yet—it is still too deep, too much in the subconscious. I feel almost as if God and Satan are at once whispering the same words to me--it is the tone of voice which makes the difference, which holds completely different implications.

We cannot judge. To judge is to damn ourselves. The Gospels say as much. But I think I'm learning this at a more personal level. It is not just that we are guilty of hypocrisy, but that our judgement causes us to commit that very thing.

I cannot say what this passage does in me. Just read it and perhaps you will know it, too.

At Oreanda they sat on a seat not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was hardly visible through the morning mist; white clouds stood motionless on the mountain-tops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection. Sitting beside a young woman who in the dawn seemed so lovely, soothed and spellbound in these magical surroundings—the sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov thought how in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves when we forget our human dignity and the higher aims of our existence.

And then, the end...

In moments of depression in the past he had comforted himself with any arguments that came into his mind, but now he no longer cared for arguments; he felt profound compassion, he wanted to be sincere and tender...

"Don't cry, my darling," he said. "You've had your cry; that's enough... Let us talk now, let us think of some plan."

Then they spent a long while taking counsel together, talked of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long at a time. How could they be free from this intolerable bondage?

"How? How?" he asked, clutching his head. "How?"

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

Do we torture ourselves to remind us how miserable we really are? What person is really convinced that some affair will bring happiness? As with Tristan and Iseult, it is Death... a sickness which we do not want to let go of. And yet, somewhere, somewhere here I sense Christ working in His infinite mercy and love.

Have you ever thought that all the truly great characters who live out a life of charity—I'm thinking of Les Miserables, Tarkovsky's Rublev, Crime & Punishment—debase themselves in some way, realize their wretchedness and their response is to do good. I was thinking today that they do not do good in the hopes of saving themselves, or of making up for what they have done, but that to them there is nothing left for them to do but either destroy themselves in death or to become a living crucification of love... not a work nor a necessary task, but that it becomes the only breath given them.