Tag Archives: Seán Thomas Kane

Dúlra

Dúlra – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how it’s good to pause and notice the ways we supersede older things with the new while benefiting from the old all the same. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how it’s good to pause and notice the ways we supersede older things with the new while benefiting from the old all the same.

One thing I seek to understand the most about the Irish language is how different external influences have changed the language. I first learned the word nádúr before learning dúlra. Both words mean the same thing on a broad level: they both refer to the concept of nature. Yet nádúr comes from the Latin nātūra with the early medieval monks. It was an import to Ireland that arrived with Christianity and the Latin alphabet, a Roman concept of nature that perhaps fits better in the classical sense of civilization than the Gaelic model which was highly developed around forts and homesteads rather than cities or towns. I’ve often challenged my students to consider that while civilization at its core refers to cities, the ways in which it has developed around the globe differ in their own methods.

Take, if you will, the different origins of writing. Whereas our own Latin alphabet derives from a Mediterranean sphere of the written word whose roots trace back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, the history of writing in East Asia goes back to the earliest forms of writing in ancient China on the oracle bones. In the countries whose writing systems derive from this Chinese source, they still largely use logographic or syllabic forms of writing while there is a greater diversity of form among the descendants of these old Egyptian hieroglyphs. We, the Greeks, and Cyrillic writers, have devised alphabets in which both consonants and vowels are written out. Other cultures that have adopted this Mediterranean tradition of writing only write the consonants, as in Arabic and Hebrew. Still others have syllabic systems in which individual written characters represent a syllabic sound: a consonant and vowel combination.

Each system is equal in its utility, and each represent the diversity of human experiences with their own worlds. They are each their own response to a common question. So it is with nātūra and dúlra, one is a Latin way while the other a Gaelic one. Nature, in this Latin perception is quite monolithic and abstract in my view; I’m thinking of Lucretius’s book De rērum nātūra, or On the Nature of Things, whose title I’ve surely ripped off a good many times in the last fifteen years. We can talk about nature this and nature that, yet we need further context to properly understand what is meant by nature. It could be a reference to the non-human world, places untouched by civilization. That certainly fits the Renaissance perception of nature which I study. Or it could stand in for instinct and feeling. My Instagram feed was filled earlier this week with videos of people who have pet panthers and tigers for some reason. Sure, they may seem like big, cute kittens but unlike domesticated cats (Felius cattus) these animals don’t have generations of domestication and breeding to be willing to live around humans like their smaller distant cousins do. So, pets they may be, but they are still pets that could, and quite likely will, rip your face off if given the chance.

What I like about dúlra is that it comes from another Irish word, dúil, which is a very abstract concept in English yet specific in that it refers to the most fundamental aspects of one’s nature. Dúil can be used to refer to the elements of one’s existence, or to a creature as something created. In English we have several words that all generally refer to other fauna: there’s animal, the most common one which has the Latin anima meaning “spirit” at its core, creature, which sounds slightly more menacing yet at the same time speaks to the thing’s nature as a created being, and finally beast which comes into English through French from the Latin bēstiawhich implies a strong sense of danger in its name. These three words offer a gradient of distinction from humanity, and even a scale by which we humans have judged each other. Dúil then fits closer to the English word creature in the sense that a creature is created and is constituted of elements which allow it to exist.

Are these elements then immutable, or can they change with their experiences? There is a story in the March/April 2024 issue of Smithsonian Magazine by conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb about the negative impacts that roads are having on the forests of the American West. In many places roads were the forward guard of civilization, along those roads came the hunters and loggers, the miners and sightseers all of whom transformed these forests to better fit that classical view of a civilized and maintained wilderness that isn’t truly wild. Today, Goldfarb writes, in the contiguous United States “it is impossible to travel further than 22 miles (35 km) from the nearest road.” Think about that for a moment: in the Lower 48 states, which occupy an area of 3,119,884.69 mi2 (8,080,464.3 km2), you can’t go very far from running into a road. I’ve often noticed how if you look at a road map of the 48 states you’ll see how tightly packed the roads are in the eastern half of the country, and once you go out further west they are still there but often more in a clear grid pattern. Goldfarb describes how Idaho’s Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests have a road density which exceeds that of New York City even.

These roads then are not natural to the landscape, and those which were built on older Native American footpaths and trade routes are now so widened and imprinted upon the landscape as to make them less thoroughfares through the woods and more barriers for the denizens of the woods going straight through their home turf. Think of Arthur Dent’s exasperation at waking up in his comfortable English house to find a bulldozer outside his front door ready to pull the house down to build a bypass. The same goes for the bears and birds and deer and all the other wild things that live in this continent’s forests.

Roads often stand for a level of sophistication and civility which hearkens back to the Romans, whose roads famously all led to Rome. Like the Roman coloniae which reshaped the great forests of Northern and Western Europe two millennia ago, our own settlements changed this continent in a way which better reflects the aspirations of one society seeking to assert their sense of civility and right upon all others they encounter. Roads are tangible symbols of empire which aid the movement of goods and people from one place to another. They tie this continent together in its most fundamental way, before the railways or airways brought us even closer together. Yet Goldfarb makes a good point: at what cost have we strung these ribbons of highway across the North American continent?

The suggestion which Goldfarb describes is pulling out less used roads, old timber roads no longer operated by the companies who built them, and letting the wilderness restore itself. At first, I was hesitant to support this cause, after all how else would I, a city guy, be able to venture out west into the woods to see nature and admire the wonders of the Rockies? Yet as I read his article which features conservationists in Idaho and Montana, I began to see his point. These roads are destructive, and perhaps the better way to see nature, to experience dúlra in its fullness on this continent is to pull out some of these more remote roads, let the brush take over again, and force any would-be visitors to hike in and out. Let it be a reminder that whenever we are in that world that we are guests in someone else’s house.

In the coming weeks, I hope to write more about this question of mine of what exactly makes us human? What is the dúil at the core of our existence? And how can we understand our own dúil, our own essence, in a way which coexists with all other life rather than living above all others as some sort of self-appointed superior? Perhaps that famous line in the Book of Genesis where God commissions Adam and Eve as stewards of the Earth ought to be understood not as “having dominion over nature” but “tending to the balance of nature.” As humanity becomes more urbanized, as civilization becomes more city-orientated, perhaps we will see the land around our cities return to the wild. The Australian mammalogist, paleontologist, environmentalist, conservationist, explorer, and science communicator Tim Flannery argues this could be the case. To conclude his book Europe: A Natural History, Flannery describes a future around 2100 where most of Europe’s human population live in cities and the open land between them has been turned into wildlife reserves, national parks, and restored to its primeval forests. As long as we can assure that our food supplies, fresh drinking water, and sanitation persist if not improve, and that overcrowding doesn’t become too much of a problem in these cities then I have little issue with this idea.

It is interesting to me that even in the context of the word dúlra there is a clear distinction between that and humanity, that dúlra represents the essence of the non-human world, something far less orderly than what we’ve created. It doesn’t necessarily follow laws in the same manner as nātūra, laws whose order can be discerned with careful examination. There is something pure to the chaotic origins of life in this word dúlra, and that’s something I appreciate.

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On Exploration

On Exploration – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words on two books about exploration that I’ve read this summer: Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, and Michael Palin’s Erebus. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, some words on two books about exploration that I’ve read this summer: Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, and Michael Palin’s Erebus.

I may well be one of a few millennials who regularly watch CBS Sunday Morning. I remember finding it a comforting and calming way to start Sunday when I was little, and now that they publish the stories from each week’s broadcast on YouTube, I tend to watch the program there. So, in April I was excited to see a storyabout Captain Cook was airing on the program. It was an interview with Hampton Sides, an award winning non-fiction writer whose new book The Wide Wide Sea tells the story of Cook’s third and final voyage into the Pacific which left England just days after the thirteen of Britain’s American colonies declared their independence, only returning home again four years later. On this voyage, Cook’s ships the HMS Resolution and HMS Discovery became the first European ships to reach the Hawaiian Islands, where Cook would meet his own demise in February 1779.

I’ve been fascinated by Cook’s voyages for a long time now; his was one of the great explorers whose names I’ve known since childhood. The notion of exploration is intrinsic to our American culture, as a settler society, and Cook’s third voyage was the last time that any of our countrymen participated on a British voyage of exploration as British subjects. Sides makes note that Dr. Benjamin Franklin lobbied his colleagues to provide Cook’s expedition special immunity, and if needed to provide them with safe passage as they conducted their business for the betterment of the scientific knowledge of all humanity. Cook’s voyages have a troubling legacy as they were the forebearers of the later colonists, merchants, and missionaries whose ships soon plied the waters of the Pacific from Arctic to Antarctic. We can learn a great deal then from Cook’s expeditions in how best to interact with other worlds, and what to avoid doing.

I started reading this book on my flight in June from San Francisco to London; I knew I wanted to bring this book with me even though it’s quite large and heavy, there was something about it that struck me as fitting for this trip. I began referring to it as the “Captain Cook Book” with the pun fully intended and when not watching Citizen Kane and The Donut King on that 11 hour flight I opened Hampton Sides’s new book and took in the story of the last full measure of one of the great explorers of the last age of exploration.

When I arrived in London, I tried to visit museums that I hadn’t walked through on my last trip in October. One of these was my old favorite, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. When I lived in the British capital in 2015 and 2016, I often would wander southeast towards Greenwich and take in the baroque architecture of the Old Royal Naval College, now the University of Greenwich, and explore the National Maritime Museum’s exhibits on the colonial and exploratory history of the British. This time, I was surprised to find the museum under renovation, and so the main entrance that faces toward the Thames was closed. Instead, I entered through the back of the building. Yet where I was left wanting more in past visits, this time I was pleasantly surprised at how the galleries were set up to tell the story of Britian’s maritime past. I acknowledged the portraits of Cook in the ground-floor Pacific gallery; yet I was more thrilled to see several uniform coats worn by Lord Nelson, including the coat he wore on his last day at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Even more so, I loved seeing relics from the British Antarctic and Arctic expeditions which included Cook’s third voyage.

The Arctic held an appeal for British navigators because they hoped they might find the fabled Northwest Passage above the top of North America, which would be a quicker route for ships to reach China and Japan without passing through the Spanish and Portuguese controlled waters of South America and the fearsome currents and winds of Cape Horn on Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of South America. Martin Frobisher’s three expeditions to the Arctic between 1576 and 1578 were among the first English voyages to the region in search of the famed passage. Frobisher is known to have brought with him the 1557 second French edition of André Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique and Thomas Hacket’s 1568 English translation of that book The New Founde Worlde, or Antartike on at least one of his Arctic voyages. This, dear reader, is the book that I’ve translated as The Singularties of France Antarctique. (More there to come).

With the Arctic and Antarctic on my mind as I finished my tour of the galleries, I wandered into the gift shop, as one does, and saw they had copies of Michael Palin’s book Erebus, a history of the HMS Erebus which sailed to within both polar circles in the 1830s and 1840s only to disappear in the Arctic ice in the mid-1840s under the command of Sir John Franklin. When this book was first published in 2018, I remember being intimidated by the subject: I knew about the Erebus and her sister-ship the HMS Terror, yet in my mind this sounded more like a history written as a horror novel than anything else, and I’m not one for horror. So, I waited until this sighting of it to buy a copy. I started reading it later that afternoon while taking the Elizabeth line from Canary Wharf back into Central London to Bond Street and was immediately engrossed in the story.

There’s something funny to me about the settings where I start reading books: they become as much a part of my experience and memory of reading those books as the stories themselves. I began reading Judith Herrin’s history of Byzantium on the DLR in mid-summer 2016, and to this day when I glance at it on my shelves or when I’ve taught about Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire, I will think not only of that book but also of the DLR elevated line going into Tower Gateway station. In this instance, Palin’s Erebus is connected for me with the darkened-purple hue of the lighting in that Elizabeth line train as we rushed beneath Central London toward the West End.

Now with both books in hand, I proceeded to change my strategy for how I’d read them: I decided that as long as the course which Cook took between 1776 and 1779 mirrored the course that James Clark Ross, captain of the Erebus on its Antarctic expedition between 1839 and 1843, I would go back and forth between each book chapter-by-chapter. That lasted until about Tasmania, where the Erebus first encountered Sir John Franklin, then Lieutenant Governor of the colony, and where Cook and his men had a jolly shore leave before their monumental and historic crossing of the Pacific. What struck me most was how similar these stories felt despite the 70 year gap between their visits to Tasmania. By the time Ross and his crew arrived in Hobart in August 1840, sails were beginning to give way to steam as the main propulsion of ships, and when Erebuswas refitted for its Arctic expedition under Sir John Franklin in 1845, the ship was given an engine from a steam locomotive from the London and Greenwich Railway to help propel it forward into the polar north.

After the two books diverged in their stories I set aside Michael Palin’s Erebus for a while until I finished Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea, wanting to experience his retelling of Cook’s third voyage in its fatal fullness before reading Palin’s retelling of Franklin’s fateful and more mysterious Arctic expedition. This happened around the 16th of July, a mere six days after Hampton Sides gave a talk here in Kansas City about The Wide Wide Sea. As I switched gears from Cook to Franklin, I listened to as many podcasts as I could find about Cook’s third voyage from our local NPR interview with Hampton Sides in conjunction with his talk, to Melvyn Bragg’s episode of In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 about Captain Cook.

I then picked up Michael Palin’s book again and set off with him in the wake of the Erebus and Terror on their voyage north past the Orkneys and Greenland and into the Canadian Arctic. I came into these chapters with a different sort of prior knowledge about this expedition. On 2 September 2014, the CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a Canadian icebreaker, sent north by Parks Canada to search for the lost Erebus and Terror discovered one of the ships which a month later was confirmed to be Erebus. I remembered just before moving to London watching an episode of NOVA on PBS about the search, which after reading another article about this expedition in either National Geographic or Smithsonian earlier this year I watched again. So, now instead of a horror-themed history book, I found Palin’s chapters about the Arctic expedition to be a familiar and tragic history of an expedition gone awry.

It struck me in particular that the majority of the last section of his book is devoted to the aftermath of Erebusand Terror’s disappearance entering Baffin Bay in August 1845. Palin told the story as it was uncovered by British and American expeditions sent north to find the lost ships in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. From all that I’ve read and watched about this voyage, it is likely that we will learn more of what truly happened to Erebus, Terror, and their crews in the coming years as more evidence is found in Nunavut, the Canadian territory in whose waters the ships sank.

There is something to be said for how my fascination for exploration has informed my professional life. While I style myself a historian of Renaissance natural history, I am equally focused on exploration, for it was the explorers whose eyewitness accounts first described the animals about which I write. I’ve even considered trying out a voyage of my own just to see what an oceanic crossing by sail is like. What brings both of these books into being in my imagination is that both authors have experienced the places they’re describing and have spent copious time in the archives and libraries and talking to people connected even across the generations to those whose experiences they seek to describe. They truly bring these stories to life. They allow the reader to explore a world now fading, and perhaps even to see how close we are today to Cook, Ross, Franklin, and all their fellow explorers who lived in centuries now gone.

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The Power of Hope

The Power of Hope – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This past weekend, history was made when President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. The next 48 hours inspired tremendous hope again.

During my senior year at Rockhurst, now a decade ago, the BBC released the first of two seasons of a new series of Shakespearean adaptations called The Hollow Crown. These films were realist adaptations of the Henriad plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II, and Henry V. This first season seized my attention and enthusiasm with a tremendous rush of emotion and energy. I wrote my undergraduate capstone in History on Richard II partially because of how these films brought these medieval kings to life for me. Shakespeare’s plays have tremendous power because they speak to common human emotions and experiences, it’s why they’ve been adapted by Akira Kurosawa from their original settings to feudal Japan, and why contemporary adaptations of these plays can work even if they can also leave something to be desired. 

Yet the greatest power that Shakespeare’s plays have is in their quotability. William Shakespeare was one of the greatest writers to use the English language to tell his stories, and to breathe life into his characters and settings that the most fantastical magic of The Tempest can seem just as believable as Richard II’s grief at losing his crown. For me, one of the most readily quotable lines in Richard II comes not from the deposed king but from his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who in a speech which Jeremy Irons described as one coming from a medieval Brexiteer, offered the truism “small showers last long, but sudden storms are short.” (2.1). I think of this often in many different situations. Our politics of these last 8 years have been somewhere in the middle, an 8 year on-going rain that may seem tempestuous throughout but that has merely brought together several of these sudden storms in quick succession.

For most of my life I’ve heard the argument that ordinary people like us cannot do much to change our politics, and that we are better off leaving politics to the politicians who are going to do whatever they want anyway. I’ve grown up surrounded by this apathy, yet my parents instilled in me from my earliest memories a duty to vote, to speak up, and to play my part as a citizen. I’ve been frustrated in the last year in particular hearing so many people express a distaste in our electoral system because the two candidates running for President this year were men who seemed so out of touch and disconnected from the rest of us that we felt little need to participate. For myself, by the time the Missouri Primary came around for my party, our candidate had already secured enough delegates to claim victory in the primaries, and so this was one rare election when I didn’t vote.

All of that changed on Sunday at 12:46 Central Time when our sitting President, my party’s candidate, Mr. Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection to the Presidency this November. I was out at lunch with my parents when I got the news, and my first reaction was akin to many: fear at what would come next. I was on the fence whether President Biden should drop out of the race, unsure of what the result might be; and today writing this 48 hours later I’m still afraid of what could happen.

Yet my fears have been assuaged somewhat at the sight of how much the tone of this election has changed in my party. Where so many were going to vote for the President in order to keep his opponent out of power, in the last 48 hours our new candidate, Vice President Harris, has received more than 28,000 offers from ordinary people to volunteer for the Harris campaign. In the last 48 hours the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party have raised about $250 million in donations and pledges; of those donations more than 888,000 were from ordinary people wanting to pitch in. The tone has changed, where before last month’s debate we hoped that President Biden could lead the campaign to eke out enough moderate and undecided voters to support the Democratic side and defeat his opponent, now we have a campaign that is built less on fear of the opposition and more on the hope of what our new candidate has promised to do and could do if elected President.

Hope is far stronger than fear because it offers us a chance to aspire to something greater than ourselves. The most successful President of the twentieth-century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ran on a platform of hope and reform that would pull the country out of the Great Depression, and in his later campaigns defend liberal democracy from the growing tides of authoritarianism around the globe. All Democratic Presidents since Roosevelt have been judged on what FDR accomplished, and few have risen close to his level. The two that initially come to mind are Lyndon Banes Johnson, who served as President from President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 until January 1969, and our now outgoing President Biden. In spite of a staunch and illiberal opposition built around the premise that any and all legislation proposed by the Democrats must be blocked at all costs, even at the expense of the country, the Biden-Harris Administration has passed several landmark pieces of legislation which have been notable in the good they’ve done while being overshadowed by claims to the opposite from the clamoring gallery in the opposition.

Most of the Biden-Harris Administration’s major legislation occurred when the Democrats had a majority in both houses of Congress through the end of 2022. These included in 2021: 

  • The American Rescue Plan Act, which injected $1.9 trillion into the economy to help ordinary people during the hard times of the recent pandemic.
  • The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is funding infrastructure improvements and new projects across the country. 

In 2022, Biden signed: 

  • The Inflation Reduction Act, which included elements of his failed Build Back Better Act offering significant investment in climate and energy production and a three-year extension to the Affordable Care Act.
  • The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act which is the first major federal gun control law passed in the last three decades.
  • The CHIPS and Science Act which bolstered American semiconductor manufacturing.
  • The Honoring our PACT Act, which expanded health care for US veterans.
  • The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act which adds procedures to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to avoid a repeat of the stalling measures to keep President Biden’s election from being certified during the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
  • The Respect for Marriage Act which codified same-sex and interracial marriage.

And finally, in 2023, Biden signed:

  • The Fiscal Responsibility Act which restrained federal spending during fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and suspended the debt ceiling until the beginning of 2025.
  • In September 2023, he established the American Climate Corps, in a Rooseveltian manner to help facilitate the national response to the climate crisis.

What is striking about Biden’s presidency is both how much he accomplished in four years, and how little most people seem to know about it. He could not fully live up to FDR’s legacy because he lacked the majorities in Congress throughout his term that would have allowed him to continue to pass legislation. In the last month, it’s become clear that what new policies his Administration announces will be intended less as viable things to be accomplished in what remains of his term, but rather as signs of hope of what his party would do if they retain the Presidency and win back a majority in the House of Representatives.

That hope now has a face and a name in the Democratic presumptive nominee for President, Kamala Harris. The Democrats would do well to recognize that the power of hope for the things she and her Administration and the congressional party can accomplish together are far more powerful than all the fears we have of what would happen should the opposition regain the Presidency and retain its majority in the House. Hope is stronger than fear because it builds on the idea that there’s something better to be had than what we now have. I believe that hope is what will unite us together in the Democratic big tent this year to win this election. The circumstances aren’t great, President Biden’s withdrawal was far later in the race than I would have liked, and in the coming weeks I want to write here about the flaws in our electoral systems that his withdrawal lays bare.

This week though, let me leave you with what I believe to be true: the Harris campaign is in a strong place with its grassroots enthusiasm, fundraising, and organizing, and has the legislative accomplishments of the Biden-Harris Administration as a strong foundation for a successful, if unexpected, campaign. It’s up to all of us to hope that she can provide better promises than her opponents, and to act on that hope and vote in November.

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On Political Violence

On Political Violence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I feel compelled by this past weekend’s events to write about the follies of political violence.

On Saturday evening, I was making dinner for a friend and I to share when I received the first notification from the Washington Post that something had happened at a rally held by former President Trump in Pennsylvania. We first heard that that something was a shooting as we were starting dessert. The evening turned from genial conversation in my family’s dining room to tuning into NBC’s coverage to learn as much as we could at that early moment. What transpired, as far as I’m aware at time of writing, is that a single shooter firing from a nearby rooftop shot at the former President, striking him in the top of his right ear in what was clearly an assassination attempt. This is the first time an American President has been shot since Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt in 1981, and so the first in my lifetime. We quickly saw the film of the former President being removed from the stage by the Secret Service, and only a little later did we see the actual shooting itself, albeit on RTÉ’s Instagram feed rather than on NBC.

Considering the level of senseless gun violence in this country, and the bellicose rhetoric of the former President and his allies, I’m not surprised that something like this happened. I remember well how the conservative press were using bull’s eye targets in their graphics on TV over the faces of Democratic elected officials whose seats they wanted to target in the 2010 Midterms, and how that contributed to the assassination attempt against Gabby Giffords, the former Representative of Arizona’s 8th congressional district. Things were toned down after that shooting thirteen years ago, but the rhetoric has increased in the years since, especially since 2015 when the 2016 Presidential primary races began.

I feel that political violence ought to be considered in the same vein as the concept of just war and the practice of capital punishment. Can we reasonably assert a right to use violence to influence the politics of a society? It has certainly been done time and time again. Just this Spring, I was engrossed in Apple TV’s recreation of the aftermath of the assassination of President Lincoln on 14 April 1865 in the series Manhunt. The Civil War is a good place to ponder these questions, when David Brooks of the New York Times interviewed Steve Bannon just before he reported to prison on charges of Contempt of Congress over his refusal to appear before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, he brought up Lincoln’s call for restoring national unity in his second inaugural address, Bannon would not accept any such arguments, fixating instead on Lincoln’s decision to engage in the civil war with the rebellious southern states, referring to our 16th President as “a military dictator” for his actions and the actions of the military during that war.

I was deeply disturbed reading Bannon’s responses to these questions, because though we may both be Irish Americans who were raised in Catholic schools, I come from Illinois and have always seen Mr. Lincoln as a hero, as longtime readers and listeners to this publication are well aware. What disturbed me most was that this moment when these words of reconciliation, which matched what I’ve read of Lincoln’s plans postwar to engage fully in reconstruction rather than retribution, that Bannon’s reaction was belligerent and unwavering. 

For decades now the cries of “no compromise!” have rang out in our politics. I remember a friend in high school telling me that there are no moderates, only conservatives and liberals, and you are a friend to one side and an enemy to the other. I was shocked then too to hear such rhetoric from a friend because at that time we were on opposite sides. Political violence occurs because we allow ourselves to be riled up into a frenzy to the point that we believe it is justifiable to act violently against our neighbors, our countrymen and women, our fellow humans. I have a very hard time with the concept of a just war that is taught by my Church, though again in the context of the Union aims during the Civil War, I can readily see how preserving the Union and ending slavery were justified. I believe a just war needs a strong moral bedrock for it to be justifiable. We cannot run out crying “Deus vult! God wills it!” and proclaim any old brawl a just war.

The first time I was challenged to consider these questions was also in high school, about a year before that conversation mentioned in the last paragraph. In my sophomore year, I took a combined honors world history and world literature course, taught by two teachers in their first year. Our literature teacher assigned us to read Eli Wiesel’s novel Dawn, in which the main character, Elisha, is a Holocaust survivor who’s moved to the British Mandate of Palestine and joined the Irgun, a Jewish paramilitary group fighting to drive the British from the region to establish a Jewish state. The book covers the early morning hours when Elisha is preparing to execute a captured British officer, who is to be shot at dawn. My assignment was to write an essay of my own saying how I would have acted, would I have carried out the execution or would I have let the captive man live?

The essay I submitted was one of the rare essays I ever earned an F on. I wrote that to take a life is not in our rights but should be left to God alone, so I would not know how to make that decision. At sixteen, I tried to find a middle way, to fall back on my faith as a means of avoiding making such a tough decision. Today though I would choose to reprieve the captive, to let him live. When I visited the remains of the Dachau camp in the Munich suburbs in January 2020, I was struck by the thought that everyone involved, the captors and the captives, the murderers and the victims, were all at their core humans, and at one point in their lives they were all innocent, helpless, and defenseless as infants. Since then I’ve noticed more of this in people I pass on the street, where just as I still in some ways imagine myself as I was when I first recognized my own consciousness as a very young child, so too I can readily imagine others in those perhaps purer moments of life before we are weighed down by our anger and fears and pain, by our suffering and sorrow and grief.

So often, political violence is unnecessary and unwarranted; a choice made by someone on their own, an inflection point in history when the decisions of the individual can change the whole world for the worse. In more pop-culture questions about history, one will often hear people ask, “If you could go back in time and could stop Hitler or Stalin, would you kill them?” I for one prefer the way Hitler was handled on Doctor Who, when in the episode titled “Let’s Kill Hitler,” the man merely ended up being shoved into a closet.We will likely not know much more of the motives of the man who shot the former President on Saturday evening for some time, and the best thing we can do is let the investigation continue in its own pace. I do not wish death on anyone, that is a horrible thing to do. Even if the acts of some are so heinous that they may seem to be due such an extreme and ultimate punishment, I challenge you to consider what condemning or killing them would do? What benefit does it hold? And how would it change you?

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Utopia Lost

Utopia Lost – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I have a short story for you that I wrote three years ago after the death of a dear friend. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I have a short story for you that I wrote three years ago after the death of a dear friend.

How does one convince a civilization to accept it’s moved beyond the known and into an entirely unknown and new age? How does one convince oneself of this terrifying and very real fact? It takes loss, grief, and sorrow for humanity to recognize and embrace change, world wars, revolutions, or sudden bouts of violence to remind us that time continues ever onward. Yet for me, one guy living in this world moving along, strong, pulsing like the tempo in the fourth movement of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, it takes something even more personal for me to admit one act in my life is ending, and that after a turbulent period of intermission that another will shortly begin. It often takes moving out of my skin, out of the comforts of my upper middle-class normality, my tree-lined block in my beautiful neighborhood in the heart of my city, out into places I’d never really desired to visit. And yet, after she died, I found the need to flee far from home, like Gilgamesh seeking a cure for death itself in the lands beyond the water.

These thoughts danced through my mind as I stood atop the rim of a canyon, a thousand miles from home, in the high deserts of the Colorado Plateau, exposed and in the open; a danse macabre moving out of place in the desert setting of a Dali or Georgia O’Keeffe painting. I was struck by the silence of the scene, the extreme quietude that reminded me of many a hymn and prayer the Jesuits and Franciscans alike offered about finding God in all things. Nature certainly is God’s canvas, just as van Gogh understood it when he painted his own vision of that Creation, and just as I, a guy trying to understand grief had heard but never fully appreciated until I saw it for myself. The starkness of the desert, the browns, greys, and dusty oranges, seemed so different from the many shades of green, the vibrant spectrum of flowers that decorate the parks and gardens of my city. Yet it was there, in that environment, so far from home, that I felt drawn to. I’d been in the desert before, in Arizona, and found it lacking in beauty, seeming to be hostile, dangerous by nature, unbefitting for someone of my origins or health. Yet this desert, as alien as it was to me, seemed gentler in a way, less severe, more textured in its variety. Here where the Yampa River flows into the Green River, on federally protected land, the wilderness seemed to sing with all its resplendent harmony. Nature cried out on the wind as if to Elijah in a whisper, in its own language, its own song. I could recognize it, but I had a hard time understanding it. I, a city guy, knew only the manicured nature of my urban homeland. I knew the landscape that had been remade in the image of the Eastern cities and their European forebearers, a landscape of verdant trees and gardens which conquered the native prairie grasses in the wake of the settlers who conquered the native peoples who had called those prairies home.

I knew my home was artificial, and so it was not fit to help me through my sorrows. When she died, laying there on the veterinarian’s table, her face was calm, at peace; she looked as though she were having the best of dreams. Long suffering from a lack of tears, even when I wanted them, I felt as if I cried enough to fill the stormy Atlantic and more. She was my dearest of friends, the one who was always first to comfort me, the one who would go on adventures with me through the parks and along the trails. She was my companion at the sidewalk cafés, her with her water bowl and a couple treats, me with my tea and a pastry or two. Neither of our lives would’ve been possible without our artificial world, we were both born in an industrial, global, civilization, created out of the migrations of countless dogs and people from throughout the globe who would carry out a few begats until we were born in our own times. Yet even then, in her long life, her sixteen years of naps and treats and play, she saw our world change again from that industrial world of our forebearers into a world of the digital, a world where ideas were spread not on paper but on screens, where her favorite toys would inevitably come not only from the local pet shop and groomers, but often from some distant warehouse, a distribution center built to cater to the needs of millions, even billions of “consumers,” as we’d become known. To them, we were just numbers, her existence was acknowledged by the fact we purchased from the dog section, but her gifts inevitably were counted among my numbers. We’d created this world where if we really wanted to, and had the means, we could ensure that we would never wont for anything again. We’d created a world where instead of settling for the same old cooking shows that she loved to watch (she knew the names of all the foods), we could now tune into cooking shows from Europe, as I learned French, hoping she might pick those food words up too. I dreamed of a reality where we would always be together, where she would be as wonderful and dear a friend to my kids in the coming decades as she has been to me. Yet time marches on, and with it we age. Unlike Gilgamesh, I knew I couldn’t stop death, like the Swedish knight, I knew even if I kept the game going, eventually Death would reach checkmate, yet in my dreams at least she was still with me, still snoring next to me every night, still leading me from one blade of grass to another around the neighborhood as she sniffed for traces of her dog friends’ adventures.

In my dreams then, I hoped I might hear a familiar pattering of her paws on the rocks leading to the canyon rim, only to turn about and see her trotting over to me, tail wagging with glee. Perhaps a part of me truly believed if I went out into the desert, I might just see her again, if only in a greater clarity in my mind’s eye, in my memories. I stood there on the canyon rim, and listened to the silence, hoping dearly she was coming, wishing she could’ve seen that sight as I was seeing it that day. I could hear her snorting, and smelled that she needed a bath, something she was often proud of, though never appreciative of when she was bathed. Yet I knew, all too well, I wouldn’t see her again until I too had crossed the water, however distant that day would be. As much as I spent our days together worrying about the world around us, and what might well be beyond what we know, she spent those same days curious about few things, simple things, but most of all she was sure about love, and its importance and meaning. I understood it in those last moments before she died as she kissed my face for a final time. It was clear to me that as much as I could speak French when in Paris or Montréal, so too I could communicate with her, by letting her do “gross” things like jump on my chest and kiss my chin, or listen to her growl and whine at me, to let her have her say. I would reply each time, telling her “I love you,” and meaning it. Even if I was leaving the house to shovel the snow in the winter, I would look her in the eyes and say, “I love you,” so that she knew it well. She was as innocent as she was mischievous, her favorite game was running around the house with the end of a roll of toilet paper in her mouth, decorating the rooms and halls with that ribbon of white. It annoyed my family to no end, but I could see she was having so much fun doing it.

The desert, a place I traditionally thought of as dead, hot, lonely, seemed full of life, and while I could not see birds fluttering around the far rim of the canyon, I knew they were there. I could feel the breeze as if it were in part propelled across the chasm by the fluttering of many little pairs of wings beyond. It was as though they were singing their own hymn to being alive, to the radiant Sun in the blue sky, to the scrub and the rocks laid down there over millions of years. This place had seen many ages even before the coming of the first humans. To it, my little artificial urban island in the seas of prairie grass must have seemed both a cute human attempt at recreating nature in humanity’s own image, and a threat to the current vitality of the wilderness itself. Far overhead, the trails of passenger jets remained the only sign of the civilization beyond the canyonland before me. Sitting in those planes, focused on evading humanity’s worst bogeyman, a specter named boredom, the passengers surely didn’t notice what wilderness was below them, and if they did look out the windows, from 30,000 feet they would well have been at a loss to truly appreciate what they were speeding over on their way to the great cities of this country and beyond.

I thought of Elijah, hearing the Voice of God in the faintest whisper of the wind, and imagined what the Divine might say to me. Quickly though, unlike other daydreamed dialogues, I found myself at a loss for imagined words and banter, unsure of how to speak for such a concept as an omnipotent and omniscient God. Maybe then that’s the real beauty of Elijah’s experience, he heard God in a whisper because we humans can’t really understand what it even means to hear such a Voice. I tried fantasizing about it even more though, doggedly not wanting to give up too easily, and found myself afraid, scared at the idea of even hearing such words, the power and presence they would command would be the same that creates realities. The idea itself was but a micro fraction of a particle of a grain of sand when compared to the consequences of the Divine. My importance was duly minute, yet without my imaginations would I really recognize any of this? Would I hold out hope that my dog recently deceased would appear to me wanting to play there on the canyon rim knowing all I know about how this reality operates? In the great cosmic totality, I began to wonder how much her life really had meant. A little eleven-pound dog, who couldn’t put on a fierce face to anyone, or serve as much of a herder. If anything, she was best at being a friend, the best of friends. 

If her life had any consequence, I realized, it was in loving everyone and everything she met, in that unblemished innocence, that unconditional affection for life itself. She served as a role model of sorts for all the rest of us, especially for me, having lived with her for so many years. Even someone as little as her could plant a seed of love and charity in the minds of others that one day could restore the Utopia that seemed lost to me at her death. I stood there as the day continued on, and through the setting of the Sun, and watched as Venus, the evening star, rose overhead, bearing behind it the curtain of darkness that is the twilight and eventual nightfall. I was soon laying on my back on the canyon rim, not caring about the dust or the bugs, just awestruck at the sights above me as one star after another appeared in the darkening sky. The ancients believed the dead could be found among the stars, though my own ancestors passed down a belief of an earthly paradise on an island of eternal youth, something which as skeptical and scientific our world becomes, I still find myself believing in. If for nothing else, that light in the darkness of even the emptiest of cloud covered nights has kept me warm company in my thoughts. From that far distant island I thought I could hear her calling, her bark and wagging tail inviting me to come, but in my own time, not too soon. Even in this most dystopian of days, I thought, tears streaming down my cheeks again like on the day she died, there is still hope to be found, utopia restored, after all behind every cloud glows the light of some distant star. I laid there looking up into the starry night, through my tears singing a song I used to sing to her, hoping, believing, knowing somewhere she was listening.

Someday, however soon or far, I knew I’d see her again, once the boatman calls upon me. Funny enough, for someone who enjoys life as much as I do, the simple belief that I will see my dearest and sweetest of friends again is enough for me to look forward to that reunion across the water on the far shore.

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An Election Year Independence Day

An Election Year Independence Day – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I’m writing to you with this week’s holiday in mind, with some of my aspirations and hopes for America.

While I have colonial ancestors who settled New Haven, Connecticut and Newark, New Jersey, and who at the time of the American Revolution were living in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, I more closely associate with my recent immigrant ancestors. I’m one of those hyphenated-Americans who holds onto elements of a culture and identity that transcends the Atlantic and provides connections not only to this country but to the places where my ancestors came from. One aspect of the political philosophy of American nationalism that I don’t agree with says that you have to conform to a particular American identity when you come here. My ancestors did that, to varying degrees, and I’m more American than anything else, yet it’s all those other elements that give our Americanness its richness of character.

So, when I think of the music that embodies the soul of America, it’s music written by a fellow hyphenated-American, Aaron Copland, the dean of American classical music. When I tried my hand at musical composition in college, I wrote a four-movement trio sonata that told the story of a voyage from Ireland to America by St. Brendan and his monks in the sixth century. My addition to the fable was to have the tone of the music switch from being very Irish in the first and second movements to taking after Copland’s sound in the third and especially the fourth movement as they reached this side of the water. I’ve long wanted to write a blog post all about my admiration for Copland’s music, but thanks to the copyrights on his recordings I’m waiting for a few more decades. For now, go listen to Appalachian Spring and Rodeo after you’re done listening to, or reading, this.

Copland’s music speaks to me now in 2024 especially as we approach an election year. This is the most sacred task that we American citizens fulfill in our obligations to our republic: we do our duty by voting for whom we want to represent us on all levels of government, and on the host of ballot measures found further down-ballot. This election feels far more pivotal than any we’ve seen in my lifetime. For context, I was born exactly one month before the elder President Bush stood aside for President Clinton. While I may have disagreed with the policies of both Presidents Bush, they still seemed to be decent men. It’s hard to say that this year about one of the two candidates who flooded Thursday night’s debate on CNN with so many half-truths and outright lies that the network did nothing to check live on air. I was baffled watching it to think that the network’s executives and news directors didn’t choose to lay out better safeguards considering this is the same man whose rhetoric and refusal to admit his loss in 2020 led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

When I think of a President who I want leading our country, I think of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.I want someone who best represents the best ideals of America, someone who can speak with all of us and for all of us. I hope for someone who can work with Congress and the states to execute legislation that will lead to an overall improvement in our national well-being. I was disappointed to see the President perform so poorly during the debate on Thursday, yet of our choices this year he is the closest to embodying that ideal of the common man.

This year’s election is not politics as usual, there are deep intrinsic questions at stake over the future of our country and what sort of government we want to have. I was deeply unsettled to read the transcript of David Brooks’s recent interview with Steve Bannon, who Brooks called a Trotsky-figure for the MAGA movement. From the interview, and from the way Bannon positioned himself as a leader of that movement, he made it clear that there is no room for communication with their political opponents, who Bannon termed in a far more affrontive manner as their enemies. That is the most essential element of good government, something that all the great political philosophers recognized: we need to be able to communicate with each other and grow together as one body politick made up of a great many parts. I’ve seen the same problem on the left as on the right, a disinterest in listening and in compromising to achieve a higher ideal or a common good that will benefit everyone. Yet the greater threat is coming from the faction who’ve gained enough sway that they now control their party and their leader is again a candidate for the Presidency.

This Independence Day, Americans around the globe will celebrate the invention of our republic from an ideal written on paper during a hot and humid Philadelphia summer 248 years ago. I’ve heard it said that that was the first time that anyone thought to write down the idea that “all men are created equal.” Think about that for a moment: that was the first time that the notion of universal equality, or better universal equity, had ever been considered. The President is the President, and I respect him for serving in that office as I feel respect for the office itself. It is a monument to self-sacrifice when done well, and a trap of self-aggrandizement when the oath is taken for the wrong reasons. Yet when a sitting President leaves the office on Inauguration Day, they may still be Former President, but they are now again just another citizen who’s offered to carry that mantle in the relay until the next candidate will take it up.

The burdens of preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution of the United States are greater than one person can carry on their own. The office holder ought to have us, we the people who come first in the Constitution, supporting them as long as they keep their oath, and do their duty for as long as their term lasts. It is a humbling thing to serve in such an august role. It is something that truly should not be taken lightly, or brought on by a candidate for any other reason than for service.

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Two Cities

Two Cities – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words about the trip I just completed to London and Paris. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a few words about the trip I just completed to London and Paris.

If there’s anywhere in Europe, I’ve visited more than anywhere else it’s London and Paris. 

When I was eight my Mom took me on a two week tour of those two cities which I found to be life changing for how they opened my eyes to a far wider world than what I’d previously known. My fascination for European history began on that trip; it’s a fascination that I’ve made into my career. I remember that February she put a “Learn French” cassette tape on while our family was driving through the hills of northwestern Illinois from Chicago to visit relatives at Mount Carmel, the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque. I still think of that evening, watching the sunset over those hills, as the moment when I was first introduced to French, a language that I have come to define a great deal of my brand as a historian, writer, and translator by.

I remember thinking after our return from Paris in June 2001 that before that trip when I thought of what I was most excited about it was the Space Shuttle, dinosaurs, cowboys, and American history. Yet after that trip, while still thrilled by these things they still felt dulled somewhat by a new passion for medieval castles and far older history than what we had in our young republic. What’s funny to me about this is that these same thoughts returned in the days before I left for Europe. While normally Memorial Day wouldn’t have as much of an impact upon me, I think it’s pairing this year with the 80th anniversary of D-Day left me far more profoundly moved with pride in our republic, and what our people have accomplished across these generations. I returned to Europe then in much the same mindset that I had when I first visited London and Paris 23 years before, albeit with those 23 years of experience framing my thoughts.

London remains a home-away-from-home for me, having lived there for a time. Some of the optimism I remember feeling in that city in 2015 and early 2016 seemed to be renewed, if slightly, by the prospect of the upcoming General Election which will likely see a change in the governing party for the first time since 2010. I arrived there not entirely wanting to cross the Atlantic on June 6th. I always feel a hint of fear when I travel, especially overseas; this has been magnified since the pandemic when international borders were closed and for years afterward travel remained severely limited. The thought of being stranded somewhere away from my family leaves me shuddering, and has given me more pause when considering travel since 2020. Still, the flights, trains, lodgings, and some museum visits booked, I left home on the morning of June 6th and flew west to San Francisco, where I caught my transatlantic flight on United to Heathrow.

Why go west to go east? I tend to use my miles to fly international, and it was 30,000 miles cheaper to fly through San Francisco than my usual connections in Chicago, Newark, or Washington, or even through Toronto on Air Canada. Like last time, I felt a renewed sense of welcome when I arrived in London, and throughout my stay with friends in the Home Counties, I knew that this remained a place where I could build myself a home if the opportunity or need arose. One key difference from my last trip in October was that I was less concerned with visiting every single place I wanted to see from my time living there. I didn’t feel that desperation or passion to see and do everything that I’ve long known. Rather, I was content to be there again, and to enjoy what I was able to see and do. I prioritized seeing special exhibits at the museums alongside the permanent collections and was thrilled to visit the Tropical Modernism Architecture and Independence exhibit at the V&A, an exhibit on birds at the Natural History Museum, and two exhibits at the British Museum. 

The first of the British Museum exhibitions spoke to the initial field of study I wanted to pursue after finishing my MA in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster. It followed the life of a Roman legionary during the reign of Trajan, and provided a full introduction to the legions and auxiliaries of the Roman Army during the height of the Empire. In 2016, when I chose to return to History from Political Science, I wanted to study the expansion of Roman citizenship to provincial subjects either after the Social War during the late Republic or during the reign of Caracalla when in 212 CE the emperor extended citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire. That initial interest eventually led me to where I am today studying the natural history of the Americas in the Renaissance, by admittedly a circuitous route. The second British Museum exhibition was closer to what I study today in its chronology as it covers the life and works of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). It was inspiring to see his own self-portrait gazing out at us visitors, and to see his letters and sonnets in his own hand on paper there in the exhibit gallery.

After a weekend in London, I traveled south to Paris for a conference on collecting in early modernity that was held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in their building on Boulevard Raspail in the 6th Arrondissement. The building in question is important in the historical profession as it is where the French Annales school has been based since 1947, the Annalistes being quite influential in introducing new methods and theories of studying history to the profession globally in the postwar years. There, I presented my research into the provenance of two Tupinambá ritual artifacts today housed in the Musée du Quai Branly, also in Paris, which were likely brought to France by André Thevet in 1556 as gifts from the Tupinambá leader Quoniambec (d. 1555).

I’d intended to use the majority of my time in Paris to work in the various departments of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Archives nationales to look at some sources I didn’t have online access to, but instead in the months leading up to the trip I was able to find and request several of these documents be emailed to me, while others were restricted due to their poor physical condition. As a result, I only viewed one document, Thevet’s 1553 French translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a 12th century Sephardic traveler who toured the Mediterranean. I spent a lovely morning sitting in the ornate Department of Manuscripts in the BNF Richelieu site reading and photographing Thevet’s translation. It was the first time I’d ever seen Thevet’s handwriting in person and gotten somewhat of an unscientific sense of the man himself between the lines. Looking at the folios, I had a sense of familiarity in a man who started with elegant pen-strokes which with each turn of the page became quicker and impatient. The last significant work that I wrote out by hand, a play I wrote in 2011 titled The Poet and the Lamb, had the same feel to it. I enjoyed writing it by hand, but it proved to be more of a burden than the art I intended it to be when I eventually typed it all out after all.

My theory is that considering Thevet took the time to translate Tudela’s travels into French, all 56 folios (112 pages) of it, that he likely modeled his own Mediterranean travel account La Cosmographie de Levant and his later Atlantic travel account Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique on aspects of Tudela’s work. I found my efforts at reading his Tudela translation were aided by my deep knowledge of the Singularitez, which I’ve translated into English. Thevet has a particular style and verbiage that you get to know after translating an entire book of his, a project that for the first draft alone took me three years to complete.

Without any other archival visits scheduled, I spent the rest of the week enjoying a few days of life in Paris. I visited several museums each day, wandered about the city from bakery to bakery (it’s not just a joke I tell about the bakery crawl being my favorite type of walk), and looking around bookshops selling both general titles, specialized academic titles, and several antique bookshops selling volumes largely published in the 18thand 19th centuries, though there were several I browsed through printed in the 17th century.

All around, this was a pleasant trip. When I returned home to the United States on Bloomsday, the holiday commemorating Leopold Bloom’s day about Dublin on 16 June 1904, I was left with an unsettling feeling that both in climate and in history that I fit in better in Europe than in America. For one, none of the muscular or joint pains I often feel walking around Kansas City are present when walking similar distances in either London or Paris. For another, the pace of life and the dearth of car dependency is certainly better all-around than how we’ve built our cities and lives here in the United States. I’d happily take the bus around town at home, if the temperature dropped below 90ºF (32ºC) during the day, and if the bus schedule worked with my own.

In these two cities I’ve grown to become much of the guy who I am today. This was my sixth visit to Paris, and a return to an old hometown of mine in London once again. In them, to draw the Dickens analogy out further, I’ve seen some of the best of times, and yes some of the worst of times, yet I’ve learned now to go with the flow, to not worry too much, and to embrace the opportunity to travel to these places. Travelling has made our world far smaller than ever before, so that the 4,500 miles (7,242 km) between Kansas City and Paris seem not as far as it really is. After all, before aviation it would’ve taken close to 10 days to travel between these two cities, whereas now it’ll take only a day.

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A tiger staring at the camera through two fences.

A Tiger in the Sun

A Tiger in the Sun – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I have a short story for you, in the style of an Irish aisling, a dream narrative, about a tiger basking in the warm February sun. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I have a short story for you, in the style of an Irish aisling, a dream narrative, about a tiger basking in the warm February sun.

On a sunny, warm, and blustery day in February I left my desk in the afternoon for a walk at the city zoo. You could never really know how many warm days you’d have in February on the prairies, a time of snow, cold, and gray skies. I showed my member’s pass at the gate to the clerk and strolled between the polar bear’s wide enclosure and the lorikeets’ walk in cage towards the penguin house where I often liked to stand quietly and watch the birds waddle and swim about. There was something wistful about these penguins today, their black and white feathers glowing with a renewed exuberance from the lengthening days outside. I’d seen these penguins in all seasons, confined to their Antarctic chamber with many good places to swim, enclosures, and crevices that even I hadn’t seen. Worlds still unfamiliar to my eyes yet already known to my imagination which saw places where these birds could play and rest away from human eyes.

I left the penguins and began to walk further into the zoo towards the Asian and Australian animals who I hadn’t seen in my last few afternoon visits. I’d read that a new pair of Sumatran tigers had been brought to the zoo from another facility on the West Coast where they’d been born into captivity. These animals it seemed had a comfortable life, if confined as they were from the wilds their ancestors had once known. My walk took me past the alligators still hidden indoors and the camels who wandered about the edges of their sandy glade looking for new grass and leaves to eat. 

After passing the pelicans I came to a grand sign displaying a portrait of a tiger, in all its majestic ferocity. The entry to this Asian walkway was marked by a fleeting glimpse of another red, black, and white animal whose furry legs and tail darted behind a wall to my left. I walked onward and rounding the wall met a red panda on a stroll within the confines of its fenced enclosure. I stopped to look at the red panda who climbed a gangway that’d been set up for its enrichment and admired its ease of movement, the jolly grace of its demeanor. Yet still, the hairs on the back of my neck stood tall, alert. I knew the tigers dwelt behind me, yet they could’ve been anywhere in their terraced enclosure. I turned and caught the yellow eyes of a cat staring back at me, its orange nose wreathed in a beard striped black, orange, and white. This new tiger was smaller than I imagined, perhaps little older than a cub. It lay there on its side like my own cat often does, finding a nice place at the highest point in its home with the sun’s rays glittering down upon its neck and back between the barren branches of the cottonwood grove which towered above both feline and me.

I stood stock still, my nature sensing some intrinsic danger in my situation despite the double layers of fencing between us. This was a tiger after all, a hunter who if in the mood would gladly seek prey from either myself or its red panda neighbors across the path. Who was I to say I was any finer a creature than this one, who was lounging the afternoon away in the warm winter sun. It had no need of work or time; no economy or politics furrowed its brow. Here was a creature free of all our worldly concerns in its terraced enclosure. I would soon have to leave this tiger and continue on my way. My walk in the zoo was merely a distraction from my labors, an escape from the small walled enclosure of my desk where Sisyphean work awaited my attention. What time did I have to lay out in the sun and cherish the day? I walked on, my body moving back towards my work, yet my imagination remained. I dreamed as I walked of adventures I might have, greater escapes from my work, and of absconding for more than an afternoon from worry.

As I rounded the corner past the lower terrace of the tiger’s enclosure my phone began to ring. I pulled it from my pocket and caught myself seeing the number, “213, who’s calling me from Los Angeles?” I answered, looking up towards where the tiger lounged high above me. “Hello?”

            “Hello, I’m calling you about your application for the archivist position at the Space Science Center.”

            “Oh yes, how may I help you?” I asked reflexively, a knot building in my throat worried at what word might come next after so many rejections.

            “We would like to offer you the position here, if you’re still interested.”

            I caught myself in my jubilation, remembering I was in public, “Oh!” I cried, “what wonderful news!”

            “So, you’ll take it?”

            “Yes,” I stopped myself from being too exuberant, “It would be an honor to work with all of you there.”

            I thought I heard a smile from the other end of the phone. “I’m glad to hear that. Can you be here later this week to start?”

            “Later this week?” I asked, stopping in my tracks near the entrance to the kangaroos’ enclosure.

            “Yes, we’d like you to take over the work from our outgoing archivist who’s retiring at the end of this week.”

            I looked at my watch, it was nearly 3 ‘o clock in the afternoon. “Well, it’s Monday now, I can be there on Friday morning if that’d be alright with you.”

            “That’d be fine,” the herald of good news replied over the phone. “We’ll see you on Friday morning here in Pasadena.”

            “Thank you again!” I said as I heard the phone on the other end hang up. “Friday, Friday morning in Pasadena. I need to start packing,” I turned from the kangaroos and was about to walk past the building ahead when I remembered that path was closed for winter renovations. I turned back again towards the gate and strolled through; my head held higher than before with a newfound exuberance. Soon I wouldn’t be scraping by just as a freelancer, my four part-time jobs would have to go. Now, I could really earn enough to begin living my life.

I passed the Australian birds in their walk-through enclosure and was amused to see they were all standing stock still on various fenceposts. One squawked at the world, in what seemed to me a jubilant chord of praise for the wonderous afternoon sun.

If I was going to be in California on Friday morning, I would need to leave at dawn tomorrow. I could drive to Denver on Tuesday and stay at my cousin’s house there, if he’ll have me, and then cross the Rockies and the high deserts on Wednesday. I’d driven most of that route before one summer vacation several years ago, but the Rockies in winter would surely be an entirely different challenge than they are to cross in summer. The last time I drove through the Eisenhower Tunnel that bored its way beneath the Continental Divide I waited to use my breaks for just a few seconds too long on the western side and nearly ignited them in their furious efforts to slow my car down as it pulled into a parking spot along a creek in the village of Silverthorne. Should I get my snow tires out then, and have those on in case the interstate was slick up in the mountains? But I wouldn’t need them once I reached Utah where the high deserts would surely be dry, and possibly still hot despite it being February.

Once in Utah, even if my tank was nearly full, I would still stop in Green River, the last town before nearly 125 miles of open desert to ensure I wouldn’t run out of fuel on that other most dangerous part of the trip. I’d avoided that part of the interstate last time, taking a smaller high mountain pass through Central Utah. This time though there was no avoiding the desert. Once I made it to the junction with Interstate 15, I could turn south and make my way to my second overnight stop in Las Vegas. I figured I might not be the only traveler passing through Sin City who wasn’t there to gamble or for the spectacle. Then at last, on Thursday, I would finish with the last leg of the drive southwest across the California border and to Pasadena where my future awaited me. Work, to be sure, was something that drove me forward, the aspiration that I might make something of myself, that I might better my stars and spend my days doing something that both kept the lights on and fulfilled my dreams.

Like the tiger, I would perhaps have time to rest in the sun, to enjoy the afternoons on a park bench near the science center. Surely in California, I would never have to shovel snow again, or scrape the ice off my car in the cold January mornings. Wasn’t California where that tiger was born? I thought about that for a moment as I walked along the path. To my left the local kangaroo mob lounged and grazed on the grasses of their meadow. A kangaroo stood and stared at me. I warily watched it, silently snapping a photo of it with my phone, and continued on my way, keeping ever a respectful distance from those remarkable creatures.

But what of my cat? How would she fare the long voyage west? Would she appreciate so much time in the car? She’d never been one for car rides even to her vet just a few blocks away. Perhaps she’d rather stay with my parents, they always enjoyed her company and she theirs. She was surely napping now too, finding a sunbeam somewhere near a south-facing window where she could enjoy this lovely day like her far larger yet far distant cousin. It would be a great change for my cat, as much as it was for me. We’d have to travel light, perhaps I could send for the rest of my belongings, especially my books, after we settled into our new abode. 

I paused at the southern gate leaving the kangaroo enclosure. Before me one of the camels stopped its grazing to stare back at me as I stood there, deep in thought. I could see my life in California well. I’d probably get a space in the basement of the science center, somewhere with no natural light where they kept their records. My domain would exist in the deep darkness there, somewhere I could make my own. Maybe I’d be far enough away from the rest of the staff or the general public to bring a radio in and listen to baseball games during the season like my grandmother used to do in her kitchen. There’d always be a part of me that would yearn for home of course, for the prairies and woodlands of the Midwest. Who would I be without this place that I came from? What would my life be like so far from everyone I know and love? Could I really separate myself off, devote my working hours to a place where few would understand what it meant to be from here, where few would understand me?

My mind returned to that tiger lying there in the sun, content with its lot in life. There was a creature that could try to hunt and prowl, perhaps it did so in its dreams. What are dreams but the longings of the subconscious? I’d always been a dreamer, an imaginer of wonders near and far from the truth. Do dreams then tell the truth, or is there such a thing as truth in the surreal realm which we imagine? I remembered a story I read as a child, from P.L. Travers’s original Mary Poppins novel, of a scene in which the roles were reversed and all the animals of London Zoo were gawking at the humans in the cages. Was fantasy so different from reality that it could not be informed by the real but instead kept unreal? 

I felt I had to return to that being whose yellow eyes had so deeply captured my thoughts that even now as I planned the monumental voyage of these coming days, a week spent crossing half a continent in winter, I couldn’t shake the image of those deep yellow eyes. I followed the path back towards the tiger sign that greeted visitors to the Asian footpath and ignored the red pandas in all their charm and found my captor laying there still. Those eyes caught mine again, and they seemed to recognize me from only a few minutes before. In those eyes I saw a truth that life was meant to be enjoyed, to be lived, yet in my eyes I was sure the creature could only see fear and wonder. Without these fences we both knew those yellow eyes would be a death sentence for me and that my power was devised in only the most artificial of means. The tiger was the real power, the true monarch of our shared domain. And yet it blinked at me, slowly, a signal that my own cat offers when it feels comfortable around me. Could this tiger feel at ease in its enclosure or is its ease perhaps from its inherited knowledge that nature gave it the upper hand over feeble, clawless, scaleless, featherless, furless me.

I didn’t feel the need to speak, this tiger could understand my expressions. I gazed into those eyes deeper, feeling my thoughts free fall into that yellow sea of potent grace. Did these eyes envision things like mine did? Could this tiger see things unknown to it in its dreams? Could it imagine a Creator? Would I still feel such a connection when I retired from my native place to that basement archive where surely, I would spend my waking hours? I wasn’t sure that the adventure of it all would be worth the query, yet I felt my nature pull me towards exploring further and deeper. I heard a noise from before me, a deep hiss emanating from a striped sea of orange, black, and white. The tiger had enough of my gaze, and with a hiss told me enough, “move along, leave me be.”

I backed out from the tiger’s view and turned away, looking to the red panda who seemed unfazed by the hissing hunter across the way. Move along indeed. In this adventure I’ll learn more about myself, and what I am capable of. When I reach the end of the line on this drive, when I arrive in California, there will surely be many new possibilities and wonders to behold. How often had I experienced a warm, sunny day in February here on the prairies? Wonderous things remained for me to find beyond my desk. I walked back to the front gate of the zoo and felt something new inside of me glow with confident glee at the thought of all that was to come.

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Gustave Doré's depiction of Dante and Beatrice beholding the circles of Paradise.

Paradiso

Paradiso – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog is dedicated to Micah Holmes.

This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.

I’ve long wondered about the nature of the heavens, both scientifically through my passion for astronomy, and theologically drawing from my Catholic education and faith. In the Spring of 2011, I staged a one-act play of my own writing called The Swansong of the King which I wrote in the spirit of the scene in John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur where Merlin’s ghost appears to Arthur in a circle of standing stones to reassure him before his great final battle at which he would surely die. I wrote Merlin lines that told the story I’d imagined of the soul’s voyage to Paradise, an island amid a deep blue sea where in a valley in the middle surrounded by lush forests, there stands a city of white stone houses and public edifices. Each house is a garden in its own right, looking like an ancient Roman atrium more than anything else, and when the soul arrives, they find the people they always loved waiting for them there for one last great party.

My vision of Heaven draws from other sources than Dante’s; his is the child of a medieval Italian world with deep and still living Roman roots, while mine has in equal amounts classical and Celtic antecedents, the island in essence being the Irish Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth. There’s also a bit of Tolkien in there, with the speech that Gandalf gives to Pippin during the Battle of Minis Tirith in The Return of the King that was so wonderfully acted out by Sir Ian McKellen in the film adaptation. Yet upon reading Dante’s cantica of his travels from the summit of Mount Purgatory to the ultimate light at the apex of all Creation, I can understand where he was coming from even if I found my understanding of his verse fading in and out at times.

Early in the Paradiso, Dante writes in Canto 5 about acknowledging one’s mistakes, in Beatrice’s words “Better for him if he had said: ‘I’m wrong,’ / than to do worse doing it.”[1] So, the vision I’ve held onto since childhood of Paradise may well be lacking, while it makes sense in my understanding I could still very well be wrong in my assessments, and in that I would be joyous to be proven wrong so for that would mean that this affirms one of the greatest truths that I believe in: that there is always more out there for us to learn.

All things that we know exist within creation, Beatrice describes in Canto 7 how all things “come to decay and last no time at all,” on Earth, yet in them something greater can be seen. In Paradise, Dante meets many saints and holy men and women. There too, he lives out the genealogist’s dream by speaking to one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida (c. 1098 – c. 1148), a knight who left Florence to join the Second Crusade during which he was knighted by Emperor Conrad III (r. 1138–1152). When asked who he was, the knight responds to Dante, “My branch and leaf (in whom I was well pleased, / waiting until you came) I was your root.”[2] Yet when Dante asks the question I’ve long wished I could ask my own ancestors from whom I inherited my family name, “Tell me my earliest, my dearest growth / who were your own progenitors? Also, / what years were marked for you as boy and youth?”[3] Cacciaguida replies that his ancestors lived in Florence as did he and Dante, concluding “that’s all you need to hear of my great sires.”[4] Among my own Kane ancestors––the name is variably spelled Keane, Kane and Caine in English but consistently as Ó Catháin in our native Irish––the unbroken recorded link only reaches as far back as my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather who is identified in Griffith’s Land Evaluation in the 1840s as Thady Caine. I’ve surmised that he was likely born at the earliest in the 1790s. The memories of these people who in worldly affairs had little impact yet still existed as a part of our history deserve to be remembered as we still exist as a part of their legacy.

As Beatrice leads Dante higher and higher through the celestial spheres, he notices how her laughter and joy evokes the spirit of their surroundings. In Canto 18, Dante writes that upon turning to Beatrice he:

            “saw the light within her eye so clear,

            so full of laughter that her look and air

            defeated all that these, before, had been.”[5]

One passage, in Canto 19 that struck me as needing particular note concerned the salvation of those who are born outside of Christendom and live good and worthy lives. In Dante’s verse:

            “’A man is born,’ you’ve said repeatedly,

            ‘beside the Indus. And there’s no one there

            Who speaks of Christ, or reads or write of Him.

            And all he does and all he means to do ––

            As far as human minds can tell –– is good,

            sinless alike in living and in word.

            Then, unbaptized, beyond the faith, he dies.

            Where is the justice that condemns him thus?

            Where is his guilt, if he does not believe?”[6]

Here, I feel that Dante is asking about the salvation of his first guide through these three realms, Virgil, who is condemned to eternity in the First Circle of Hell for the fact that he was born and died just too early to have encountered Christianity. It’s a question that I certainly have, having known many people who do not practice this faith yet have lived good and true lives. I don’t have an answer here, like many questions of faith this is something that remains a mystery to me, for I can see both sides of this question. What I can do is hope in love, which Dante writes is the purest and truest emotion evoked from God’s Essence:

            “Love, which in laughter sweetly clothes itself,

            how ardent in those piercing pipes you burned,

            voiced by the breath of holy thoughts alone.”[7]

In that essence of love, Dante sees Beatrice slowly immerse herself into the orbit of God, beginning in Canto 21 and continuing through to the end of the Paradiso in Canto 33. In the first of these two canti, Beatrice warns Dante that he is not ready to see her in her full beauty enhanced by the presence of God:

            “’If I were to smile,’

            so she began, ‘you would become what once

            Semele was, when she was turned to ash.

            For if my beauty (which, as you have seen,

            burns yet more brightly as it climbs the stair

            that carries us through this eternal hall)

            were not now tempered, it would shine so clear

            that all within your mortal power would be 

           a sprig, as this flash struck, shaken by thunder.”[8]

Here Dante drew from the classical inheritance, evoking the story of Semele, daughter of Cadmus of Thebes, the founder of Tyre, who was one of Jupiter’s lovers and was tricked by the jealous Juno to ask to see Jupiter in his full majesty only to be reduced to ash by seeing him.[9] I’m reminded as well of the Irish legend of the return of Oisín to Ireland after spending 200 years in Tír na nÓg with his wife Niamh only to turn to ash when he fell onto mortal soil again, but not before having a long discussion of faith with a certain Christian missionary named Patrick. In both Dante’s use of the myth of Semele and this clear Christianization of the death of Oisín, the one ancient hero who by all druidic accounts still lived in the Irish Paradiso of Tír na nÓg, the new faith could incorporate the old worlds into which its light flooded over the last two millennia.

At long last though, Dante is able to see the “sacred light” in its purest form, and to look again at the face of Beatrice illuminated by this light as one of the righteous. Later again in Canto 21, he proclaims with the exuberance of the Magnificat:

            “O sacred light,

            how love – the freedom of this holy court –

            is all one needs to trace God’s providence.”[10]

Dante can see the truth of Paradise because of the caritas, the charity, “on high that makes us serve / so readily the wisdom of the spheres.”[11] This light overwhelms Dante, even then. This is something that I fully can relate to, having felt much the same throughout my life yet magnified in recent months. In the first lines of Canto 22, the poet writes:

            “Astounded, overwhelmed, I turned to her

            my constant guide, like any little boy

            who’ll run to where his greatest trust is found.

            And rushing there, as mothers always do,

            her shocked, pale, sobbing son, she said to me:

            ‘Do you not know that you’re in Heaven now?

            Or know the heavens are holy everywhere,

            and all here is done is done from zeal?”[12]

Even in this moment when Dante ought not to be afraid, he still felt that most human of instinct at beholding something otherworldly and so beyond what he had seen before then. The immensity of Paradise alone would make anyone of us cower in fear. These verses more than any other spoke to me directly, as something that I could see myself doing in Dante’s place. It reminds me of Moses’s first reaction to realizing whose voice spoke to him from the burning bush:

“I am the God of your father, he continued, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”[13]

This, dear Reader, is a human experience of the Divine, of something greater than ourselves. I’ve long pondered how best to express my own beliefs concerning these questions, how best to refer to God. Dante sees God as a light emanating from the core of all things, and in my best effort at understanding the inherent paradox of God, for nearly a decade now I’ve come to think of a Divine Essence, as the best metaphysical expression of the Tetragrammaton which in its best English translation is rendered I am that Am. The Latin infinitive of the copula verb is essere, and this is the root of the noun essentia, so it seems prudent to me to write then of this Divine Essence, even if that Essence may seem impersonal. That’s where the three persons in one of the Trinity comes into my own faith.

At the end of Canto 22, Beatrice offers one of her last encouragements to Dante, the man who had loved her since first he saw her when they were children:

            “’You are so close,’ Beatrice said,

            ‘to your salvation here that you must keep

            the light within your eye acute and clear.

            And so, before you further ‘in’ yourself,

            look down and wonder at how great a world

            already you have set beneath your feet,

            so that your heart may show itself, as full

            as it may be, to this triumphant throng

            that rings in happiness the ethereal round.’”[14]

Dante here has a moment to look down on the Earth, on his home, what the great humanist astrophysicist Carl Sagan called the Pale Blue Dot and admire just “how small and cheap it seemed.”[15] I admire how Dante is able to imagine the Earth in one view, to see our entire planet as one common body made up of many separate parts.

Dante’s Paradiso concludes the three cantiche of his Divine Comedy, one of the great works of epic poetry in the western canon. It offers many things to many people; to my medievalist friends it is a window into the cosmology and theology of an Italian at the dawn of the fourteenth century. I would add here my own question of how different this Commedià would be had it been written just a few decades later when the Black Death swept across Europe in the 1340s? To the believer today, it evokes a vision of the afterlife in all its nuance and promises what might become of us once our lives have ended and our souls are weighed for their actions and deeds while living. I see both of these visions in the Commedià and also a poet, someone with whom I share the vocation to craft stories and enrich the human experience with our words, trying to make sense of his own life in exile far from his beloved Florence.

Reading this work has enriched my experience of Dante and reawakened some of that spirit of imagination and faith which I’ve long sheltered from the harsh winds and tempests of these recent verses that I’ve written in the last few years of my life. As much as I look forward to that great garden party in my vision of Tír na nÓg, Dante’s celestial spheres leave me with a warm sense of hope for something better to come.

[1] Dante, Paradiso 5.66–67.

[2] Dante, Paradiso 15.88–89.

[3] Dante, Paradiso 16.22–24.

[4] Dante, Paradiso 16.43.

[5] Dante, Paradiso 18.55–57.

[6] Dante, Paradiso 19.70–78.

[7] Dante, Paradiso 20.13–15.

[8] Dante, Paradiso 21.4–12.

[9] Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.253–86.

[10] Dante, Paradiso 21.73–75.

[11] Dante, Paradiso 21.70–71.

[12] Dante, Paradiso 22.1–9.

[13] Exodus 3:6.

[14] Dante, Paradiso 22.124–132.

[15] Dante, Paradiso 22.135.

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Dante and Virgil meet Marco Lombardo, envisioned by Gustave Doré.

Purgatorio

Purgatorio – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Last week, I wrote my thoughts on the first cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This week then, the second part, the Purgatorio. All quotations from the Divine Comedy come from Robin Kirkpatrick’s English translation published in the 2012 Penguin edition. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Last week, I wrote my thoughts on the first cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This week then, the second part, the Purgatorio.

The sentiment of purgatory isn’t a good one, it’s a place where you don’t want to end up yet often find yourself stuck for longer periods of time. I often have dreams about needing to get somewhere or to do something or find something and getting stuck in an eternal loop of steps along the way and never actually reaching that goal. There are many different ways I could interpret those dreams of mine, yet in this instance I think they may be my subconscious imagination of purgatory. 

Dante’s Purgatorio is an early depiction of this concept, though Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), the French annaliste medieval historian wrote in the second appendix to his book The Birth of Purgatory that “the noun purgatorium was added to the vocabulary alongside the adjective purgatories.” In the next paragraph, Le Goff dated this addition to the decade between 1170 and 1180.[1] The concept itself is affirmed by the Catholic Church as doctrine today based on an interpretation of three verses from Chapter 12 of the Second Book of Maccabees, in which the author described how Judas Maccabaeus (d. 160 BCE) “exhorted the people to keep themselves free from sin, for they had seen with their own eyes what had happened because of the sin of those who had fallen.”[2] The footnote there in the New American Bible acknowledges that this passage “is the earliest statement of the doctrine that prayers and sacrifices for the dead are efficacious” and that “this belief is similar to, but not quite the same as, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory.” Dante’s depiction of purgatory fits well into this model, though he does write often of souls asking him to pray for them, as prayers for those in purgatory will speed their cleansing that they may enter Paradise again.

In this light, Dante’s purgatory is optimistic and hopeful. Sure, he encounters people who continue to suffer as they did in life from their own actions. In Canto 12, an angel proclaims to the poet and Virgil his guide, using Robin Kirkpatrick’s translation, “O human nature! You are born to fly! / Why fail and fall at, merely, puffs of wind?”[3] The cleansing path that the souls in this realm take requires tremendous effort and faith both in one’s abilities to surmount that path, and the reward for those efforts. Dante remarks later in Canto 12, “How different from the thoroughfares of Hell / are those through which we passed. For here with songs / we enter, there with fierce lamentations.”[4] The dead who walk the paths of purgatory then are working toward something, they know that they will learn in their paths the way into Paradise, it just may take a while.

The Purgatorio is remarkable for how it contrasts with the far more popular Inferno. Again, Dante stops and talks to everyone, and again nearly everyone he encounters is an Italian like him, someone with whom he can relate. He finds his fellow Tuscans among the crowds and makes his own birth well known by speaking Tuscan along his way. In several instances the souls he meets remark on the fact that he must be a Tuscan by his way of speaking, even if they themselves are Lombards, Latins, or from elsewhere. 

I found it fascinating to see him encounter the ruling elite of Europe, the kings and popes who work off their sins. In one instance he sees Henry III of England (r. 1216–1272), one of my favorite medieval English kings, who had a pretty unfortunate and quite long reign. Dante places him among several other failed rulers, including Rudolf I of Germany (r. 1273–1291), Ottokar II of Bohemia (r. 1253–1278), Philip III of France (r. 1270–1285), Henry the Fat of Navarre (r. 1270–1274), Charles I of Naples (r. 1266–1285), and Peter III of Aragon (r. 1276–1285).[5] In Canto 20, Dante meets Hugh Capet (r. 987–996) who succeeded the last of the Carolingians as King of the Franks and founded the great medieval French royal dynasty which still exists as the Royal Family of Spain today. Capet sees his old life as something distant from himself: 

“I was, down there, called Hugh Capet once.

From me were born those Louis and Philippes

by whom in these new days our France is ruled.

I was from Paris, and a butcher’s son.

And when the line of ancient kings died out ––

All gone, save only one who wears a monk’ dark cowl ––

I found my hands were tight around the reins

That govern in that realm, and so empowered

In making that new gain, with friends so full,

that, to the widowed crown my son’s own head

received advancement. And from him began

our lineage of consecrated bones.”[6]

In this world which he devised, Dante created tangible settings where the soul is cleansed after its life and before its final entry into Paradise. Dante himself climbed high until by the time he reached Canto 15, the suffering and toil of purgatory cleansed his own soul, so that in place of any other emotion “caritas burns brighter.”[7] The distinction in Latin between caritas and amor is something that I remember being discussed at length in my undergraduate theology classes at Rockhurst. These Latin terms are in turn translations of the Greek originals ἀγάπη and ερως, which I’ve come to understand as a distinction between charity and romance. The higher Dante and the penitents climbed up Mount Purgatory, the purer their souls became so that the affection they felt for their fellows and for all things was less a love that desired something of each other rather than a love that wished only to exist in communion with each other. In my fraternal order, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), our motto of “Friendship, Unity, and Christian Charity” speaks to this vision of love as charitable, unifying, and amicable. Purgatory was intended to replace fear and “penitential tears” with charitable love:

            “If love, though, seeking for the utmost sphere,

            should ever wrench your longings to the skies,

            such fears would have no place within your breast.

            For, there, the more we can speak of ‘ours’,

            the more each one possesses of the good.

            and, in that cloister, caritas burns brighter.”[8]

In purgatory, the penitents seek to cleanse themselves, and to cleanse the world in time as well. In Canto 16, the medieval Italian courtier Marco Lombardo remarked to Dante that societal corruption stems from the government:

            “So — as you may well see — bad government

            is why the world is so malignant now.

            It’s not that nature is corrupt in you.”[9]

The hopes then of the penitent are that not only will they enter the Gates of Paradise but that all those who they left behind on the Earth will also join them and God among the heavenly spheres in their own time. Marco Lombardo remarked to Dante that “of better nature and of greater power / you are free subjects. And you have a mind / that planets cannot rule and stars concern.” In this, Marco reminds Dante that the key to Paradise is accepting one’s responsibility for one’s actions and life and being honest and free about one’s mistakes. Dante experiences this at the end of the Purgatorio, when he at last arrived in the Garden of Eden, located at the top of Mount Purgatory. There, he encounters his beloved Beatrice, the love of his life who sent the poet Virgil from the first circle of Hell (Limbo) to guide Dante to this point where he will at last be reunited with her.

Yet when Beatrice sees Dante standing there in the garden, she admonishes him for his sins and faults when she was alive and afterwards. She challenges him to be better, and to give up the last of his fear and worry, he had not come to her in the usual way after his own death. Beatrice challenged Dante, silencing him with sharp words that he did not expect of her:

            “Respond to me. Your wretched memories

            Have not been struck through yet by Lethe’s stream.”[10]

To advance further, and to be with his beloved again, Dante needed to forgo his feelings of fear and worry, remorse and sorrow, and instead embrace the moment in which he was living, standing there in her sight and hearing her voice.

            “And yet –– so you may bear the proper shame

            your error brings and, hearing, once again,

            the siren call you may show greater strength ––

            put to one side the seed that nurtures tears.”[11]

Beatrice is the first one in the entire Purgatorio who calls Dante by his name, the first to properly recognize him for who he is, more than just the wandering Tuscan poet or the Italian. I’ve often thought about how I would reveal characters’ names in my stories. I like to slowly peel away the layers of fog surrounding a narrative and let the audience discover the characters’ names in a more natural fashion. In a story I’ve begun to write, a sort of cleansing purgatory for the main character, his name is not uttered until after he has passed through these great circles of repentance in his own wandering way home.The Purgatorio concludes in a very mystical fashion, heralding the beginning of the Paradiso that follows. The symbols of the heavens abound, as Dante leaves fatherly Virgil behind to return to his own circle and follows instead his muse Beatrice toward the highest heights anyone in this cosmos can hope to achieve. That then, is where we will continue next week.

[1] Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 362.

[2] 2 Macabees 12:42–45 (NAB).

[3] Dante, Purgatorio 12.95–96.

[4] Dante, Purgatorio 12.112–114.

[5] Dante, Purgatorio 7.

[6] Dante, Purgatorio 20.49–60.

[7] Dante, Purgatorio 15.57.

[8] Dante, Purgatorio 15.52–57.

[9] Dante, Purgatorio 16.103-105.

[10] Dante, Purgatorio 31.11–12.

[11] Dante, Purgatorio 31.43–46.

All quotations from the Divine Comedy come from Robin Kirkpatrick’s English translation published in the 2012 Penguin edition.

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