INSULT TO INJURY; EMBRACING THE MALE MIDLIFE CRISIS, LOOKING FOR BEATRICE

It starts at a dinner party with a wagging of heads and the slow clicking of tongues against the back of the teeth. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

"How could he do it?" a woman asks with a sniff of contempt.

"To abandon her like that," another offers.

And thus begins the incessant lambasting of that one fortysomething guy everyone knows who surprised his family and friends when he walked away from home and hearth, altering his lifestyle to pursue his evanescent youthful dreams.

A shame, they say. A disgrace.

There will follow the great castigation, complete with moral censure both for things he did and things they imagined he did, and ending with complete revilement. Finally, someone will say it:

"It's just some midlife crisis, I suppose."

Just some midlife crisis, as if it were a passing fancy, a phase one grows out of with age. Just some midlife crisis, like a head cold you ride out with rest and plenty of fluids. Just some midlife crisis. A dreadful thing. There is no cure, folks seem to say, but you will get over it in time, in time.

The male midlife crisis has become, sadly, a much-maligned phenomenon, and those of us who have gone through it (yes, I count myself one) are seen as little more than perpetrators and perpetuators of a rather hackneyed cliche.

In fact, the term "midlife crisis" has been appropriated by writers to refer to any reappraisal by any group or organization that is roughly 40 or so years old. Recent news stories have used the phrase to describe, among other things, shopping malls, public television, the European Economic Community, Disney and birth control pills.

The result of this usurpation of the term is a cheapening of its import and its ability to elicit empathy. Nothing serious, they say. Just a midlife crisis.

But a midlife crisis is neither something easy nor something to be dismissed as insignificant. It is not just a midlife crisis.

For me, I know, it was a time of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, of dark nights of the soul where I cried uncontrollably at times and wondered at others if there were any reason for continuing this farce called life.

It is, in fact, for many men a radical reorientation of their entire way of life. It is a period of confronting the great questions of life -- questions of meaning and purpose, sexuality and the dimunition of potency, the loss of faith, the threat of death.

They are neither happy nor satisfied with life. They experience more mental health problems, including depression, neuroses and nervous breakdowns, than men of any other age group. Thoughts of suicide increase. Bodies begin to deteriorate. Marriages break up. Finances crumble. Career prospects diminish. Options dim.

Little wonder, then, that Dante began his "Divine Comedy" with a poetic rendering of the crisis: "In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray, gone from the path direct."

Banished from his home in Florence, forced from his life in the political arena and even threatened with death, Dante, in his early 40s, found himself assessing his own life. And as have others, Dante first describes the experience as a descent into hell. One does not reach the glory of highest heaven without passing first through the refiner's fire.

Yet, there is hope, certainly, always hope. It is, after all, "commedia," replete with happy endings and visions of the Empyrean.

For Dante, though the gloomy wood led down a descending path into the nether worlds, it also led eventually to the heavens and to Beatrice, the woman who became for him the embodiment of truth, purity, beauty and heavenly grace. She became for him the symbol of the ideal.

In the midway of this my mortal life, I, too, found myself in a gloomy wood, far from the path I had once traveled, beginning the descent.

But the descent was worth it. I have cleansed my soul. And in the distance, Beatrice.

~Jeffrey Jackson is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.