LETTERS: DANTE'S CRISIS? LET'S HAVE MORE

To the editor:

To prove that I read the Southeast Missourian, to applaud Jeffrey Jackson's column and his reminder to think again of Dante, to argue a bit with the writer -- all are good reasons for sending a letter.

The world would be less anguished if we spent more time reading Dante and less watching "Oprah." For thousands of years, poets and psalmists expressed our own joys and griefs, poets like Homer and David and Tennyson. Reading them was a very good reason for learning to read. Now, alas, courses which cover such granaries of the human experience are almost never required reading, yielding space to courses on computer technology.

Even grocery stores have racks of pamphlets for the distressed of our age. "How to Think Right." "Better Living Through Vitamins."

T.S. Eliot believed that modern man began with Dante. One of my students went to a counselor to complain that both Dante and Dr. Hilty were scolding him for being "sullen." He was at least half right.

I think of Dante every week when I read the church page in the paper and note the many churches in our small community. "Not Your Ordinary Church," they claim. Dante found that those who split churches were in the very bottom of hell.

I am less confident that the Italian poet can be used as a champion of the male midlife crisis. True, the verse begins, "In mezzo camin" (in the middled of the road). But poor Dante had crises all of his life. As I went to buy the Post-Dispatch, I met boys with baggy jeans and hog rings in their noses who seemed to be in a junior high crisis. Later we will visit friends in the retirement home and be stopped in the hall by someone who asks with pathos in her voice if we can help her find her home. Geriatric crisis?

Contributors, mad or sane, to the word list in the Oxford English Dictionary could not have entered "male midlife crisis," for a more recent word book tells us it began to appear about 1970.

And cheer up. Maybe Dante had to wait for heaven for Beatrice, but the very thought of her, the memory of that beautiful young girl he saw going into church one bright morning, gave him direction and a subject for living and poetry for the rest of his life, with some left over for the rest of us. If that was a midlife crisis, let's have more of them.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau