LIBRARY NOTES
Virgil served as Dante's guide; our guide through The Divine Comedy in the first of the Library's "Conversations on Great Books" was Professor Joseph Anthony Mazzeo of Columbia University. O Magnanimous and learned guide!
Dante assumes immense learning on the part of his reader. He makes hundreds of references to Greek and Roman history, mythology, theological issues, and contemporary events. Commentaries on The Divine Comedy began soon after Dante's death in 1321. The first may have been written by Dante's son Pietro. Already by 1481, the date of possibly the earliest printed edition (which the participants viewed at Pierpont Morgan Library), the commentary exceeds the length of the poem.
Dante's wonderful similes are drawn from everyday life: The perilous sea, flowers, a flock of sheep, children who are afraid, an uprooted oak. One of my favorites is when Virgil transforms the dispirited Dante with the news that Beatrice has sent him to be his guide. "As little flowers, bent down and closed with the chill of night, when the sun brightens them stand all open on their stems, such I became with my failing strength, and so much good courage ran into my heart that I began as one set free..."
The Divine Comedy is the most challenging book I have ever encountered. In the years ahead, I hope to return to favorite cantos and become acquainted with new ones. Reading The Divine Comedy, I now realize, is a lifetime undertaking!
William J. Dean
Chairman of the Board of Trustees
The second of the Library's "Conversations" was devoted to the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. In 1571, at a time when France was convulsed by religious civil war, the 38-year-old Montaigne returned to the family chateau at Montaigne, amid the vine-covered hills of Bordeaux, abandoning without regret the life of Paris and of the provincial law courts. His stated purpose, he wrote at the time, with characteristic diffidence, in words he caused to be painted over the mantel in his library, was to consecrate "what remains of his life...to freedom, tranquillity, and leisure." He soon recognized, however, that the "soul that has no fixed goal loses itself," and resolved to record his thoughts so that he might "contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness." This was the inauspicious beginning of a project that was to occupy him for the rest of his life, and would become one of the great works of literature.
The "conversations" were led by Jacques Barzun, who is singularly well-equipped for the task not only by a lifetime of reflection on the Essays, but by the learned, skeptical, and humane temper he shares with Montaigne. The group explored Montaigne's inconsistencies ("like a sure-footed Basque," Sainte-Beuve noted, "he jumps from rock to rock") and digressions through the stoicism of the early essays and the profound skepticism about human reason in the Apology for Raymond Sebond.
The final session was devoted to the magnificent essays that came with Montaigne's neoepicurian recognition that "there is no knowledge so difficult as to know how to live this life well" and that "the most savage of our maladies is to despise our own being."
Peter Dailey
Library member
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