David's Inferno (42 page)

Eventually, I accepted that I doth protest too much. For while, as countless books have attested,
The Divine Comedy
is the journey of one man, it is also the journey of
everyman
. Indeed, my journey through Hell (and hopefully not back), was and is every bit as important to humanity as Dante's. And so is yours. And yours. And yours.

The Dark Wood—yes, we all have been there. Limbo, we've been there, too. Hell and Purgatory, we've tasted them. And a Paradise that's beyond the forms of this earth? Beyond contentment? Beyond bliss? Well, those who know don't say and those who say don't know. Me? All I can do is say I don't know.

Not only am I
not
a Dante scholar, I don't even understand Italian. Fortunately, there are many English translations of Dante's work. At various times, I consulted ones by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Musa, H.F. Cary, A.S. Kline, and others. The Dante quotations in this book are the result of my mixing and matching these translations, and then putting them into a vernacular
that made sense to me. Heresy, perhaps. But I'm in good company.

Growing up in my academic household, you were only supposed to use primary sources. Looking things up in encyclopedias was a capital offense. And summaries like
Cliff Notes
were beneath contempt. Nevertheless,
Wikipedia
deserves my thanks and even a bit of my money for saving me an extraordinary amount of time when I was trying to remember for the
20TH
time what year Dante was exiled or which behaviors dopamine affects. The ever-expanding website
Shmoop
was similarly helpful as were the
Cummings Study Guides
(
http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/
). In all cases, you need to cross-check your facts, but sites like this sure make things easier when you encounter a factual block in the middle of a paragraph.

No matter how much cross-checking you do however, there are many things about Dante that are still subject to debate … in particular, when he started and completed each of the three books, and where he traveled while in exile. Sources disagree on the former by years and the latter by miles. Paris? Likely. England? Maybe. And then there's the stuff of pure legend. Which son found how many remaining cantos? Where? How many months after he died? In this regard, my favorite source for the confusion about his travels while in exile is a review of the book
Dante the Wayfarer
which was published in
The New York Times
on December 2, 1905 (
http://www.unz.org/Pub/BookmanUK-1905nov-00074
).

After reading the introductions to various translations and roaming around the Internet, I pretty much settled on
http://www.worldofdante.org/timeline.html
for the basic chronology, because it was easy to follow and was developed by the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. Advanced technology? Humanities? I hear a little cognitive dissonance there. But is it all so different from Dante's insistence on writing in the vernacular? The medium changes. The message evolves.

Beyond that, I intentionally didn't read too much about Dante while writing this book, because, as I've said, my goal wasn't to write
about
him so much as have a relationship
with
him. Since this led me to make some assertions and projections that could raise the eyes, if not ire, of Dante scholars, it's probably best if we call those those sections “historical fiction” and leave it at that.

One biography I do need to acknowledge is
Dante in Love
by Harriet Rubin (2004). When I discovered this book, I felt I had met a kindred spirit because she, like me, was more interested in the
living
Dante than the dead one.
Also her book was the one that brought to my attention the important fact that the poet called his book “The
Vision
of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.” Anyone who likes my apparently speculative sections about Dante in this book will likely enjoy Rubin's.

There are two authors in this field that I—and most other people interested in depression—consider required reading: Kay Jamison and Peter Kramer. I was informed, illuminated, and inspired by
An Unquiet Mind
(1995) Jamison's groundbreaking book about manic-depression (including her own first-hand experience); her
Touched with Fire
(1993) about manic-depression and creativity; and her
Night Falls Fast
(1999) about suicide.

I also read Peter Kramer's
Listening to Prozac
(1993) and
Against Depression
(2005), both of which have been major forces for bringing depression “out of the closet,” as an illness that can be treated with medication, and the implications of that for understanding who we “really” are. The latter book also raises the intriguing question of what human life and creativity would look like without depression.

Whenever we read a book about some kind of suffering, we experience a kind of simultaneous relief and envy. There is, however, a place in the middle, where the emotional lives of the writer, reader, patient, caregiver, and innocent bystander all have their place and are equally deserving of acceptance and respect. While there are many memoirs of depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia, William Styron's
Darkness Visible
(1990) still sets the standard. By being equally intimate and informative, he lets you into the experience without forcing you to stare or to turn away. To get a bigger picture of his experience and what it was like to live with him through it, read his daughter Alexandra Styron's new book
Reading My Father
(2012).

While I tried to make most technical terms self-explanatory in the text, I've included a Glossary for easier reference. It includes a chart of trade and generic names that professionals tend to use interchangeably.

The only medical
text
I referred to was
DSM IV: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness
, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association. As of this writing,
DSM V
is about to be released. Many libraries have copies, and there are several websites that give general overviews of the various diagnoses, including
http://allpsych.com/disorders/dsm.html
and
http://www.dr-bob.com

I tend to triangulate between a lot of different resources in order to understand the who, what, when, where, how, and why of technical topics. After a while, however, I began to rely on certain ones. The following are my major Internet resources for understanding neurotransmitters, diagnoses, and medications:

NB: Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and died in Ravenna in 1321
.