Midlife Crisis

Chris Stevens

Episode 3.13, "Things Become Extinct"

In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.
Ah! how hard it is to tell of that wood,
savage and harsh and dense,
the thought of which renews my fear.
So bitter is it, that death is hardly more.

That's Dante folks, writing of his own midlife crisis. That's the fourteenth century. Six hundred years have passed and we're still into it. It's at that midpoint in our personal continuum when our delicate lives hang in the balance. We look behind us to see how far we've come and we realize that our past isn't a solitary trail through secret woods, but a vista as big and expansive as the ocean itself, with our experiences stretching to the horizon like tiny dot-like sail boats, sucked up into the enormous sea.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

A toast to old lang syne, for my own mid-life crisis at twenty-two, my lost year. To excess, forgetfulness, failure, and blindness. In many ways, friends--the best year of my life.

[Browse Italian and English on-line editions of The Divine Comedy or purchase The Inferno]

Death, our Common Fate

Chris Stevens

Episode 3.17, "Lost and Found"

The ancients knew that we all share a common fate. They gathered around their hearths, their sacred fires, not just to remember those who had gone before but to comfort each other in the face of their own inevitable journey. Mister Einstein put it like this:

Strange is our situation here upon Earth. However, there is one thing that we do know, that man is here for the sake of other men, above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy.

Good night, Cicely.

[Chris reads from Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions]