Before Dante's House > IDEAS & IDEALS

• 목록

   "Deep as love, deep as first love"
                                                 - Alfred Tennyson

                  
      Led by a young and fast-walking guide, we, a group of eighteen Korean tourists to Europe, made a round of Duomo Cathedral, Uffizi Gallery, Michelangelo's Plaza, Medici Chapels in Florence, Italy, and all of us were awestruck and tired at seeing too many good and big things all at one time, and felt heavy in mind and body. But when we stood in front of a small and commonly-looking stone house, after zigzagging through narrow alleys, where Dante Alighieri was born and lived, we felt free and light as if we had cast off a heavy burden from our back. As most of the group tourists are supposed to do, we made a circle around the guide and listened to his explanation of the place dutifully in the bright and hot Italian summer sunlight, out of courtesy for the guide, an art student from Korea, and took pictures with Dante's bust sculpture in the background. To amuse us and to dispel our indifference to the place, the wise guide called our attention not so much to the poet Dante himself as to his first love, Beatrice, and, to my great surprise, he succeeded, although most of us were elderly people over sixty.

      Most of the people in the group seemed to have heard of Dante, and of his Divine Comedy, although they had not read it. But interestingly enough, all of them seemed to know of Beatrice. It was clear that Beatrice was far more famous and well-known than Dante who immortalized her in his writings. Encouraged, the guide told the old story that had taken place right on the spot about 730 years ago very convincingly, as if he had lived next door to Dante and seen everything with his own eyes.  

      Dante was nine years old when his father took his son to a May-Day party at the house of a wealthy Florentine citizen, and there young Dante met the host's little daughter, a child about his own age, and at that very moment his heart trembled, and said to himself, "Behold a god stronger than I that is come to bear rule over me." The name of the god strong and powerful enough to rule over the soul of Dante all through his life from the moment to the end of his life was Beatrice.

      From that time on Dante sought to go where he might look upon Beatrice, because the mere sight of her was to him a revelation, as of something divine walking the earth bodily. He was eighteen when she first acknowledged him and spoke to him in the street, giving him "the uttermost bounds of bliss." On a subsequent occasion, having heard some scandalous rumours about him, she "refused him her salutation," and he learned that love could be an initiation into suffering as well as ecstasy. His love was "most chaste" one, and was not directed to marriage nor to any kind of possession. There was no hint of jealousy, grief or grievance over her marriage to a banker in 1287 when Beatrice was twenty-one. After three years of her married life, she died at twenty-three.

      The guide's version of the love story between Dante and Beatrice ended here, and all the listeners, even the grandfathers and grandmothers including me, seemed quite pleased and moved by the story, and I found myself absorbed in my own thought and memory of my own first love. Although dimmed and lost in the distance of time, in the happiness of my married life and in the business of daily life, the image, the power and experience of my first love was there not completely erased, but hidden and buried in a nook of my heart, like glowing embers under the ashes, and I blushed secretly. I looked around and found, to my great relief, my wife happily talking and laughing with other tourists about something.

      Like Dante I experienced the strong power of love quite early in my life, and its subsequent joy and pain. My heart jumped whenever I saw her and mere thought of her could literally make my heart skip a beat. But unlike Dante my love was not so pure and chaste. I wished to have her and marry her, and consequently I had to suffer from jealousy, grief, grievance when she did not return my love, and I was cut to the quick when she married another man. I wept. I wished her dead. I prayed her unhappiness. I thought of killing myself after killing her.

      There are many kinds of emotions we have, feel and experience in our life, and among them all, first love is one of the most powerful as well as mysterious ones. In our life there comes a moment when it sneaks into our life, regardless of our will or wish and raises our life to a level that we had never known until then. Like strong liquor it intoxicates us. Like a disease or illness it registers in the blood with dizzying effect. It cuts deep and leaves an indelible mark in our psyche. It is ignorant, wild, and blind. This is why so many first loves fail to succeed in marriage.    

      First love is the love that is not consummated by marriage. It can be mutual as well as one-sided. Many people succeed in marrying their first love but become unhappy, while many fail to marry their first love, fall in love with another and live in happiness. First love doesn't guarantee happiness. But like a sweet dream it lingers long as an ideal of love, as an unique and particular emotional experience, as a marvelous vision. It has its own entity separate from conjugal love.  

      On the bus on our way to the hotel after finishing the day's tour my wife asked, "What happened to Dante thereafter? Did he marry another woman or remained a bachelor all his life?"

    "Guess," I said.

     "He must have died a single man, thinking, sorrowing, and writing of Beatrice," said my wife wistfully.

     "Wrong," I said.

     "Wrong? How come?"

     "Dante married Gemma of another noble family in Florence about seven years after the death of Beatrice when he was thirty-two, had four children from her. He fought valiantly in the civil war as a soldier, entered political life, elected prior of Florence, accused (probably falsely, I hope) of fraud and corruption while in office, banished from Florence, and led a wandering life throughout Italy for twenty years until he died at Ravenna at fifty-six, during which time he finished writing The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature, and in which he met Beatrice again, and was led into Paradise through Purgatory by her."
                (December 25, 2000)