Quote of the Day | January 1, 2008: Divine Comedy

KBHR disc-jockey Chris-in-the-Morning, from the "Things Become Extinct" episode of Northern Exposure [1992], musing on Dante's Divine Comedy:

In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself within a dark wood

Where the straight way was lost.

Oh how hard it is to tell of that wood,

Savage and dark 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 14^th 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 in the enormous sea.