Dante's New Beatrice

"Round Midgnight" by Ella Fitzgerald

...I do pretty well 'til after sundown / Suppertime I'm feelin' sad / But it gets really bad / 'Round midnight / Memories always start 'round midnight...

Nineteen days into this new year, I am quite proud of myself. Classes have commenced and I'm in love with my brain. I love school. I love to learn and I am taking the kinds of intellectually stimulating, humanity connecting classes that my mind was truly created for.

I am taking a World Studies class about the classic The Divine Comedy by the epic Italian poet Dante Alighieri. My professor is this balding, handsome, compactly built Italian genius who stolen my mind with his vast knowledge and my heart with his accent and animated English.

I imagined that this class would be messily boring (because I resent "the classics" written by these dead white men whose offspring annihilated what would have been African classics). But it is not. Dr. Piciche offers information about Dante the writer.

He provides historical and social contexts for many of the things Dante includes in his poem. He comments that times never really change. The technology gets better so more details are recorded and more babies are made so there is more to record. But times never really change.

Hence the term "classic". Classics survive time; remain relevant. Time gives us the illusion that things have changed so we hang on to very few things. And classics are the few things we hang onto.

Education sophisticates people. I do not mean sophistication in some saddidy, I-read-more-and-better-than you kind of way. Education sophisticates one into being humble. It reminds a person how big the world is and how small every person is...unless you decided that there is something that you can do to improve the world. That is what makes one grand.

In this new year, I have decided to discover and display my grandiosity. I have taken to praying far more often than I used to, eating as good as I know I should, being patient, and even more empathetic. I am calm.

I am still the same. I am uptight and I worry too much. I am pessimistic and I am dramatic. But I can calm myself down within a few seconds. If not, eventually, the situation dissipates totally and I think about it in a far less tragic way. It becomes correctable, manageable, necessary even.

I think I could be happy even though the situation has not changed. Beauty is a state of mind.