Soon after we arrived, I came home on a warm fall afternoon to watch game three of the Red Sox’s divisional playoff against the Yankees. My team was sure to lose, I told myself as I left my car and walked toward our warehouse loft in one of Durham’s former tobacco factories, but I still savored the anticipation of the game. I grew up loving the Boston Red Sox, an experience that taught me we can’t bend the world to our will, that life is in large part learning how to manage disappointment. In 1978, as a sixth grader on my way home from school, I listened as the neighborhood rang with the news: Yaz just homered! The Red Sox took a brief lead in their one-game playoff against the Yankees, only to fritter it away on an improbable home run by the beefcake Bucky Dent in the seventh. The great Carl Yastrzemski himself would seal the inevitable disaster, popping up on the blur of a Goose Gossage fastball that I knew was unhittable even before it skimmed harmlessly off his bat. It would take another twenty-six years for the curse of the Red Sox to lift.
Sitting in our North Carolina home, I watched helplessly as, by the ninth inning and down 4–3, it looked as though fate would hand the star-crossed Red Sox another loss. But then, after a startling rally against the otherwise invincible Mariano Rivera, the Red Sox’s Big Papi Ortiz ended it all in extra innings with a mammoth game-winning home run. The Red Sox went on to win game four of seven as part of their improbable run to their first World Series title in nearly a hundred years.
Three years later, in fall 2007, Katherine and I were husband and wife and awaiting our first child, and the Red Sox were back in the playoffs. As I watched Game Six of their American League Championship against the Cleveland Indians, Katherine spoke on the phone with her mom. Our spacious apartment looked out onto Tivoli’s main street and was perched above a gallery. There was an art opening that evening, so our floor hummed with voices and the shuffling of feet. The streets were filled with people walking to bars and restaurants. With the count three balls and a strike, the Red Sox’s J. D. Drew was offered a fastball down the middle of the plate. With a graceful swing, he sent the ball sailing over the center field wall to give the Red Sox an insurmountable lead.
After Drew’s hit, I walked out onto our porch and stood against the railing with a glass of wine in my hand. It was a pleasant November night, the air moist. The scraping of chairs and scuffling of feet in the gallery below had ceased, as the artists and guests spilled onto the sidewalk below me. Across the street, a vegetarian restaurant and country hotel gave off a warm glow through their frosted windows. The world felt small and ordered. I lived in a two-room loft that stood a short drive from the garden-like campus where I taught great books and a beautiful language, and inside our well-lit home my wife held our future in the perfect dome of her expanding belly. All I needed and wanted was right here in the life my wife and I had built amid the stacks of books and stray tennis rackets. While Katherine talked and J. D. Drew circled, I thought: I have it all. Not in the grand sense—no fame, fortune, or power. But in a good, simple way that was all I could hope for. For the first time, I could feel the sawed-off halves of my life—the family-oriented immigrant warmth I had grown up with and the striving, exciting, but exhausting climb up the academic mountain—coalescing into a whole. The great is the enemy of the good, according to an old Italian proverb, warning us away from chasing an unreachable ideal. Finally, at the age of forty, I was ready to accept the good.
This was October 2007, and the Red Sox eventually took the game and went on to win another World Series—their second in three years.
IN DECEMBER OF 2007, JUST two months after J. D. Drew sent the Red Sox into the World Series, I returned to the same spot where I had sipped my wine and contemplated my happiness. Then it had been a warm and moist early fall night; now snow covered the main street. Isabel slept in my bedroom and my mother was watching Two and a Half Men in the living room. The white desert outside my window brought to mind the words of Dante’s greatest lover: “There is no greater pain / than to remember happy times / in misery.” I was awake, but there was little difference between my daydreams and the dreams I had at night. Everything I imagined was a picture from the past that carried ominous implications for the future. It was like prophecy in reverse, with my greatest sorrow hidden in the folds of what had been my happiest thoughts—in a mind now held in fixed orbit by death.
“Tu pur morrai.” You will die.
That’s what the ladies with the crazy hair said to Dante in his first book, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), an autobiography that he wrote when he was in his twenties (about 1293)—a book about daydreams too terrible for words and the overpowering enigma of first love. A mixture of poetry and prose, the Vita Nuova narrates how Dante came to discover poetry as his life’s calling, and how his love for writing was fueled by his passion for a young Florentine woman named Beatrice Portinari, who also went by her nickname, Bice. Both Dante and Beatrice belonged to Florence’s nobility—but Beatrice’s family stood on a higher ledge than Dante’s, making him jealous.
On May 1, 1274, Beatrice’s father, the wealthy banker Folco Portinari, invited the nine-year-old Dante and his family to a party celebrating the coming of spring. All it took was one look at Beatrice, Dante writes in the Vita Nuova, for him to fall headlong and hopelessly in love. The feeling wracked his body like a deadly airborne virus, nearly killing him:
At that very moment, and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi.
“Here is a god stronger than I who comes to rule over me.” With these Latin words—the ancient language meant to convey the authority of his new master, Love—Dante proclaims Beatrice’s dominion over his heart. He would not see her again for another nine years, when he was eighteen and she seventeen. When he finally does, the illness returns, reducing him to uncontrollable tears and forcing him into the shameful privacy of his bedroom.
The Vita Nuova describes how these visions of Beatrice continue to inspire a mix of ecstasy and anguish in Dante. One day he falls ill, very ill, afflicted by a painful disease that makes him languish in bed for nine days. On the ninth day, he has a vision that is even more terrifying than his illness: the wild-haired ladies appear in his delirium, announcing, “Tu pur morrai.”
One even tells him that he is already dead. Another says to him that Beatrice, his miraculous lady, has departed from this world.
The delirium breaks. He realizes it was all a dream: Beatrice still lives. But not for long. The vision was actually a premonition. They may have been wearing sumptuous robes, Dante realizes, but the women with the disheveled hair were witches.
Terrified of my own daydreams and desperate for help, I left the chilled balcony and phoned the chaplain whom I had encountered my first snowy day in the Underworld.
A FEW DAYS AFTER I called the chaplain, she and I met at a coffee shop near campus in the village of Red Hook.
An ordained minister, Georgia was a curly-haired woman in her fifties, with gentle eyes and small shoulders that sat incongruously on a large lower frame. She lived just up the road from my apartment. I often saw her out walking and would occasionally run into her at the Tivoli library. During the memorial service for Katherine at Bard she had been a calm, dignified presence, and when I saw her walking in the snow I felt as though she had been sent to help me.
I told her that I had been trying to connect with God. I had been reading the Bible, annotating the margins of the edition I had been given for my Catholic confirmation. I tried to identify with Job, but he was too old, his suffering impossibly extravagant. I tried to pray, I told Georgia, even got down on my knees on the hardwood floor of my apartment, just as I was taught to do as a child—just as I had in the yellow chapel of St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie as the neurosurgeons worked on Katherine’s traumatized brain. Dante believed that prayer expedited your way through Purgatory to Paradise, with hundreds of years lopped off in a single fervent supplication. Countless letters were arriving, from my friends, Katherine’s friends, our families,