07-07-2025
A Medievalist Hits the Gym
I teach a seminar for graduate students called Divine Comedies. My students and I trace Dante's influence through the ages. After a close friend — like me, a medievalist — died by suicide last year, I found the passage of the 'Inferno' where Dante describes a grove of suicides almost intolerable. The poet relegates the souls of those who have died by their own hand to trees in a withered forest in the seventh circle of hell. During the Last Judgment, we are told, they will not reoccupy their bodies like everyone else, but will remain trees, with their skins hanging from the branches, in penalty for casting their bodily garments aside during life. The poet snaps a twig from one tree. It bleeds.
After my friend's suicide, I found myself surprised by the depth and complexity of my grief. To cope, I turned not to the consolation of poetry, but to the gym. I started weight lifting.
I had to process anew Dante's condemnation of suicides. How to read the 'Inferno' when my friend was now to be counted, in Dante's eyes, among those who could not find peace? Many centuries after Dante, the American poet W.S. Merwin imagined emerging from this life, casting off his skin: 'I will no longer / Find myself in life as in a strange garment / Surprised at the earth.' But life had never felt like a mere garment to me. My body was clunky, squishy, heavy. Turning to weight lifting was a method of control. It also made palpable the grief I was carrying.
Around that time, I thought often about a conversation I had with another friend, a music professor. He told me that his family questioned the amount of time he spent with his music, noodling with synthesizers. 'We're all going to die,' he said. 'And while I'm here I want to learn a bit of what it means to be alive.'
Before this, I had only rarely attempted weight lifting — and usually experienced frustration and injury when I did. Still, those words resonated with me. I had been a writer, an academic and a musician. But after my friend's death changed my life, the thing that gave me the urge to live while there was still time was strengthening my body, challenging my body, surprising myself in the process. Seeing how I might transform, given time, just for the fun of it.
I thought of Dante once more, in the land of the dead and newly attuned to his own physical heft. There's a moment in the poet's tour of the afterlife, stopping on the shores of Mount Purgatory, when the spirits notice that Dante is alive, an interloper. They 'had spotted by my breathing,' he writes. The spirits 'were so astonished / that they all turned pale.' (I have used the poet Bernard O'Donoghue's translation.) From the perspective of death, the living body must be a wonder and a shock. All sinews and hairs and fat and muscle and bone. Wet eyes. The necessary breathing. The way your shadow claims its spot of earth.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
