Dante, love and cheesecake

     

     Valentine's Day looms — a week from Saturday. You've done nothing, of course. It helps to have a plan. For starters, what is Valentine's Day about, anyway?
     Love, right?
     Yes, clearly. All those hearts and flowers. Kind of a a giveaway.
     Of course, you could argue that everything is about love, in one way or another. Sports. War. Success. All mating rituals gone mad. I just finished Prue Shaw's excellent "Dante: The Essential Commedia" and it reminded me that, in Dante's cosmology, love is the essence of belief. Asked — by Saint Peter in heaven, no less — to explain his own personal faith, Dante replies:

     "...I believe in one God,
      sole and eternal, who, himself unmoved,
     moves all the heavens, with love and with desire."

     Love drives the clockwork of the universe, from the beating of our hearts to the whirring of the cosmos. The epic masterpiece has 14,233 lines of terza rima, and — spoiler alert — the last five are:

      "Here my lofty imagination failed
      but, like a wheel revolving evenly,
      already my desire and will were turned
      by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.'

    So saying Valentine's Day is about love doesn't mean much, since everything else is about love too. Maybe Valentine's Day is more about gratitude — thanking the people whom you love and, mirabile dictu, love you back, not only despite who you are, but because of it.

     In the 43 years my wife and I have been an item, I've been famous for nailing Valentine's Day. One year, when we were dating, and had separate apartments, I used my new key to slip in her place while she was away and clean it, top to bottom, as a present. I suppose some gals might be horrified at that, but, given our situation then, she knew it was the perfect present: something thoughtful, that demanded knowledge of the recipient and considerable planning and effort. Plus I was broke, so it was the most elaborate present I could afford.
     And, like all the best gifts, it was kind of a gift to myself, too, since the place clearly needed cleaning. She married me anyway.
     Speaking of love and gratitude, I've always been grateful for the love shown to this blog by Eli's Cheesecake. From the very beginning of Everygoddamnday.com, the classic Chicago dessert ran holiday advertisements here, from Thanksgiving through February.
     Gratitude being important, to me anyway, I felt I should thank them for their support. 
     Over the years, these pieces developed a certain tone of elaborate, almost theatrical appreciation I think of as Cheesecake Hysteria. Such as 2016's "Fight Donald Trump with cheesecake," (its suggestion that you " stock up on Eli's cheesecake now, before the break down of the government affects the package delivery system, or the electrical grid is impacted by a surge in terrorism or from fallout of whatever reckless war or unnecessary international crisis Trump blunders into" grows more on point as the years pass) or 2020's "We will eat the good cold cheesecake, browned by the sun and be men" and 2o19, perhaps the ultimate, "Have you done your duty, cheesecakewise?" with its pointed opening sentence, "Hey, parasite!"

     Maybe because I'm a journalist, and thus supposed to be impartial. Immune to such considerations. I wanted to make sure that the reader clearly understood what was happening — I am being paid and celebrating my benefactor. Sunlight is a disinfectant.

     That said, I still felt guilty. How was I different than any other bought-off hireling? Yes, the cheesecake is great. Yes, I'd eat it anyway. But still. Money changes hands. There is no free lunch.

     Fast forward to the present day. I'm reading "Dante: The Essential Commedia," a unique sort of book, where the author walks the reader through the Commedia's three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, providing a running commentary, stopping the action to expound on what is going on. An excellent way to appreciate a book that otherwise can be puzzlingly dense and obscure. I plan to write my Sun-Times column about it Friday.

     At one point, Dante, Virgil — and I suppose we readers too — are heading up Purgatory's mountain, toward Heaven, where Dante will gaze upon the blinding white light glory of God. Angels are flitting about, too quick for Dante to process. A climbing soul introduces himself: 

      "My name was Currado Malaspina
      I'm not the old Currado, but a descendent of his
       the love I felt for my family is purified here."

     Shaw steps in to explain.
     "Dante pays the speaker an elaborate compliment: he has never been in those parts, he says, but the Malaspina family is famous throughout Europe for their courage and their liberality, the two quintessential feudal virtues."
      Dante outlines their renown.

      "The fame that honours our house
       celebrates its lords and celebrates its lands,
       so that even someone who hasn't yet been there knows of them."

     The soul makes a prediction.
     "The shade responds that, before seven years have passed, Dante will experience the family's generosity for himself," Shaw writes. "Dante was the guest of the Malaspina family in the Lunigiana in late 1306, one of the few securely documented sojourns in the early years of his exile. While there he represented the family in peace negotiations with the bishop of Luni. The document that names those involved survives in a local archive. In the time frame of the poem, these events lie in the future. here the poet repays the courtly hospitality of the Malaspina family with generous words, written long after the event."
     Ha. Double ha. So Dante Alighieri, master poet of all time, equal only, perhaps, to Shakespeare, pauses in his epic masterpiece to sing the praises of the house that put him up for a while after Pope Boniface VIII exiled him from Florence and sentenced him to death, should he ever return.

      In exchange for his room in the family estate, and — what? — a few months' worth of meals at the communal table, Dante celebrates the Malaspinas in a work that will circle the globe and remain fresh and current — and in print — for 700 years.
      So it's not just me. 
      I can't tell you how satisfying that is. 
      Between the world wars there was a skillful cartoonist named H.T. Webster who would draw various series of cartoons under a certain theme. "Life's Darkest Moments" and "The Timid Soul" (named Casper Milquetoast," a character that lingered in the culture for quite a while). One series was "The Thrill that Comes Once in a Lifetime" and showed a young man holding a newspaper whose headline reads, "JOE DI MAGGIO LIKES CHICKEN CHOW MEIN."

     "Gee!" he says, cheeks flushed. "I like chicken chow mein too!"

      The almost unnecessary caption, "THE BOY WHO FOUND HE HAD SOMETHING IN COMMON WITH HIS HERO."

      I don't claim to have much in common with Dante — pervasive disappointment, a sense of my own worth not at all in keeping with my current state — but I do know on which side my bread is buttered on. Just like him.

      Oh, I almost forgot. Valentine's Day. Here before you know it. Go online and order your beloved a box of "Be Mine" Baby Eli's cheesecakes, or a Valentine's Red Cherry Vanilla Bean cheesecake. Do it right now, right here, before you forget and it's Feb. 13 and you're jamming yourself into a 7-Eleven to pay $10 for a limp looking single rose. Your long-suffering loved one will be glad you did. You'll be really glad you did. I'll also be glad you did. And Dante, if only he were around, would be glad you did.

     Okay, maybe not. Not a lot made the dour Florentine glad. But one can still hope, another important quality when you find yourself stuck in hell and trying to get out.