This room is being built. Its two great pillars:
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321): a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, guided by Virgil and Beatrice — the summa of medieval philosophy, theology and politics turned into poetry. It opens “in the middle of the journey of our life” (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita) and places Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in Limbo, and Thomas Aquinas in the heaven of the Sun.
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615): an old gentleman who has read too many chivalric romances sets out as a knight-errant with his squire Sancho Panza, tilting at windmills he takes for giants. Often called the first modern novel — and, for Ivan Turgenev, the eternal opposite of Hamlet: faith in an ideal against self-doubting reflection. Hume borrows from it the story of Sancho’s kinsmen and the key in the wine-cask (see David Hume).
And then: Petrarch’s sonnets, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Machiavelli’s comedies (see Niccolò Machiavelli), Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, Leopardi’s pessimism, Pirandello, Primo Levi, Calvino, Borges’s labyrinths, García Márquez’s Macondo.
Thinkers & Authors
3
Dante Alighieri
The Florentine poet of the Divine Comedy — the journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise that summed up medieval thought and created the Italian language.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Florentine diplomat and political theorist whose Prince told rulers how power is actually won and kept — separating politics from conventional morality and giving the world the adjective “Machiavellian”.
Miguel de Cervantes
Soldier, captive, tax collector and the father of the modern novel — whose Don Quixote made a deluded old knight and his earthy squire the most famous pair in literature.
Works
2
The Divine Comedy
Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise — the summa of medieval thought in a hundred cantos, and one of the greatest poems ever written.
Don Quixote
Cervantes’s comic masterpiece about a country gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances, who sets out as a knight-errant with his squire Sancho Panza — often called the first modern novel and the greatest ever written.
Coming to the Library
21 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionIn the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
Abandon all hope, you who enter here.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
Consider your origin — you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.
fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle
You shall learn how salt is the taste of another’s bread, and how hard a road it is to go down and up another’s stairs.
Look, your worship, those things over there aren’t giants, they’re windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails.
Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasure the earth holds or the sea conceals can compare with it.