[from the Letters archive] The Tao of Dante Chris Nolan stopped by for a visit one morning last week. One of the country's most intelligent, insightful, and bitingly funny political commentators, Chris is a leader among a new guard of "stand-alone" journalists who have broken away from their former keepers: bricks-and-mortar-bound corporate media conglomerates. Chris was a high-profile columnist at the San Jose Mercury News for much of the tech bubble; subsequently a freelance journalist for various magazines and newspapers. Almost two years ago she decided to bring her brand of reporting and political analysis directly to the public – with no strings attached, no punches pulled.  Her site, Spot-On.com, is the single best place to keep up with trends and happenings shaping the political landscape in California and beyond. Our visit was primarily social. But Chris also caught me up on what's happening in the world of web-based content syndication and shared her off-the-cuff analysis of a slash piece, written about the exploitative labor practices of San Francisco restaurants, published in that morning's San Francisco Chronicle.  It was Chris's astute analysis of the latter subject that started me thinking about the relationships among politics, restaurants, philosophy, and Dante. Shift of Power While at the Mercury News, Chris exposed the inner workings of some of Silicon Valley's most powerful business interests. She is the reason – some say the only reason – why one of the valley's most powerful investment bankers was indicted for obstruction of justice. In the process, she changed some of the previously unwritten rules about how the business of Silicon Valley operates. One of the bedrock ideals of journalism is that a truly independent media best serves the public good.  For Chris and many others – including her former colleague Dan Gillmor – technology has raised this possibility on a mass scale and, for the first time in history, has done so without requiring a large concentration of capital invested in infrastructure required to produce and/or distribute the content. Chris is making the kind of big bet I admire – the prime years of her professional career – that now is the right time in history for this transformation to take place. Accurate interpretation of political maneuverings is Chris's stock-in-trade. So I was intrigued to learn that she did not perceive the morning's public attack on restaurant labor practices as an attack on restaurants, but rather as a play by organized labor to reshape its own political destiny, which at the moment is uncertain in California. Restaurants aren't necessarily the target, Chris explained (though sometimes it feels that way), rather a convenient foil for lashing out at labor's most dangerous foe: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has in the past supported restaurants – an industry near the top among California's largest employers – in various causes.  Evidently, we restaurateurs are merely pawns in a much larger game. This made me wonder what it really means to see the big picture. Since it is virtually always possible to see two sides of the same issue, sometimes the difference in which approach you choose will mean the difference between happiness and sadness, good and evil, sanity and insanity. Working in a restaurant, one has the opportunity to experience the good, bad, and ugly every day. Often times it's up to you to decide what to take away from any particular experience, which may determine whether you end up happy or bitter.  As Keanu Reeves said so eloquently in The Matrix, "The problem is choice." So what guides us in the choice we face every day: how to interpret the thousands of things that happen to us, when so much of it is subjective? Enter Dante Scholars love The Divine Comedy precisely because the text is fertile ground for interpretation.  Almost 700 years after Dante's death, people are still devoting entire academic careers to exploring the significance of Dante's epic poem.  Professor John Freccero, one of the English-speaking world's leading Dante scholars, and with whom I was fortunate to study (briefly) as an undergraduate, wrote his 300-page Ph.D. thesis in 1958 on the significance of just four lines of text from Inferno. The brilliance of Dante's writing is that it enables interpretation on at least four distinct levels: literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical. For example, when Dante writes in the first canto of Inferno: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, From these simple opening lines of Dante's long poem we can interpret: 1) the literal: that, at the beginning of Dante's journey he finds himself alone in a dark forest; 2) the allegorical: that Dante was 35 years old when he wrote Inferno and he may have been struggling with a mid-life crisis; 3) the moral: which implies that the "dark forest" is the state of Eden after the Fall, and thus refers to humankind's condition of living in sin, away from the light of God, and; 4) the mystical: that with his use of the plural possessive in the phrase "midway in the journey of our life" Dante was referring not only to the middle of his own life, but to the middle of humankind's life on Earth, based on a Christian tradition in the Middle Ages in which the Heavens progress through a cycle known as the Annus Magnus, which leads the stars back to their original alignment once every 13,000 years. Based on an extrapolation of Dante's numeration of the ages found later in the text of The Divine Comedy (within Paradiso), we can place the year of Dante's journey through the afterlife at 6,499 years, thus at the precise midpoint of humanity's "earthly voyage." To put this in context, these are merely the first two of 14,233 lines of poetry (all of which rhymes in a scheme called tercet, by the way) that comprise The Divine Comedy. So you can imagine the fun to be had studying the poem in its entirety. Don't Be A Cynic Last summer a remarkable group of four friends shared a dinner here at Incanto in the Dante Room.  One of them is a neighbor who has been a great supporter and loyal friend to Incanto since we opened three years ago. Toward the end of their dinner, they invited me to visit their table. We exchanged pleasantries and I learned that one of the guests was a professor at a local university.  Among his regular teaching duties, this gentleman had a special opportunity, a few years ago, to teach a course on The Divine Comedy. This fellow was not a Dante scholar, he explained to me, but he spent an entire summer preparing to teach his course by studying in depth Dante's famous text. He wanted to achieve a degree of familiarity with Dante's work that would enable him to guide his students through the poems as well as Virgil guided Dante through the underworld.  After "living" with the text every day for several months, he had an epiphany: All the persons in Dante's hell were being punished for devoting their earthly time to hating the bad things in life more than loving the good. Those in heaven, by contrast, were rewarded for loving the good more than hating the bad. The first sin to be punished in Dante's hell is lust, while there is a special sphere in Dante's heaven (the sphere of Venus) devoted to passion. What differentiates lust from passion?  Choice. Effectively, it's all about choice. One way to look at this is that Dante is delivering, in his own particular way, a very simple message:  Don't be a cynic. It's something we all know, but few of us (myself included) are able to live up to: you'll be happier if you devote all your energy to loving the good around us, not to hating the bad.  I've been thinking about the implications of this profoundly simple interpretation of The Divine Comedy ever since that brief encounter last summer. Universal Truths? Another reason that Dante remains significant so long after his death is that his work was an early signal of the impending end of the Middle Ages – a precursor of the burgeoning Humanist movement and of the coming Renaissance.  Dante was a well-read scholar who counted among his influences Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, and both Thomas Aquinas and Thomas's teacher, Albert the Great. His writings should therefore be taken not only as a reflection of his own thoughts, but also as a synthesis of the state of classical thinking and Western philosophy of his time. One of Dante's contemporary influences, the poet Guido Guinizzelli, wrote extensively about la intelligenzia del cielo, the notion that there is a divine intellect, manifested in Guinizzelli's poetry as the radiance of a beautiful woman, which transmits the divine influence of the First Mover to the rest of the universe at large. Guinizzelli's influence, as well as that of Guido Cavalcanti, may serve as a key to understanding the role of Dante's Beatrice not only as a personal influence (there is no doubt that Beatrice did exist as a historical figure), but also as a literary device.  In simple terms, Beatrice's perfect beauty represents divine love or celestial intelligence; Dante's love for Beatrice, in turn, can be seen as the noble path in life: virtuous pursuit of divine knowledge. On the other side of the world, almost two thousand years before Dante lived, Lao-tzu developed a philosophy of governance based on what is termed by scholars today as "trust in the intelligence of the universe."  The core of the Tao Te Ching says: I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are the greatest treasures. Simple in actions and in thoughts, you return to the source of being. Patient with both friends and enemies, you accord with the way things are. Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world. I don't mean to imply that Dante has its roots in Taoism. For starters, Taoism does not rely so heavily on moral judgment as a guide for human behavior and approaches the question of divinity in a fundamentally different way than Dante does.  But for the first time ever, thanks to one of our guests, I am asking myself whether The Divine Comedy and The Tao Te Ching are in fact touching upon the same broad human themes: the capacity to find divine intelligence, love, and compassion within oneself, no matter what the circumstances. Whether you believe in a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God, a universal intelligence, or you're a secular humanist, it's an interesting and relevant subject to consider. ________________________________ Working in a restaurant exposes you to people; often hundreds of people each day.  It's inevitable that some people will like what you do very much and that others will not.  It's also inevitable that you will receive both positive and negative reinforcement, sometimes delivered in a very personal manner. The business affords countless opportunities on a daily basis to interact. If one is open-minded, then working in a restaurant is an incredible opportunity to learn both about people and about oneself.  If not, it can literally drive you crazy. At the end, it all comes down to choice. It's more about ourselves than about what people around us may say or do. I sincerely believe this philosophy applies, whether Dante is your guide or Lao-tzu is your master. When I studied Dante in school, I never imagined that I would be looking back twenty years later, thinking about how it relates to my everyday life. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure how or why this all happened – I'm just glad it did. And for that, I count my lucky stars.