Reading this slim letter by one Ellen B. Valery amended these twin concerns, which I’m tempted to think are now at their dastardly peak atop the looming threat of large-language models. But Ellen’s letter is from 2002. It amended my fear of technical obsolescence and spiritual emptiness by revealing, without fanfare or pretension, how they occurred 24 years ago, and likely 240 years ago, because they are immemorial and hardly bound within modern American anxieties. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,” as the Preacher in Ecclesiastes says to explain why all is vanity.

Valery didn’t write a word about computing or chatbots or autonomous weapons or the brackish trough of online content. Ellen wrote about church bulletins for St. Mark the Evangelist Church in Long Valley, New Jersey. Until her resignation, she had been writing them for at least nine years, likely more. Her letter is unclear about the dates of her tenure but crystalline about its degradation, doubts, and descending peace. For, according to the volta of Ecclesiastes which I’m tempted to omit, “I commend joy, for man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of his life that God has given him under the sun.”

I found this letter waiting in the correspondence from the Paterson Diocese of New Jersey, folded once horizontally, slipped in between two page-length homilies written by a Father Vito Cattaneo di Francis. It is an apt amendment.

— KLT, 3/12/2026

April 3, 2002

Fr. Vito,

Like I said to you on Sunday, a happiest Easter to you, and blessed be our Risen Lord Christ. Also like I said to you on Sunday, I’m resigning as your bulletin writer. The choice was sealed with a visitation, Father, and I have to.

I’m putting my declaration in writing like you requested. Your St. Francis de Sales put it, “Be brief when you cannot be good,” and I ought to try both. Putting declarations and other things into writing is what I do well, or so I’d thought. I knew from the first that I’m ill-suited to the rest of what our bulletins required, the phone ringing all week long with “news” that turned out to be gossip, the succession of printers that got smaller but more crabby every year, the panics you and I shared every Saturday before and after the printing, the stacking of those printed copies, the comments after (and during) mass about the misspellings my dear sisters in Christ liked to find, the Monday phone call from Rose about why the bulletin didn’t include the things she’d told me, the Tuesday phone call from old Guthrie on the same subject, and how it was always Friday evening again, and watching you correct Sunday’s bulletin with your blue fountain pen. I haven’t been able to read your markings since 1994, Father. I told you that but you haven’t been able to hear me since about the same time, you deaf old codger. Your ears have faltered, along with my eyesight, hips, left elbow, breasts, and fortitude against imbeciles. Their decline isn’t random, if you ask me.

I will miss you, of course. Not that you won’t continue to see me around St. Mark. I am resigning and not apostatizing. Our confessions will continue, I hope? My days still won’t be any fuller, I’m still a puttering, parched old goose. I just won’t have to confess regarding Rose, Guthrie, e-mail, or our little liturgical director any longer.

Sometimes, one ought to change. I remember our priests and good doctors saying that sort of blather on the radio and into the television cameras after the Second Vatican Council, though those things weren’t due for a change. But I am. Bulletins for St. Tom are not what they were, not their expected quality nor the expectations for their (your) writer—a set, old woman grown tired, one who always preferred a pen to a pencil and knew from the first that the Web was a trap sprung by many-legged demons. You know I cannot stand the so-called pages St. Mark uses for our website and e-mails. Yes, Tim or Andy or other such boys may help me all they can, but that does not change the systems into which we are entering our names, prayers, saints, and liturgy. Let’s contrast them with a blessing: as a girl, I fell for the broadsheets that came whirring out of that mechanical press on Ellison Street, downstairs at the The Evening Press. Those broadsheets were like talking materialized, words made real. The first time I typed one of our Mass bulletins into the “page” that Tim cobbled together for you in the Internet, I felt the opposite, I was feeding real words into a silent mouth I couldn’t see so that the words would never be seen in this world again, words consumed by a mouth that plainly doesn’t exist. It was unmaking words that we had made real.

Do you think we ought to linger on such changes? No, don’t bother answering that. I don’t want you to linger on it in a letter. It’s not good for you and your cricked knuckles. It’s hard on the fingers beginning in the ring.

Whatever the case, I can’t do what your bulletins now require. I’d like to think that the silent, eating mouth of the Internet breaks apart when truth touches it. This is one of the reasons I prefer St. Catherine to St. Francis dS (I’m out of his patronage anyhow, having resigned): when she touched implements of evil, they couldn’t withstand it and blew apart. The spiked wheel where she was supposed to be tortured blew apart. Its spikes impaled the guards who wanted to impale her. The surviving bastards cut her head off nonetheless, but Catherine had made her points. If I could feed my last Easter bulletin into the Internet and see the whole damnable web blow up at the mere touch of our Lord’s Resurrection and shoot sparks of wrath into all the fools and perverts who’d built it, I’d do it and laugh, LAUGH, laugh.

We laughed in confession, Father. I never thought one ought to laugh with one’s priest but then we were always laughing without you ordering penance. I have something to tell you now that neither of us will like, so I wanted us to recall our laughter first.

Aside from our bulletins being eaten by the invisible world of demons, I’m also resigning my duties because I can’t say they belong to God any more. The demons and His dominion are tangled, if you follow: when the bulletins went out of the world by going online, maybe they went out of God’s concern too. But I can’t only blame the e-mail. For a long time I’ve had a fear that what I was doing in every bulletin was nothing of great love or devotion, maybe amounting to busy-looking idleness. “We must not fear fear,” yes. But also “All these persons may pass for being devout but they are nevertheless not so.” It’s always only been paper, maybe. It was paper that the faithful held in their hands and read to see the life of the Holy Church, but still paper. I wrote every word and edited every word you asked me to. Was God in that, really?

You called my writing inspiration once, if you recall. It certainly felt like it, then. But if one of the first inspirations is obedience, and I’m now disobedient in resigning, what of your inspiration now? And St. Francis dS wrote that “One of the best marks of the goodness of all inspirations and especially the extraordinary is peace and tranquility of heart in those who receive them.” I haven’t had peace or tranquility since 1976, Father. I stopped sleeping at Michaelmas after a year of dreaming only about dark rooms where children are crying and hiding from me. I get out of bed and my right hip bites me, I sit to pray and it’s my left, I raise your communion wafer and it’s my elbow. I wish you had never never recommended St. Francis dS to me. I never needed him to write our bulletins, and all he wrote just ties me into knots. I don’t know if I ever received inspiration. One ought not do what she does not believe, and I can’t say that the bulletins I wrote were ever God’s work.

But for all this, I still might’ve received a sign no one deserves. Understand, Father, that I was given a confirmation. After I’d told you that I was resigning, I was still visiting at St. Mark after Easter Mass, talking with a few people in the vestibule outside the chapel. I wasn’t speaking very much, since finally telling you the truth left me feeling ill and worsened my aching hips, if you can believe it. Through the doors to the chapel, I could see the towering pipes of the organ on the right-hand side, the lectern, and the hanging crucifix of our Lord suspended over it. On the crucifix, there was a dove perched on the shoulder of our Lord. It was the orange-white color of glimmering flames. My eyes are poor but not delusional. No such dove had entered the chapel through the doors where we were standing, not then nor any time during Mass. And doves generally do not look like they’re burning. But there it was like one of my dreams come into the world, and it alighted from our Lord’s shoulder, flew across the chapel with wingbeats that crackled like burning boards, and landed on my own shoulder. Its touch was excruciating, but I couldn’t move nor make a sound even as my shoulder and ear were being burned away. Even the dove and I burned, neither of us was consumed. Then it flew off through the vestibule and out of the church. No one I was with saw the dove, heard its crackling, or felt its heat. Maybe you or Devin would know what to make of this episode, Father. But my hips have hurt much less since that dove of God touched me and since I followed it out of St. Mark. I can’t explain any of it beyond putting into words what I saw, which might mean that it was a true visitation.

Please do not ask me about these things when I see you next. I will pretend not to hear you. I don’t know how I’d say more than what I’ve written, and whether I was inspired or deluded isn’t my business any longer, now that I’ve been confirmed. One ought to receive the sign and leave it there, I think.

What you ought to do is speak with a young woman named Erin McDowell. She will be a suitable replacement for me: good of hearing, Fordham graduate in 1985, now a widow. She teaches at DePaul just like I had, though with fewer enemies. I’ve substituted for her English courses and found her materials quite skilled, not just competent. I will introduce her to you on Sunday so that neither of you can avoid the conversation you ought to be having.

I have loved being your bulletin writer, Father. But I am due for a change, and this one might bring me peace and tranquility of heart at last.

Your sister in love,

Ellen B. Valery

Do not forget that old Guthrie will bring his homeless friends to breakfast Saturday, since it’s the first Saturday of the month. And Mary Hanlon needs tending and prayers at St. Joseph’s. And I need Tim or Andy or other such boys to come take your printer out of my living room so that I can regain my coffee table for myself.

Through my wife’s family and my own, I’ve obtained two familial collections of letters that together comprise 476 yellowed pages that neither my parents nor in-laws remember nor wish to keep. (They include a squat box of correspondence from the Paterson Diocese of New Jersey that found no room in its parish archives but did find a home with my grandmother the model parishioner, a mundane refuge beside her basement sofa of pine-green leather, where children could use it as a stool and adults, a coffee table.) In my early study and organization of them, I find these letters are the messages that our grandparents and their parents once received from writers fanning out in every cardinal direction from southern Texas and northern New Jersey, letters that spelled out their lives along grids and angles now, by the sibling shades of death and forgetting that fell across the senders and recipients, rendered oblique and foreign to the present. But I still search them. “I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived,” as Nabokov wrote. As one archive, the letters record many intersecting lives now made strange by time and death.

One such life is the man Támas S. Loj, who recurs as “T.S. Loj, SJ” in the Paterson files but also in the Texan letters. He is the only correspondent I have found to appear in both collections. By his “SJ” (the abbreviated designation for Society of Jesus) and repeated use of “H” and “B” (for Hermano and Brother), Loj was a Jesuit brother who recurred in 23 letters, and he is an inexplicable figure I cannot or ignore—rather, a man I cannot understand yet.

I’m reproducing here the Spanish letter that leaves Loj inexplicable, since it alone departs from the geographic, clerical, and professional details of his other correspondence, which he wrote in either English or French. It is the letter he wrote to my wife’s grandmother Rita, in the days when she was called Clarita and attended a school in Monterrey, a school where Loj had once, apparently, been her teacher. It is a letter that I’m glad has persisted despite its contents, which surely baited the furtive, obscured flame.

Here is the letter in my translation:

October 6, 1961 AD

Daughter of God

I am writing you this letter in place of returning to Monterrey and resuming my classes. The life of a humble brother does not permit the movement nor commitment that I would prefer. “Teach us to give and to not count the cost.”

I enjoy this university. It is a very pretty crossroads. The city recalls Mexico to me. The food and the bright stones of the buildings and the devilish heat, etc., etc. Here, it depresses me to see the little hills and the poor-looking trees. I’m always returning to Huasteca, where we used to sit in front of the canyon. (Indulge me with these simple lines. You know that my Spanish is faithless and blind. I write with a dictionary open, and in everything I create the facsimile of a natural discourse.) They call me Lejos here. My surname agrees with no one, but I prefer Lejos more than the Lojes of Monterrey — that name of baubles and shopkeepers.

Br. Valdez told me that Mr. Ventura is teaching my courses of history and theology. Do you like him? He is a layman of great education and ambition. Which texts is he teaching? I hope that he assigns you all the letters of St. Francis or St. Benedict. Is he giving you those saints? Or is he confining you all inside the texts of Chimalpain? Write out your curriculum for me. Include the names of any teachers invited by Ventura.

I need to teach. The most urgent thing is to return to Monterrey tonight. It disturbs me to remain apart. I would like to relax here, where I don’t have any educational duties. I attend my mandated meetings with a blank mind. I walk by the side of the San Antonio River. I talk like a stray with the locals. They tell me that the city owes its people to Mexico and also to Tenesee [sic] and also to guns and also to cattle. This city of various sources but no identity/harmony confuses me. Do you know that they celebrate a “Fiesta” for 10 days in April? I tell you, I am afraid to remain here until April. There is more I would tell you. But I have my commitment.

Abandon history. I recommend biology and mathematics and physics to you. They will offer you material clarity. Clarita: are you familiar with the atom? With the electrons the are always circling? Understand them. They circle forever the nucleus and will never touch it, because of their opposed electrical charges.

I don’t believe I will return to Monterrey. Goodbye, in the face of a hidden future, Clarita beloved daughter of God. (I should tell you, “Go with God,” but the phrase doesn’t apply here—the tension is that we never move.) Think about me in your history and true science courses. “Truly, I am in love with suffering, but I don’t know if I deserve the honor.”

Megbecsült,*

Br. Támas S. Loj / Lejos, SJ

*“Honored” in Hungarian

There is an element my translation conceals from non-Spanish speakers: Loj moves between the formal usted / le address and the informal tú / te address without the strict organization the two addresses usually entail (he often slid from one to the other in the same paragraph). The formal usted would have been the expected and proper address between a teacher and a student.

In addition, Loj’s own history slides and clouds with murk despite his seeming divulgence of its facts: his mention of “this university” in the second paragraph is unclear, since San Antonio has no Jesuit universities, though he could’ve been writing from the University of Incarnate Word or one of San Antonio’s other Catholic universities. Rita hadn’t saved the original envelope, and so I can’t know the sender’s address which Loj used. I also can’t determine the Mexican school where they’d first met. There are no Jesuit academies in Monterrey, though the Colegio Franco Mexicano is a Catholic university founded by the Society of Mary which was in operation during Loj’s stay. Rita, for her part, claims she can’t remember. (More transparent are the quotations at the beginning and end of the letter, both from St. Ignatius.)

These weren’t questions that anyone else could answer for me, 65 years later. When I reached him for comment, Br. Sancho Rocinante, a representative of the Jesuit Province of Mexico, confirmed only that Loj was a Jesuit brother who did serve in Mexico between 1959 and 1961. He couldn’t confirm the specific school where Loj taught. “He has only three Society records in this country: his arrival permission through Mexico City, one rejected application for leave, and his departure permission through Nuevo Laredo, ” says Br. Rocinante. “His life in Mexico must belong to other records than what we have.” He did reveal, though, that Loj was originally from Hungary.

The Hungarian Province similarly said little about Loj’s time in Mexico. The statement I received from their Office of Public Information after my repeated inquiries states, “Brother Tamás S. Loj served the Society and our Lord Jesus Christ faithfully until his departure in 1976. He requested no further contact from the Society or interested parties. ” I haven’t been able to find means of contacting Loj or confirming if he is still alive.

Likewise, I haven’t been able to relinquish Loj. It’s because, again, I cannot understand him yet. There is an aperture in my archive of letters, or in other records that I’m capable of accessing in my nocturnal archivism, unless I am only groping along Nabokov’s spherical prison of time that is “without exits,” in trying to trace Loj back into the 20th century.

(I once wrote a Texas Monthly article about this letter and my family’s reaction to it that, despite making it through edits and fact-checking and into the mock-up of a full digital design, was canceled for no reason I ever accepted as legitimate. My kill-fee was only $60, and my publishing break in my home state was delayed yet again. You can read it here, if you like.)

KLaTorre_Rita_Design_Sept_2025-KILLED-BR

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—KLT, 2/18/26

In sixteenth-century Toledo, the priest and historian Jerónimo Román de la Higuera announced that he’d found among the manuscripts stored in the city’s cathedral four long-lost chronicles of Christianity’s spread through Spain in the first century. The documents, written by bishops in the flickering candlelights of the fourth and sixth centuries, detailed the most incredible works of God across the Iberian peninsula: a crimson comet in searing flight over the land became a lunar white dove; elderly missionaries bearing forgotten letters from St. Paul hobbled into Spanish cathedrals to encourage Spanish bishops and laymen alike; hundreds of lame and blind were washed in the Tagus River and began to walk and see anew; a coarse linen scrap from the first shroud of Lazarus was used to resurrect stillborn infants; and a fifteen-year-old virgin named Perfidía prayed for the salvation of all Saracens in the moments before a Moor sultan beheaded her for doggedly praying to Christ and the Virgin rather than agreeing to join his harem.

These chronicles, once forgotten, now reemerged to re-christen the Spanish Church as unique and to comfort the embattled Catholics of Spain with revelations of God’s singular demonstrations of power among their own landscapes, their own elect. It was in the Tagus of Toledo where St. Ignacio lathered the sores of peasants and washed them off like clay, and it was the bishops of Madrid who recorded again, for all time, “la paloma de nuestra Fe Nueva” from the letters carried by St. Paul’s companions. Some clergy and laymen could see these chronicles as their own faithful history, one necessary to stir them up to faithful perseverance against the unmade new world of post-Reformation Europe.

But Higuera had forged the chronicles. He had imagined the testimonies of Flavio Lucio Dextro, Marco Máximo, and Luitprando and then had written them into existence as physical parchments, fabulations spawning falsities in need of refuting. He had reimagined the historical blessedness of his beloved Toledo. By his Falsos Cronicones, Higuera unwittingly forced the genuine histories of the Church in Spain to become known more clearly.

Don Nicolás Antonio decried the “intrigues and schemes and absurd inventions” that Higuera had foisted on the faithful for his own ecclesial and political ends, in a text titled Defense Against the History of Spain Against P. Higuera. After falsehood, Spain’s history had to be defended, and thus known. Because both noble families and rural parishes had seized upon their falsified forebears and saints, Spanish historians, bishops, and believers had to refute Higuera’s malicious artifice with what lay behind it. They’d been made to, and in grappling with the written chronicles, they arguably found the truth of God’s works in Spain more clearly, obscured as it had been by Higuera’s mystifications.

Without a doubt, the Lord moves in mysterious ways.

It’s a phrase one hears, perhaps, as a child, when it’s spoken by adults to comfort one another and themselves in baffling or depressing circumstances, though the exact instance when one first heard disappears behind the mists of one’s recollections. It’s a popular phrase, popularized enough to title an episode of Touched by an Angel and to slither from the lips of the vile Claude Frollo in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, though not the Frollo of Hugo’s original novel. It’s a phrase become familiar, ambient from a distant origin one might assume is a New Testament verse.

But one can doubt the phrase in its arrangement, and one should: the Lord moves in mysterious ways is apocryphal.

Its true phrasing is God moves in a mysterious way, from William Cowper’s 1774 hymn “Light Shining Out of the Darkness.” The awed declaration begins the hymn’s first quatrain:

God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonder to perform,
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.

The whole of the hymn is thunderous fare for knowing God despite our “feeble sense,” and though one would be both generous and pious to end this essay by quoting all six of its quatrains and then signing off, one is caught in the last two lines of the fourth quatrain and unable to go farther:

Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

Perhaps one appeared to be darning a useless sock in distinguishing “The Lord” from “God,” “in mysterious ways” from “in a mysterious way,” but in the catching stitches of “Behind”/“He hides,” there is the aperture through which, at last, I’m threading my needle.

Behind the apocryphal phrase, there is the true phrase, and behind the true phrase, there is the one, true meaning of them both. God is indeed the Lord, and the mysterious ways attributed to Him in the incorrect phrase— incorrect because Cowper’s hymn attributes one mysterious way to God— still ultimately become the single, singular path of God: His glorification. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” Paul cried in joy. “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!”

The apocryphal phrase is not genuine but is genuinely inhabited by the truth. In this distinction, it is like fiction, which is not true but is still known to be truthful. Behind the artificial expressions of fiction and all we perceive in them, there waits the truth we might come to realize.

Behind the narrative, the query, and the assertions that appear to differ from one another but are all actually one layer of meaning overlaying another, there is the odd future of Shadow/Substance.

I’m writing a new series called “Letters from Theophilus.”

Recall that the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are both letters from the apostle Luke to one he called Theophilus, written as “an orderly account” so that Theophilus “may have certainty concerning the things [he had] been taught” in the faith. A letter from Theophilus, then, returns from the disorderly world into which faith always goes, and it is written from many disparate angles, by many disparate sources, and toward the source of all reality, Christ. “Letters from Theophilus” will sometimes be fictions in the nonfictional form of the letter. They will be simultaneously less real and more true.

Recall that this newsletter exists to parse reality by tracing its shadows back always to its substance, and so these unreal letters will return the reader to the real ever behind them. I believe so, I pray as much. I don’t believe that writing these letters will embolden the apocryphal texts that have long attempted to undermine Scripture, or exalt the history of their false claims, but rather imagine in many small chronicles the one mysterious way of the Lord, inhabiting it again and again.

Come now to ponder it, I realize I’m only catching up with the way God had already set me to walking. I had already begun writing these fictions in other guises:

My stories in Apocrypha also prefigured “Letters of Theophilus”—especially “After a Drowning, a Poet,” which in its first-person blend of the quite unreal and the truly observed is an early, strange precursor.

Aside from these features, y’all can also expect to see guest contributors in these letters. Many disparate sources is not only figurative but also literal, and the bylines of these letters will reflect that by multiplying. I have a short list of writers I mean to commission for the series, but I have no great funding with which to pay them. I do, however, have some paid subscriptions that some of y’all have given me, and I welcome more paid subscriptions to help me compensate the talented writers I want to commission. I need your paid support, if giving it is feasible for you.

But before expectations and payments, we had been talking about mystery.

Without a doubt, the Lord moves in a mysterious way, but while I was darning the exact wordings of the axiom’s noun and prepositional phrase, I had left its adjective splayed out: mysterious. I come to it now, convinced. The mysterious nature of God’s way is why the unreality of fiction is necessary to describe it, to unsettle any perceived, too-comfortable sense of familiarity with Him and replace it with true attention.

Exaggerated perceptions of familiarity lay a false path before our discernment of God. We can pass through prayers to Him, readings of His words, and communion with His flesh and blood and still not approach Him, still inside the incredulous glaze of our own humdrum numbness, all because we happen to experience these miracles in routines and no longer notice their mystifying strangeness. We can hear “For God so loved the world” and reply that He gave his only begotten son; we can hear “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and reply and are justified by his grace as a gift—we can make every word, every blaze of God’s love and transcendence, mundane because we feel familiar with them.

But “how unsearchable are his judgments,” Paul cried in joy, “and how inscrutable his ways!”

Any perception that God is perfectly familiar—even a known quantity that can’t or shouldn’t surprise or baffle us—warrants uncertainty as a corrective, as our means of a new look at Him. recently referenced the writings of literary critic Viktor Shklovsky to proclaim that art can “‘defamiliarize’ experience, in order to illuminate those aspects which have become invisible; to bring to life that which has died.” Against the deadening familiarity of habit, art can “restor[e] vividness to experience,” so that “a stone [may] feel stony again” and a simple letter may again feel lettered. By the particular estrangement in the particular artifice of fiction, “defamiliarization can restore reality.”

One seeks reality, and ultimately revelation, by means of art that estranges the eye and requires an uncertain, renewed look at all we assume too easily to know. “Letters from Theophilus,” among other things, will introduce shadows rather than certain reality, to lead your eye back always to God, their substance.

Thanks for being here, y’all. To clarify, “Letters from Theophilus” will not replace the essays and poems I write, but only complement them. Having pondered the fit, features, and purpose of this series for nearly six months, I anticipate publishing its first entries.

And if you haven’t already read the entries of the “Strange Visions” series at Cluny Journal, I recommend reading them.

The Art of Poetry, No. 9: Dante Aligheri

Interviewed by Katarina Holmes, John Ciardi, and Kevin La Torre

The exiled poet and statesman Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri, whom we call Dante, lives in Ravenna, Italy. The stone house where he is kept overlooks the Adriatic Sea. It is not his home, though he certainly lives there with his wife, Gemma di Manetto Donati, and his children, Jacobo, Pietro, and Antonia. Dante hosted us in the house’s great banquet room, and he fetched and served us his own wine bottles from his own hand. His seat in the falling, dusty light of the eastern window laid a light, sacral glow on his clothes, over his rare smiles. His two sons passed periodically through the room, most often to ask things of Gemma as she sat embroidering beside her lit hearth and monitored us, her voluminously troublesome husband and his foreign guests. The two men take their nine spinone hounds hunting in the western hills, and though their father doesn’t allow them to sail into the Adriatic, they keep their private vessel anchored to a dock in the bay below the house’s hillside. When glimpsed down the hallways of the house, Antonia bent her head to us so as not to speak or be spoken to.

Dante himself spoke slowly, allowing for John (a poet, my compatriot) to translate his orations from the Italian but, despite his courtly gentleness with us and with John, he sometimes grew irritated that the English impeded all he was discussing. With only our feeble interests to prompt him, Dante lectured fluently on the vile bulls of Boniface before the sweet roses of St. Bernard, the illustrious mountain-mounting ancestor of the honorable Guido Novella de Polenta, the difference between the crustaceans found in Ravenna’s tidal pools and the invading crabs in the shallows of the Lago di Garda, the atmospheric costs of the marble blocks used for new construction around the Vatican, his sons’ spinone hounds, the seven Indo-European monarchs of history most equipped to quell and unite Italy (maybe too obviously, Dante prefers Julius Caesar), and the sorry state of Italian cartography for the use of messengers. His eyes didn’t move or rove as he spoke, though he was evidently seeing (or had seen) much. Aside from the above, he explicated a dozen other subjects during the nine hours we sat with him in the large banquet room of the Ravenna house, but I will not recount them here from my impoverished shorthand. We here bind ourselves and the poet to the poem. The interview’s transcription cobbles together only our comments on that subject.

Katarina—Kati pronounced kaht-yeh, if you are her podcast co-hosts or her refugee mother—claimed that Ravenna didn’t impress her, joking that the Commedia had disappointed her in almost the same way. I don’t pretend to understand her addled humor. Walking through the city centre toward the stone house growing ever larger on the eastern hill, Katarina laughed with the boys darting through both cars and motorcycles to play their soccer match, and she pretended not to enjoy arguing with the uncompromising fruit-sellers under their canvas awnings. At no point before or after speaking with Dante did she discuss the Commedia with me. This is the sort of detail she doesn’t mind that I include, as she prefers keen, unflattering exposure as a narrative vantage point in her own work and (apparently) in mine as well. In all her fictions, Katarina depicts herself as an inscrutable, unwelcoming, and dogged young woman. These adjectives are true enough to life that I’m forced to add to her oeuvre myself.

John and I had corresponded for nearly a year before he joined us in Ravenna, after he replied to my fan mail with a few exquisitely passive-aggressive complaints about the Sayers and Longfellow translations of the Commedia. Aside from the poem, we mostly have discussed the University of Michigan football team or the mad Robert Lowell. (John politely, consistently ignores the questions I’ve asked about his Boston Catholic upbringing.) Translating between Dante, Katarina, and me, John became as invisible as a cleaned pane of glass. Below, I have not marked his words except where he spoke apart from Dante. I trust John won’t mind.

Kevin: Thank you for allowing us to join you here, sir. Is sir too much, sir? Sorry, it’s—I’d rather not just address you by your first name, if that’s alright.

Dante: My given name was enough for my mother and will be enough for my God. And you are all most welcome here, though I will not pretend I am a proper host or master of this house. You have heard of my situation?

Katarina: No, of course not. Why, did something happen?

Dante: So you have heard, my young friend, if you would still like to be too intelligent to discuss the situation. Very well. It is worth discussing, however, because the thorns of this land, its vilest leaders, and its cursed cities are not separate from the poem.

Katarina: We’re here for the verses, trust me. But most people reading the poem won’t know the people or the arcane motives of your situation.

Dante: What readers know or do not know cannot change the composition of the poem. I have written every one of its cantos in the shadow of my exile and thus never in Florence. My ancestral city’s present absence is a significant feature of the form. And at any point, a reader may dare to infer the circumstances which the verses allude to, as simply as spreading two branches apart to see how their great lengths join their trunk. Whatever I have suffered, I have preserved in my pilgrim’s way through the cantos as his glory and mine, for all I have suffered came from our Holy Father, as have all my blessings.

Kevin: As has the love of Beatriz Portinari?

Dante: Of course, of course.

Katarina: Do you each mind not bringing her up, right now?

Kevin: Not bring up Beatriz?

Katarina: Yes. I mean, Gemma’s sitting right over there. [She waves to Gemma, who does not wave in kind.] I’m no medieval genius, but it’s probably better not to talk up a long-dead girlfriend while the very-much-still-living wife is with us, or at least I think so. If you both can manage it. All respect to the side-piece, of course, for whomst among us, right? But I’m working on being a marriage-respecter now that I’m newly and bitterly single.

Kevin: We’re not going to talk about Beatriz while discussing the Commedia, with the literal Dante? This is some multilayered irony, right?

Katarina: I’m so earnest about this that it hurts my back. And my cervix.

Kevin: …

Dante: …

John: I don’t need to translate that, I hope.

Katarina: Well thank you, boys. We’ll all survive the strain. Now, we were discussing all you have suffered, Dante, and I was hoping you’d start really naming some names.

Dante: I have already named names, to my persecutors’ infamy. They are a pack of underfed, ravening, slobbering curs even now, after so many years to reform or satisfy their unending greed. But let me speak unmistakably: God the Creator plunged me down into these years of torment so as to raise me still higher than I could have reached while only a pampered prior of Florence, for that is His way and one of His great arts.

Kevin: Is that the allegorical meaning of the poem’s descent into Hell, which is ultimately an ascent into Heaven?

Dante: It is one meaning, of one vantage of the allegory, yes. How can I describe it, now? A succinct description without a day’s digression or falling upon the groves of vanity is the work of a scholar like John, not a poet. Still, I will attempt one: while the Lord God is truly indescribable, the men, lands, trials, and miracles He takes up for tools are not. I say again, it is His great artistry to compose the world so that from all vantages, and at all times, we may perceive Him in it. And, perceiving His mastery, we cannot keep from testifying to Him, even singing it aloud at the end of our comforts. That is why I wrote all the shades as ones who witness to their lives, grace, or punishment. Notice, too, that my own pilgrim is himself a witness. Damned, penitent, beatified, and living souls perceive God the Father, not only in the scriptures or the Church but in the circumstances he uses as revelation in our days. His revelation to me came in my exile, persecution, and dishonor. It all felt vile to me, and still it is grace from his His hands, like the persecutions of the prophet Jeremiah as he spoke his Master’s message.

Kevin: But what if you die?

Katarina: I’m pretty sure that guy Jeremiah has died by now. And we’re not doing that right now, Kevin. Dante, you use the word pilgrim to describe yourself in the poem. Or, John translated it that way. How differently do you view the Dante of your poem, versus yourself in your own life?

Dante: The first is a pilgrim, and the second is a poet.

Katarina: But they’re both you, aren’t they? Or, you are each of them. The Dante in the poem is just you in 1300, a year before the Italy-hopping, Pope-hating, verse-celling shitstorm that’s coming for you. [Katarina did not let me edit out that phrase.]

Dante: I am a man in the world, not an I on those pages. My poem reflects my life, but to see the sun’s rays reflected from a brook is not precisely to behold the sun itself.

Katarina: But you are the poet. As the poet you transcribed your entire history in your poem. Your friends, your politics, your aesthetics, your religion (your religious extremism, to be honest, but don’t worry, we love a boy who’s too crazily earnest)—it’s everything, and it’s all you. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here speaking with you.

Dante: What is your question?

Katarina: How do you treat reality in the poem? How do you pose it against your own personality, your own perception?

Dante: It is a poem.

Kevin: And as a poem, it has a set narrative where you placed the pilgrim on his inescapable path to redemption. Between “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray” and “by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he has a fixed path—

Dante: Wooing too strenuously is unbecoming, dear boy. Must you quote my verses to me?

Kevin: …[I should’ve told him to tell that to Virgil, but the moment passed dumbly.] What I mean is narrative fate, how the pilgrim is fated to receive his lot from God, just as the sinners, penitents, and beatified have. But throughout the Commedia, you argue again and again for the free will of man as an honorable thing from above, even as the pilgrim ascends into that realm where God’s will is itself reality, regardless of man’s will or deeds.

Dante: What is your question?

Kevin: Does the poem enact the pilgrim’s free will, or is it constrained by your own sub-providence as the poet?

Katarina: I specifically asked you not to ask this question. Dante, it’s an obsession, but not the fun kind. The entire trip over here, he kept asking whether we could choose anything, given that God exists (which is not a given but that’s for another time). Then he asks if the existence of free will actually matters, if we perceive reality as something we choose, and then he asks why it bothers him so much that he wouldn’t have free will, if he has Christ. I specifically asked him not to bring this up, and you don’t have to answer him.

Kevin: Well—he might have to, if God has already willed it. And He might have willed it, since Purgatorio Canto 16 delves into the question indirectly through Marco Lombardo and his free will, which “can conquer all if it is well sustained.”

Katarina: Can you stop?

Kevin: Do I have a choice?

Dante: The passage you quote from discusses only a portion of my concern with free will, as it is only Purgatorio but not yet Paradiso. God has granted us intellects to be His free subjects, so that the light of our reason still sifts good from evil in moral discipline and wise virtue. Here, I am following where Aquinas leads (as well a free Christian should), though I made sure that Virgil voice these truths, to honor that king of poets and acknowledge in him the best of man’s reason. For Virgil, instructed by the divine revelation of nature, saw too that all loves, both righteous and evil, spring from human urges but that the will of the disciplined, virtuous, and moral man empowers him to check it.

Kevin: But how can man check sin by the strength of his own will? He’s suffused in sin after the fall, truly “bare of every trace of good and by evil overshadowed everywhere.”

Katarina: We’re here to discuss the poem.

Kevin and Dante: This is the poem.

Dante: Man doesn’t overcome sin in his own strength, because of course he cannot. A free will presupposes God’s grace given through the Incarnation, as Christ lived, died, and was raised that we may be freed unto Himself in His father. And, I should stress, freed unto Himself is the key directional phrase for discussing our free wills in God. Anything called “freedom” apart from the chain-breaking Creator is a foul lie couched in glittering, stolen robes.

Kevin: … [Here I gave myself over, as in many times before on the question of will, to submitting and not understanding. Partly, I wished not to discuss my own Protestant teachers on the question of providence, because Dante would surely have placed Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Calvin, and even Erasmus in the eighth bolgia of Hell’s eighth circle, for sowing discord.]

Dante: Silence is welcome, young man, if only at the end of your silence you say something  intelligent. I am only a teacher on these questions. I myself have been taught only by teachers, however wise. The truest, fullest answer to these questions lies in our faith’s mystery, which in my third and final voyage, I revealed as my Beatriz. But, as befits heavenly mystery, she teaches as much in her celestial beauty its, so like that of the Lord’s sun, as she does in her explicit teachings on the cosmology of Paradiso. Reason must be mastered by revelation in our approach to God. If we are not to discuss Beatriz openly, we will be disappointed by ending her discourse here.

Katarina: That was such a nice thing you said of her that I’m sure it’s fine with Gemma, and fine with me. Paradiso was my second-favorite of the canticles for how much light you lay over it. But, of course, Inferno is too hard-core brimstone-y to not be my favorite.

Kevin: It’s the recognition of sin by the awful fullness of God’s wrath, compared to the reception of glory by the infinite radiance of His love.

Katarina: I don’t even know who you said that to, at this point. But—you mentioned reason just now, Dante, and I wanted to come back to that. It’s clear from the poem how much you’ve learned, though it’s also clear that not even you can keep juggling all your sources throughout the poem. My question is, I guess, why depict yourself as so learned throughout the Commedia to then disavow it all by the end?

Dante: The poem never disavows learning. Nor have I, in my other writings. How could I, if learning itself brought me here as surely as my travails, and from the same hands of God?

Katarina: But don’t you compare an over-reliance on philosophy to the leopardess in the dark wood, at some point?

Kevin: She-wolf.

Dante: I allegorized each of those beasts as a vice foretelling certain doom, and my pilgrim’s chief vice was the pride of a man well-read in the documents of human reason, not learnedness itself.

Kevin: Your pilgrim bends nearly to the ground of the cornice among the proud in Purgatory, nearly bearing their penitence as his own. I loved that image, it burned me. I feared it and loved it. It’s the same doubled searing I got when your pilgrim relinquishes his reason in Paradise, just at the gates of the Empyrean when he’s tested by St. Peter, St. James, and St. John. His answers demonstrate the height of human reason, just at the moment he relinquishes them to enter into the presence of God. I burned reading it. I wish I had a less off-putting description to tell you, I’m sorry. It was a Purgatory flame, not an infernal one.

Katarina: Very nice, thank you for your completely directionless input. But, Dante, why did you repeat my pilgrim just now, when in that literal sentence you had been referring to yourself?

Dante: I again meant my pilgrim, the character of the poem who goes bodily through Hell, Purgatory, and the three heavens. All three of which I have not done.

Katarina: But why do you separate him from yourself? It’s not a clear distinction in the poem, which was exactly what I liked most about it. If you are yourself in the poem, then placing your enemies in Hell—the liars, the killers, the Greek heroes, the gays, the cheats, the literal popes—becomes actual transgression and not just poetic exercises in nice language. Ditto for the denunciations of the Church from the saints from Paradise: their criticism, treated as documentation, would be more cutting, more transgressive. Don’t shy away from actual transgression! You’ve already been living on the run, it’s not like you could write something to get yourself still more canceled.

Dante: … [Looks to John, who shrugs.] Perhaps, my dear one, you have never visited Italy before. Beheadings await too many of us. What is your question?

Katarina: Why do you separate him from yourself, when the self-documentation would sharpen your insight?

Dante: I separate him from myself because I have written a poem, not a history or a revelatory dream from God.

Katarina: But don’t you see the potential for reordering reality, if you do away with the pretense of authorship?

Dante: You assume I am as heretical as you are. Reality is both ordered and immutable. All things have their places, their forms, and their essences because they have received them from God above, who spoke first and speaks still. I may delight in the learning of the men He has made, still knowing that for all my grasping, my reason falls at His feet. I may form the verses which He has enabled us to speak and write, still knowing that for all my skill, I can reorder nothing He makes and sustains. How could I, within the shelter of the reality whose Maker also made us and our minds?

Katarina: You really, really enjoy this unified world you believe exists. But the only unity is in what you perceive. That’s what the poem demonstrates! Not even in what we perceive, but in what you perceive, which is a totally separate unity compared to what I perceive. A unified world, but only in the one and not the many. For all your reading, you’ve never picked up on that?

Dante: I have picked up the futility of determining all things according to myself. For many years, I even bore it upon my shoulders as true. It is an oppressive weight. Only humiliation, prayer, and revelation lighten it, so that it weighs less than a dawn’s beam. Now, I bear the weightless one in the many.

Katarina: Is this the part where you tell me that I’m young, and that my humiliation will come someday? It definitely feels like you’re winding up for it. First of all: so hot, bring on the cuffs, can’t wait for my denigration. Second: you’re telling me that subjectivity is a dead-end? I know you’re reading older books and taking a deity for granted, and I know how fun a good anomie can be, but you can’t actually think that objective, triumphalist Christianity isn’t also a dead end.

Dante: I am telling you to repent, my dear one. Lest you become alone in yourself, menaced by the consequences of your pride.

Katarina: But what if one of the consequences of my pride is that I get to write something as notable, as fame-orgasming, as your Commedia?

Dante: [He looks to John, and to me. He looks again to Katarina but does not respond.]

Kevin: What if you were about to die, Dante?

Dante: That is no hypothetical. I will die, and maybe soon.

Kevin: What will you do then?

Dante: I will see the foot of Mount Purgatory, and I will approach my Lord. I only regret that my deepest imagination will have disappointed me when I finally behold Him without a veil.

Kevin: I doubt you’ll need the words, then. I doubt any of us would want words then. Won’t that be a relief?

Dante: I’ll need only “Te Deum laudamus,” but there, it will be our very breath.

Kevin: I’d written down a question about what you’re writing now. But it’s a moot, absurd question, isn’t it?

Dante: It is. We still have so much to discuss in the Commedia! Forgive me my passion, but you have each only begun. Surely, you must ask me about the construction and revelation of poem’s terza rima form, or the sixty-fourth line of its sixty-fourth canto, or the wedding of Christian virtue and pagan cosmology, or all three in succession. Didn’t you also want to discuss La Vita Nuova, or Monarchia?

Katarina: Are those prologues I didn’t know about?

Kevin: … how do you translate terza rima?

John: Oh my God.

Dante Alighieri did soon die. He trembled with malarial fevers, dying the night of September 13, 1321. I wrote to John to inquire about the poet’s final days, but in his mourning, John didn’t respond. Like the rest of us, I had to read about Dante’s funeral from an outdated essay, and it only saddened me more to have missed the procession which brought the poet’s bones into the Minor Friars of Ravenna, and only made me wish I had asked proper questions of him and his poem. (As if there are proper questions for a poet who believes in God, Katarina would say. When I told her on the phone that Dante had died, she hesitated, and then she hung up. Later that day, she emailed me the following:

“Time and again at daybreak I have seen
the eastern sky glow with a wash of rose
while all the rest hung limpid and serene,

and the Sun’s face rise tempered from its rest
so veiled by vapors that the naked eye
could look at it for minutes undistressed.

She added that I would look more poetic, and more Calvinist, in the mourning black I’d surely be wearing for the rest of my days. I’ve missed her, I’ll admit it.)

I cannot think happily on Dante’s death, despite his clear, stated anticipation of entering into Paradise. For one thing, I struggle with endings, which for me always read too repetitively. For another, malaria is too undignified. The foul wetland mosquito which delivered the disease is too small, too devious, compared to the golden eagles or powerful gryphons which should have borne Dante without death into the Empyrean. But his death is not merely my own feelings about it—as an event, it was ordered. It was given. I’m always having to remember that, in the deaths of others. And when I remember the altered, lucid visions I suffered in the feverish nights of my own life, a fevered death given to the greatest poet to render the cosmos makes good sense of his suffering. It may also be an ironic sense, but then God seems to make ironic sense as readily as He makes sanctified souls. (He is the first Poet, after all.) The bones of Dante Alighieri, interred in their plain stone sarcophagus, make sense only by the sanctifying touch like flame from the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.