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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Disneylands We Build for Ourselves

How visiting Florence in search of Dante condemned my own sentimental nostalgia
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On the main TAC page today, there’s an essay by me about Disneyland, Dante, and  nostalgia. I wrote it reflecting on the lessons of my trip last fall to Italy, on the Dante trail. Excerpts:

Sharing a communal table in a trattoria one night with a Chinese couple—both Shanghai business executives with a flawless command of English—I took offense when the husband sniffed, “Nothing has happened here in 500 years.” But a moment’s reflection revealed that the rich philistine was right.

Florence’s rise and fall as a political, economic, and cultural power tracks with the founding of the Florentine Republic in 1115 and its extinction in 1532. In the Divine Comedy, Dante sniffs that the city has been going to hell ever since all those money-grubbing hill people from nearby Fiesole migrated into town in the 1200s to serve its growing economy.

Dante, who thundered against Florence’s corruption, may have been a prophet, but he was no seer. The city’s greatest days were to come in the 15th century, when the Medici clan led Florence to the pinnacle of its wealth, fame, and importance. And then, after arguably the most brilliant century any Western city has enjoyed since Athens in the fifth century B.C., the republic came crashing down, and with it, Florence flamed out.

It has been a backwater since then—a highly civilized, industrious backwater, but a backwater all the same. Still, Florence burned so bright and so hot that today seven million people visit each year to warm themselves in its embers. A few, perhaps, will find the light and warmth of the afterglow kindling the seeds of cultural renewal within their own hearts and minds.

I said that to a certain kind of American — like me — Europe can be a kind of Disneyland of history and culture:

None of this is news, of course, but it was strange for me, as someone who has been immersed in and bedazzled by the Florence of the High Middle Ages for the past year, to go to this city where Western civilization hit one of its highest peaks and to see it so moribund. Yet to visit the Continent as a Europhilic American is to face one’s own habit of romanticizing the Old World, and to expect more from it than it can reasonably give.

Going to Florence and observing first hand evidence of its spectacular rise and long, slow decline made me reflect on my own story — specifically, that for most of my life, I had made a Disneyland of my own Family and Place, which set me up to be shocked and broken by the reality I found when I moved home with my illusions intact, only to realize that I was in exile at my family’s gate. More:

Dante, who wrote his great poem in forced exile from get-attachment-18Florence, revealed to me that exile is the human condition. Things change. Republics, like sisters and Dante’s Beatrice, die. We must be capable of change, of adaptation, so that we can preserve the permanent things in a world where most things are always passing.

Dante’s exile taught him that to put one’s ultimate faith in merely human loves—that is, in anything other than God—is to dwell in illusion and set oneself up for a painful fall. This bitterly won wisdom was, for me, a severe mercy, because it deepened my own faith and showed me the way out of my own dark wood.

To go to Florence, then, and to wander among the evidence of its past glories—the art, the sculpture, the mansions of its once-great families who live now only in monuments and memories—is to confront what it means to live in time. To read Dante, though, is to discover how one turns this sense of loss into a comedy; that is, a story with a happy ending.

This is the essence of the traditionalist conservative theory of change. If we want to preserve and to renew eternal ideals among the living, we must be willing and able to accept the inevitable transformation of temporal forms.

Read the whole thing. I’m not allowing comments on this particular post, because I want to keep the comments discussion on the main page post. Please feel free to follow the link to add your remarks.

 

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