once a pandemonium of numberless Latin-derived dialects that gradually, over the
centuries, morphed into a few separate languages--French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian.
What happened in France, Portugal and Spain was an organic evolution: the dialect of the
most prominent city gradually became the accepted language of the whole region.
Therefore, what we today call French is really a version of medieval Parisian. Portuguese
is really Lisboan. Spanish is essentially Madrileno. These were capitalist victories; the
strongest city ultimately determined the language of the whole country.
Italy was different. One critical difference was that, for the longest time, Italy wasn't even
a country. It didn't get itself unified until quite late in life (1861) and until then was a
peninsula of warring city-states dominated by proud local princes or other European
powers. Parts of Italy belonged to France, parts to Spain, parts to the Church, parts to
whoever could grab the local fortress or palace. The Italian people were alternatively
humiliated and cavalier about all this domination. Most didn't much like being colonized
by their fellow Europeans, but there was always that apathetic crowd that said, "Franza o
Spagna, purche se magna," which means, in dialect, "France or Spain, as long as I can
eat."
All this internal division meant that Italy never properly coalesced, and Italian didn't
either. So it's not surprising that, for centuries, Italians wrote and spoke in local dialects
that were mutually unfathomable. A scientist in Florence could barely communicate with
a poet in Sicily or a merchant in Venice (except in Latin, of course, which was hardly
considered the national language). In the sixteenth century, some Italian intellectuals got
together and decided that this was absurd. This Italian peninsula needed an Italian
language, at least in the written form, which everyone could agree upon. So this gathering
of intellectuals proceeded to do something unprecedented in the history of Europe; they
handpicked the most beautiful of all the local dialects and crowned it Italian.
In order to find the most beautiful dialect ever spoken in Italy, they had to reach back in
time two hundred years to fourteenth-century Florence. What this congress decided
would henceforth be considered proper Italian was the personal language of the great
Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. When Dante published his Divine Comedy back in 1321,
detailing a visionary progression through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, he'd shocked the
literate world by not writing in Latin. He felt that Latin was a corrupted, elitist language,
and that the use of it in serious prose had "turned literature into a harlot" by makinguniversal narrative into something that could only be bought with money, through the
privilege of an aristocratic education. Instead, Dante turned back to the streets, picking up
the real Florentine language spoken by the residents of his city (who included such
luminous contemporaries as Boccaccio and Petrarch) and using that language to tell his
tale.
He wrote his masterpiece in what he called dolce stil nuovo, the "sweet new style" of the
vernacular, and he shaped that vernacular even as he was writing it, affecting it as
personally as Shakespeare would someday affect Elizabethan English. For a group of
nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's
Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of
Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that--from
this point forward--everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare. And it
actually worked.
The Italian we speak today, therefore, is not Roman or Venetian (though these were the
powerful military and merchant cities) nor even really entirely Florentine. Essentially, it
is Dantean. No other European language has such an artistic pedigree. And perhaps no
language was ever more perfectly ordained to express human emotions than this
fourteenth-century Florentine Italian, as embellished by one of Western civilization's
greatest poets. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in terza rima, triple rhyme, a chain of
rhymes with each rhyme repeating three times every five lines, giving his pretty
Florentine vernacular what scholars call "a cascading rhythm"--a rhythm which still lives
in the tumbling, poetic cadences spoken by Italian cabdrivers and butchers and
government administrators even today. The last line of the Divine Comedy, in which
Dante is faced with the vision of God Himself, is a sentiment that is still easily
understandable by anyone familiar with so-called modern Italian. Dante writes that God
is not merely a blinding vision of glorious light, but that He is, most of all, l'amor che
move il sole e l'altre stelle . . .
"The love that moves the sun and the other stars."
So it's really no wonder that I want so desperately to learn this language.
16161616
Depression and Loneliness track me down after about ten days in Italy. I am walking
through the Villa Borghese one evening after a happy day spent in school, and the sun is
setting gold over St. Peter's Basilica. I am feeling contented in this romantic scene, even
if I am all by myself, while everyone else in the park is either fondling a lover or playing
with a laughing child. But I stop to lean against a balustrade and watch the sunset, and Iget to thinking a little too much, and then my thinking turns to brooding, and that's when
they catch up with me.
They come upon me all silent and menacing like Pinkerton Detectives, and they flank
me--Depression on my left, Loneliness on my right. They don't need to show me their
badges. I know these guys very well. We've been playing a cat-and-mouse game for years
now. Though I admit that I am surprised to meet them in this elegant Italian garden at
dusk. This is no place they belong.
I say to them, "How did you find me here? Who told you I had come to Rome?"
Depression, always the wise guy, says, "What--you're not happy to see us?"
"Go away," I tell him.
Loneliness, the more sensitive cop, says, "I'm sorry, ma'am. But I might have to tail you
the whole time you're traveling. It's my assignment."
"I'd really rather you didn't," I tell him, and he shrugs almost apologetically, but only
moves closer.
Then they frisk me. They empty my pockets of any joy I had been carrying there.
Depression even confiscates my identity; but he always does that. Then Loneliness starts
interrogating me, which I dread because it always goes on for hours. He's polite but
relentless, and he always trips me up eventually. He asks if I have any reason to be happy
that I know of. He asks why I am all by myself tonight, yet again. He asks (though we've
been through this line of questioning hundreds of times already) why I can't keep a
relationship going, why I ruined my marriage, why I messed things up with David, why I
messed things up with every man I've ever been with. He asks me where I was the night I
turned thirty, and why things have gone so sour since then. He asks why I can't get my
act together, and why I'm not at home living in a nice house and raising nice children like
any respectable woman my age should be. He asks why, exactly, I think I deserve a
vacation in Rome when I've made such a rubble of my life. He asks me why I think that
running away to Italy like a college kid will make me happy. He asks where I think I'll
end up in my old age, if I keep living this way.
I walk back home, hoping to shake them, but they keep following me, these two goons.
Depression has a firm hand on my shoulder and Loneliness harangues me with his
interrogation. I don't even bother eating dinner; I don't want them watching me. I don't
want to let them up the stairs to my apartment, either, but I know Depression, and he's got
a billy club, so there's no stopping him from coming in if he decides that he wants to.
"It's not fair for you to come here," I tell Depression. "I paid you off already. I served my
time back in New York."
But he just gives me that dark smile, settles into my favorite chair, puts his feet on my
table and lights a cigar, filling the place with his awful smoke. Loneliness watches and
sighs, then climbs into my bed and pulls the covers over himself, fully dressed, shoes and
all. He's going to make me sleep with him again tonight, I just know it.
17171717I'd stopped taking my medication only a few days earlier. It had just seemed crazy to be
taking antidepressants in Italy. How could I be depressed here?
I'd never wanted to be on the medication in the first place. I'd fought taking it for so long,
mainly because of a long list of personal objections (e.g.: Americans are overmedicated;
we don't know the long-term effects of this stuff yet on the human brain; it's a crime that
even American children are on antidepressants these days; we are treating the symptoms
and not the causes of a national mental health emergency . . .). Still, during the last few
years of my life, there was no question that I was in grave trouble and that this trouble
was not lifting quickly. As my marriage dissolved and my drama with David evolved, I'd
come to have all the symptoms of a major depression--loss of sleep, appetite and libido,
uncontrollable weeping, chronic backaches and stomachaches, alienation and despair,
trouble concentrating on work, inability to even get upset that the Republicans had just
stolen a presidential election . . . it went on and on.
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are
lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered a few feet
off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night
falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that
you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which
direction the sun rises anymore.
I took on my depression like it was the fight of my life, which, of course, it was. I became
a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the
root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Mom and Dad's fault?) Was it just
temporal, a "bad time" in my life?(When the divorce ends, will the depression end with
it?) Was it genetic?(Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for
generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout
of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful
and alienating urban world?) Was it astrological?(Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned
Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't
creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and
special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after
millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all
these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last
obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal?
Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical
imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?
What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers
we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our
histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches! I came to feel that my
depression was probably some ever-shifting assortment of all those factors, and probably
also included some stuff I couldn't name or claim. So I faced the fight at every level. I
bought all those embarrassingly titled self-help books (always being certain to wrap upthe books in the latest issue of Hustler, so that strangers wouldn't know what I was really
reading). I commenced to getting professional help with a therapist who was as kind as
she was insightful. I prayed liked a novice nun. I stopped eating meat (for a short time,
anyway) after someone told me that I was "eating the fear of the animal at the moment of
its death." Some spacey new age massage therapist told me I should wear orange-colored
panties, to rebalance my sexual chakras, and, brother--I actually did it. I drank enough of
that damn Saint-John's-wort tea to cheer up whole a Russian gulag, to no noticeable
effect. I exercised. I exposed myself to the uplifting arts and carefully protected myself
from sad movies, books and songs (if anyone even mentioned the words Leonard and
Cohen in the same sentence, I would have to leave the room).
I tried so hard to fight the endless sobbing. I remember asking myself one night, while I
was curled up in the same old corner of my same old couch in tears yet again over the
same old repetition of sorrowful thoughts, "Is there anything about this scene you can
change, Liz?" And all I could think to do was stand up, while still sobbing, and try to
balance on one foot in the middle of my living room. Just to prove that--while I couldn't
stop the tears or change my dismal interior dialogue--I was not yet totally out of control:
at least I could cry hysterically while balanced on one foot. Hey, it was a start.
I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine. I leaned on my support network, cherishing
my family and cultivating my most enlightening friendships. And when those officious
women's magazines kept telling me that my low self-esteem wasn't helping depression
matters at all, I got myself a pretty haircut, bought some fancy makeup and a nice dress.
(When a friend complimented my new look, all I could say, grimly, was, "Operation
Self-Esteem--Day Fucking One.")
The last thing I tried, after about two years of fighting this sorrow, was medication. If I
