Midway Upon the Journey
A Pilgrim's Notes
“And as he, who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore, turns to the perilous waters and gazes.” - Dante Alighieri
While my wife was (very kindly) proofreading my recent article on pessimism, she gave me what I think is the greatest compliment of my life.
"It reminds me of Dante’s Inferno. It’s like you’re really on a journey to figure this out.” She said.
I don’t deserve her. It took a while for my ego to come back down after that one.
What could I possibly say about The Divine Comedy that won’t fall flat in comparison to such a monolith. It is my favorite work of literature and a consistent inspiration and presence throughout my life.
Dante begins lost. He doesn’t know where he is, where he’s going, or how to make sense of what he’s seeing. He has to keep moving, keep learning, and keep revising his understanding as the world becomes more complicated than he first imagined.
I’ve spent most of my life feeling something similar.
I was born in 1992 and raised in a small town in central Wyoming. I grew up in a broken home and around people who didn’t see the world in the same way that I did.
My parents divorced when I was nine.
September 11th, 2001 happened around the same time, and like all millennial kids (and everyone else) at the time, I was confused and worried.
I spent most of my childhood as an observant pilgrim in the life I was brought into, having moved homes somewhere around 10 times before finishing elementary school.
Finding Dante’s work as a teenager (I was probably fourteen or so) and his allegorical brilliance instilled in me the curiosity and fascination with trying to understand things from as many perspectives as I could. Collecting different translations and researching different ideas on the meaning of the work became a lifelong interest. I learned about Dante as a person, his political turmoil and exile, and learned that almost everything is more complicated than it seems.
I dropped out of college after a single semester of pursuing an art degree. I couldn’t take care of myself financially and eventually found myself working in the oilfield. Classic Wyoming, right there.
I told myself there had to be some reason for it, and that I could make something out of this if I could just see it in the right perspective.
I got married.
We welcomed my wonderful daughter.
I got divorced.
I got remarried to the most supportive and caring person I’ve ever met. We left Wyoming, and I hauled off and joined the Army. At thirty-four years old, I think I’m nearing thirty different moves and homes by now. We have a new baby boy.
One of the most important experiences of my life was studying at the Defense Language Institute (DLI). I graduated at the top of my class with a degree in Foreign Language - Persian Farsi. I’m still on the hunt for a good Farsi copy of The Divine Comedy.
DLI is one of the most academically challenging undertakings imaginable. Our class began with nearly thirty students and less than ten graduated. The full immersion in a new language and culture, the intense pace of learning a difficult language in only a year, plus the daily demands of military life made for an experience that I can still feel the stress of today.
Despite the difficulty, it convinced me that people are capable of learning far more than they think they are. I watched ordinary people take on things that seemed impossible when they started and succeed through persistence more than talent.
Persistence and cooperation. The real lesson of Dante’s work is that he wasn’t alone. He always had a guide. Virgil could take the incomprehensible horrors and strangeness of the journey and give it to Dante in a quick moment before they had to move on.
I’ve never really forgotten that lesson. I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a self-made man.
At the same time, too many people have been convinced that important subjects belong to experts, academics, or specialists. The way our academic system is set up today with the competition to get published and the sheer amount of knowledge, has forced learners into very niche specializations, and away from the “Renaissance” style of learning of ages past.
So I took from my literary inspiration and my life a few lessons that culminated in my wanting to start this substack and project:
1. Everything is far more complex than we’d like to believe, yet human beings are capable of learning anything.
2. We can learn anything, and we should learn as much as we can. Becoming well-rounded and knowledgeable is a superpower in today’s world.
3. We can’t do this on our own. As much as modernity pushes people into individualism and away from community, we need each other. To learn from and to teach. To guide one another.
My military career took an unexpected dive when I got hurt pretty badly.
Now I’m in the middle of a transition I didn’t plan for, trying to reconcile the future I expected with the future that’s actually in front of me. After all I’ve been through I want to finally use the internet for something other than doomscrolling, and actually connect with my fellow humans. Hopefully, to make some positive changes concerning the problems I see in the world.
Somewhere along the way I realized that I couldn’t keep waiting for someone else to do it. I couldn’t stand being a father and not doing something that my kids could look back on and hopefully learn from if nothing else.
So that’s what this Substack is. Travel notes from my journey.
A record of inquiry. An attempt to learn in public.
A place to explore the philosophical questions that blend into the events happening now, and to make them accessible to people in a digestible way.
A call out into the void, to connect with my fellow humans in this stressful time, and to build a community for learning and sharing.
Most of all, it’s a way I can speak to my children. So that, someday, they might know I was thinking of them and wanting to help make things better. Maybe someday they’ll read these essays. I’m holding my two-month-old son in my lap as I finish this up. Hi, Jack.
I’m JD Jayne. These are my Lamentations, of late.