Knowledge of Dante Wins It All

Last night, I was delighted to see, on a Jeopardy re-run, that the Final Jeopardy answer, in the final episode of the 2006 Tournament of Champions, involved Dante.

The Final Jeopardy category was World Literature. The answer* posed to the final three champions was:

"Poet, by that God to you unknown,
lead me this way. Beyond this present ill
and worse to dread, lead me to Peter's gate
and be my guide through the sad halls of Hell."

(That is John Ciardi's translation; I think Jeopardy used a different one, and also elided some of the text.)

The correct response was "What is The Divine Comedy?" Only one champion got it right -- Michael Falk, a research meteorologist from Milwaukee. The other two guessed Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost. Mr. Falk had wagered enough on Final Jeopardy that his knowledge of Dante won the whole tournament, bringing him a prize of $250,000.

The giveaway in the quote, for those who know anything about The Divine Comedy, is the address to a "Poet." The Roman poet Virgil leads Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory, before Beatrice takes over as his guide. The precise location of the quoted lines is Canto I, ll. 130-35, of The Inferno, the first of the three books that make up The Divine Comedy. In Dante's words:

. . . "Poeta, io ti richeggio
per quello Dio che tu non conoscesti,
a cio ch'io fugga questo male e peggio,

che tu mi meni la dov' or dicesti,
si ch'io veggia la porta di san Pietro
e color cui tu fai cotanto mesti."

*As Jeopardy fans know, the "answers" on the show are really questions, and vice versa.

Ben-Hur: Movie vs. Book

If you haven't read the novel Ben-Hur, you owe it to yourself to do so. It is not only a ripping yarn but also an effective attempt to recreate the world of Jesus as realistically as possible. The book is full of densely detailed, carefully researched descriptions that were intended (I believe) to dispel the reader's hazy Sunday-school vision of the time of Christ and replace it with granite-hard likenesses of the sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and feelings of the first century AD. It is total immersion.

There are many important ways in which the book differs from the 1959 movie (which is excellent nonetheless). Without giving too much away, here are some of the differences that especially struck me:

1. The friendship between Ben-Hur and Messala does not have the bosom-buddy air that it has toward the start of the movie. In fact, Messala's character is quite different in the book. In the movie, he comes across as an ambitious man swept along by events and his unwillingness to rock the boat. In the book, he is much more complex, and both more Roman and more modern -- he's a man who has killed his own soul with cynicism.

2. In the chariot race of the movie, Messala goes after Ben-Hur with wheel-destroying axle spikes. In the book . . . well, let's just say that Ben-Hur is the trickier driver of the two.

3. The book has deep theological discussions that are barely touched upon in the movie, particularly as regards the nature of the Messiah.

4. In the book, Jesus does not appear in the hold of the battleship to release Ben-Hur from his chains. [Oops -- see below on this one.]

5. The movie is missing at least two central characters: Malluch, an employee of Simonides, and Iras, the daughter of Balthasar. In addition, Ben-Hur's relationship with Simonides plays a much greater role in the book than it does in the movie.

6. Ben-Hur's delay in returning to Judea after his adoption by Arrius is given a logical explanation in the book. As I recall, that issue is simply ignored in the movie.

7. The circumstances surrounding the release of Ben-Hur's mother and sister are almost entirely different.

There are many additional differences. I wish someone would put out a quality annotated edition of Ben-Hur, with notes on the intellectual and cultural history built into the book and how it has aged in the 126 years since the book was published.

Thanks to Lew Wallace for his magnificent literary achievement.

EDIT: A wise fellow at the IMDb Philosophy & Religion discussion board helpfully pointed out that, in the move, Jesus does not appear in the hold of the battleship to release Ben-Hur. In the movie, as in the book, Arrius commands that Ben-Hur not be chained. I think my memory was skewed by the fact that in the movie, Arrius's gesture causes Ben-Hur to recall a time when "another man" helped him, and the Jesus theme is played in the background.

Some Insight into Happiness

I recently heard a radio interview of Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who has written Stumbling on Happiness. Stumbling has been getting favorable attention. I have not read it yet, but I think some of the observations made by Prof. Gilbert during the interview are worth pondering. Based on his research, he believes that:

1. Most people are made happier by multiple moderately happy events than by one extremely happy event.

2. Most of us tend to exaggerate in our imaginations how bad bad events will be and how good good events will be.

3. Most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of bad events. Therefore, if we assume (as is likely to be the case) that we're not very different from other people, then we can have confidence in our ability to handle bad events.

Quote for Today

As we lay awake long before daybreak, listening to the rippling of the river, and the rustling of the leaves, in suspense whether the wind blew up or down the stream, was favorable or unfavorable to our voyage, we already suspected that there was a change in the weather, from a freshness as of autumn in these sounds. The wind in the woods sounded like an incessant waterfall dashing and roaring amid rocks, and we even felt encouraged by the unusual activity of the elements. He who hears the rippling of rivers in these degenerate days will not utterly despair. That night was the turning-point in the season. We had gone to bed in summer, and we awoke in autumn; for summer passes into autumn in some unimaginable point of time, like the turning of a leaf.

* * *

We heard the sigh of the first autumnal wind, and even the water had acquired a grayer hue. The sumach, grape, and maple were already changed, and the milkweed had turned to a deep rich yellow. In all woods the leaves were fast ripening for their fall; for their full veins and lively gloss mark the ripe leaf, and not the sered one of the poets; and we knew that the maples, stripped of their leaves among the earliest, would soon stand like a wreath of smoke along the edge of the meadow. Already the cattle were heard to low wildly in the pastures and along the highways, restlessly running to and fro, as if in apprehension of the withering of the grass and of the approach of winter. Our toughts, too, began to rustle.

-- from "Friday," in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, by Henry David Thoreau (first published in 1849).