Looking for the Vita Nuova

Beyond the farthest sphere, the Primum Mobile itself, the sigh passes which issues from my heart; it has a new intelligence which love in tears has given it, and this draws it upward. When it has come where it desires to be, it sees a lady so honored and so shining that this pilgrim spirit wonders at her splendor (Vita Nuova XLI).

Dear Maria,

I confess that one of the pleasantest surprises that I received on returning home was the news that you were entering the great Dominican Order. I used from time to time to think that perhaps you had a vocation. I am glad that you figured it out by yourself—yourself, of course, with the help of the Holy Spirit.

It is the day I entered the convent, and among the little treasures I have received—holy cards with notes of welcome, a homemade apron, pink camellias in a bud vase—is a typewritten note from Sister Nicholas. Of the college sisters who’ve welcomed me today, none matters more than Sister Nicholas.

She was a medievalist and the English Department chair at my college in San Rafael, California. She wore with grace the old habit, itself a survival of women’s dress in the Middle Ages. The wimple and veil flattered the symmetry of her face, the steady wisdom of her brown eyes. A woman in her sixties, she moved with nimble quickness—black oxfords just skimming the ground. And if you rose early enough, you might glimpse her racing across campus on her white Peugeot ten-speed, pedaling fast, as the motherhouse bells chimed for Morning Prayer. I was a freshman when her colleague, John Savant, showed me his poem, “Sister Nicholas Wheeling:”

The air goes by laughing
And dragging behind it a veil
And a quick benediction of sleeve.

I do not remember
Rejoicing so much in a passing
Moment. Once, in rainlight,

By a mottled barn,
I smiled to see a swallow
Flicking out of light. But now,

Somehow, this vision,
This unworldly blur of grace
Above the humming earth

Relieves the gravity
We live with. Where the light
Recovers, nothing is left

For heavy speech. Even
The road seems pleased,
And follows.

He nailed it, the way she wasn’t your average mortal. Only now do I notice the Dantean tercets. I couldn’t wait to declare my English major and learn from Sister Nicholas.

Sister Nicholas - all photos provided by the author

By junior year, I was done hosting daquiri parties in my dorm room and setting loose the mechanical ladder from the fire escape at two AM, just to hear the clangor of its descent. I no longer filled a bathtub with ice and Mickey Wide Mouths for Thursday night happy hour. I was a now resident assistant in Meadowlands dorm. Weekend nights I spent in the foyer with kids who didn’t party, singing “Sloop John B” and turning my head at each click of the old Dutch door’s brass knob. Incipit vita nuova—a new life begins—I wrote in my journal that year, inspired by Sister Nicholas’ two-term seminar on Dante I’d begun that fall.

The Vita Nuova was there, I figured, for the sake of balance: Vita Nuova and Inferno in the fall, Purgatorio and Paradiso in the spring. I was sure I understood the Vita Nuova, and unsure why Sister Nicholas would spend so much time on the story of Dante’s obsession for Beatrice Portinari. Dante seeing her, a child of nine, for the very first time. The moment she notices him noticing her, a woman of eighteen robed in white, and he runs. The way he faints when she arrives at a wedding party.

He cries himself to sleep. The elite of Florence snicker behind the turbulent pulse of his ill-hidden love. She marries; he marries. She dies, age twenty-four. Then, honorific verse dedicated to Beatrice in Heaven.

It felt like a situation with no story. I wanted to skip the new life and go straight to hell. I rolled my eyes at the end of the Vita, when Dante proclaims he’ll write of her in a way never written of any other woman.

The author and Sister Nicholas at graduation

I liked to sit next to Sister Nicholas at the conference table, on her left where I could track time on the clock above the door. I noticed the long cuff inside the belled sleeves of her linen tunic. She remarked with pleasant interest on the fast waggling of my foot from the ankle, her way of suggesting it might be annoying.

I learned about close reading in Hell’s Circle of the Gluttons, souls lolling in muck and Dante’s guide, Vergil, chucking mud balls into their mouths like a game of beer pong. “Drinking too much is also a form of gluttony,” Sister Nicholas remarked, breezy, in an aside to me, the very Tuesday after a bit of weekend backsliding that involved a six-pack and my decision to spike piqué turns across a footbridge. Momentum that night pitched me flat against the little Tudor cottage where Sister Nicholas had her office.

I’d been read, in the tenor of a fun fact I took as a word for the wise.

December came, and with it Dante’s ascent from Hell. In low winter light I near staggered from class, transfixed by that final, splendid line:

And we came out to see once more the stars.

I guess no one has ever written a woman as Dante did. Early in Inferno, it’s revealed she’d personally descended into Hell’s lobby to enlist Vergil as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory. Late in Purgatorio, she appears at Heaven’s threshold. As her identity sinks in, Dante’s emotions are overwhelmed and when he turns to Vergil for support, Vergil has vanished. Now he’s choking back tears inspired both by loss and surprise. Beatrice isn’t having it. She indicates that when she is done with him, he’ll really have something to cry about. She chastises him: “Since I’ve died you’ve done nothing but chase after the illusion of what you think is good.” If Dante wants to cross over into paradise, he’ll have to endure tough love.

I love this part of the Commedia, Beatrice serving prophet Nathan to Dante’s King David. When blazing insight breaks Dante apart completely, he is absolved. He passes through the waters of the Lethe, the waters of forgetting, letting go, coming clean. He recognizes in Beatrice the means, not the end.

I went on to study Chaucer with her, and Eighteenth Century and Victorian literature. From Sister Nicholas, a B- was hard earned. I treasured the epigrammatic remarks she inscribed on the last page of papers and tests:

I like your personal involvement with the Task. Your paper came as a great relief to me, the corrector of many dull papers.

A spritely examination and gives evidence not only of a head but also of a heart.

What you say is there, I think is there.

The final term my senior year, she offered a course through the religious studies department, Christian motifs in The Lord of the Rings, held over the course of a weekend at the sisters’ beach house at Bolinas. She asked us to map a particular character’s journey as we read, and I chose Sam Gamgee—her favorite, it turned out. During one of the breaks, I found her at the edge of the bluff, gazing south past the bay toward Stinson Beach. I snapped a covert photo from behind: Sister Nicholas in contemplation.

At Bolinas

Dear Sister Maria,

I write to explain why I was not at your profession. You know that you are one of my favorite people and that I would not have missed it of my own volition.

I’d figured Sister Nicholas ditched my vows ceremony—the one where I switched my white novice’s veil for a black one—because she saw me for the imposter I sometimes believed I was. But no, she’d gone to see the travel photos of an alumna, a woman confined to a wheelchair, and didn’t have the heart to cut the visit short in order to attend my vows. “I am sorry,” she wrote. “I did pray for you and will continue to pray for you—that you increase in wisdom and grace and, among other things, that one day you will teach Chaucer and Dante.” Had she attended my ceremony, I wouldn’t have this imprimatur for the life I dreamed.

I pasted it into the artist’s sketchbook I kept for mementos, below the photo from Bolinas.

I taught, very badly at first, English and religion and Latin at a high school in Napa. The class prep and grading, the prayer schedule, the house meetings and shopping for groceries two carts at a time—even when the river would flood and school got canceled, I couldn’t keep up. No wonder Sister Nicholas was always on the run.

She sent a postcard at Christmas that first year I taught. It depicted an angel reaching to place a parcel outside a window whose light glowed golden across her hair and tree boughs thick with snow. She’d written:

Sister Samuel, our Director of Education, clearly did not observe my teaching the day I kept confusing Moses for Abraham in Freshman Religion, the smart Jewish girl gasping at the patent ignorance. It was hard to accept the promise of future glory from the depth of the trenches.

She died November of that beautiful bright year, collapsing in her room after her morning class—Chaucer, by some reports, Classical Literature, by others. “When I die, I want to go just like that,” she’d said at breakfast that morning, punctuating that with a finger snap. How quickly her death took on the proportion of legend. On a rain-riven morning, I stood with Professor Savant on the landing as her body was borne down the motherhouse stairs. The wind pried a hefty limb from a tree that nearly struck the hearse.

What more can be written of the first great grief?

The sisters let me choose the field of folklore when I went for the PhD. Sister Nicholas, a fan of the miracle plays performed among medieval working folk, once said she’d pursue folklore, if she had it to do again. Had she been alive, she might have implored me not to do it at all. Graduate school: post-modern theory, feminist theory, Marxist theory, deconstructionism, and Foucault asking, What is an author?

I learned the term ‘medievalism’, the difference between the actual period and its representation in subsequent eras. I stepped away from my self and began to see a career Catholic vowed to a society created in the Thirteenth Century. It was the beginning of my deconstruction.

“Hammer your thoughts into unity,” props to Yeats, was one of Sister Nicholas’ taglines. She once confided that although she loved teaching, she was tired of the bureaucracy, tired of swimming against the tide. She would have decried the bent of my academic inquiry propped only with tools of contestation and de-containment. Sister Nicholas pointed to beauty and humanism and God as the end of studying literature. The Academy trained me to expose, instead, the hidden agenda.

The semester I taught Chaucer at the college, I was no Sister Nicholas in my flowy Nineties dresses, smoking with my students on the steps of Guzman Hall before class and during the break.

By then, I knew I wanted to leave the convent. The lightness of any given moment sagged with the weight of how, very soon, I was going to let everybody down. Perhaps it was for the best that Sister Nicholas was gone. Perhaps I might have stayed, were she still alive.

For the longest time, being a failed academic bothered me more than being a failed nun. Since I could not support myself trawling for adjunct employment, I returned to high school, and then middle school teaching. I figured out how to begin a retirement account, applied for better-paying jobs and qualified to buy a tiny condo. I bobbed in sync with zydeco dancers too many Friday nights at Eagles Hall, and attended coffee meet-ups negotiated on match.com. For three years, I dated a bad-tempered man I thought I wanted to marry and, after him, a handsome man who thought I should get rid of my cat. Ten years passed before I married, age forty-eight, the man I am with today.

I was not the woman I’d hoped I would become, while I climbed that ladder toward a secure future. And I certainly wasn’t thinking about Sister Nicholas, Dante or Chaucer.

The truth is that Dante used the Vita Nuova to create a persona who’d reach his full potential within the allegorical journey starting in the dark woods of a depressed middle age and winding upwards from hell to purgatory to heaven. He played a literary long game, enticing the reader to roll her eyes and think, “Get a grip,” as he roiled words around his attraction to Beatrice.

As Paradiso concludes, Dante finds himself at Heaven’s pinnacle, among the elect, and when he turns in joy to Beatrice, she’s been replaced by the great contemplative saint, Bernard of Clairvaux. Love has subsumed his desperate need to understand what he sees. He invokes the hapless geometer rotating squares imposed upon squares hoping to discover a formula that forms a circle. And when everything shifts, when he surrenders will and desire to “Love that moves the sun and other stars,” he doesn’t even notice Beatrice has stepped away.

Dante the pilgrim has reversed the foolish expectations of Dante the poet.

“Misdirected love,” was a phrase Sister Nicholas evoked often in the year-long Dante seminar. I thought I understood. Gluttons love beer and Francesca da Rimini, down in the Circle of the Lustful, loved Paolo Malatesta more than her husband, who killed them both. I was only twenty-one, but I believed God wanted me to be a nun, and I wanted to believe I could be like Sister Nicholas who, when I look back, had no stake in my joining the Order other than what she believed the Holy Spirit helped me to see.

When I was her student, she once sat in the folding chair behind mine at an outdoor Mass. When I turned to her at the Sign of Peace she said, “Your hair should always be seen in sunlight.”

She was right. My hair was beautiful, each strand a prism reflecting every color in the rainbow.

She was the God-bearer, but when she stepped away, I did not see Love any more than I saw the light that refracted countless prisms onto a tumble of copper colored hair.