to rebehold the stars

Dear readers,

Katabasis comes out today. I did some TV and radio this morning. I am spending the afternoon on the couch taking naps with my husband. Tonight I will launch the book at the Wilbur in Boston, and have a drink with friends in town.

I began writing Katabasis during a fairly difficult period of my life. I felt betrayed by my mind, and I was watching the person I loved most in the world being betrayed by his own body. The book opens with a quote from Plato’s Phaedo: “For I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?”

In the Phaedo, Socrates, who is about to drink hemlock to fulfill his death sentence, is comforting his friends and students, who are understandably upset that he is about to die. Socrates argues that the body is perishable, but the soul is immortal. Dying just brings you closer to the gods. What’s so bad about that? Who wouldn’t want disembodiment, when the body hurts so much?

But on the other side of Plato is Aristotle, for whom the soul cannot be separated from the body. For Aristotle, the soul is a verb: the soul is to the body what seeing is to the eye. The flourishing of the soul is bound up with the repeated actions of life, and as Aristotle reminds us, even the simplest plant knows to turn its face to the sun. And so in my movement from Plato to Aristotle, a book about going to Hell became a book about how to live.

The last line of Dante’s Inferno reads: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle/ thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.” I won’t spoil the last line of Katabasis. But I hope this book will offer some comfort for anyone who is remembering how, and why, to live.

Love,

Rebecca