The pilgrim Dante is climbing up the lower reaches of that island mountain in the great western sea, directly opposite the globe, in latitude and longitude, from another mountain, Calvary, the mount that makes climbing this one possible. This one is called Purgatory. You may notice, by the way, that the medieval poet is quite aware that the world is round, and he takes for granted that everybody else is aware of it, too. At this moment, he is among the souls who died a violent death, but who begged God to forgive them as they were dying — like the good thief who died on the cross next to Jesus, while the other thief had joined in with the scoffers and the slanderers. The people Dante sees now are suffering because they aren’t suffering yet: imagine them as in the waiting room of the infirmary of God, wanting to be healed, though they know that the medicine of God will cleave between the marrow and the bone. Dante says that they have to wait one year for every year they lived on earth, unless someone in a state of grace prays that God might speed them on their way.
One man suddenly comes up to Dante and wants urgently to tell his story. You see, everyone down on earth believed that he died as he had lived, in wickedness. His name is Bonconte, and at the Battle of Campaldino he fled on horseback from the field, pierced through the throat; and no one could ever find his body. So people assumed what people would assume. But at the last moment — so powerful and generous is the grace of God — as he fell to the ground he began to pray, and he died with his arms folded on his breast, in the pattern of a cross. And then, he says, an angel and a devil both arrived to take his soul away, but he’s saved, and the devil is enraged. “Per una lagrimetta!” he cries out, “for one little tear!” — our Word of the Week. That’s all it takes, but that’s a gift from God, and if you think you can wait until the last moment, as if you could hold God hostage, well, that’s pretty presumptuous. Better begin with the tears now. So the devil can’t have the soul, but he rouses up a huge rainstorm that floods the nearby river, so Bonconte’s body is washed away, and that’s why no one knew of the posture he took before this world’s light left his eyes.
Una lagrimetta — a little tear! Tears are something of a mystery, aren’t they? I once knew an old man who had some physical condition that made him prone to weep whenever he spoke about anything at all that was a little sad, or a little dear and sweet to him, or beautiful. I don’t know what the condition was, but the tears came easily, without sobbing or moaning. It actually made him appear more noble than otherwise. I’ve heard all my life that men should weep more, by way of expressing their feelings; but frankly, expressing your feelings can often be a real burden to people who are in their way or who are their target. Men do weep less than women do, as all cultures have recognized, and there may be a physiological explanation for much of the difference: their tear ducts are longer, so the tears simply don’t come out as easily.
Yet when Jesus heard Mary the sister of Lazarus say, “Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died,” he was deeply troubled in his heart, and he went to the tomb where the man was laid. And then comes the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” Don’t take that for granted. When somebody said to Epictetus the Stoic, testing him, “Your son has died,” Epictetus replied, “And since when did I ever say he was immortal?” There’s your Stoic ideal. The Epicurean, meanwhile, might weep, though he’s all about leading a calm life and fleeing from pain and sadness, but he too would consider it beneath him, because reason and experience tell us that everybody must die, so why should we make a fuss over it? Yet Jesus wept. And we take our lead from him. And if we harden our hearts against sadness, might we also risk hardening our souls against beauty? Or against joy that is so great — as when the chorus rises to sing the ode that is the triumphant climax of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — that tears come to us before reason, slow and halting, can tell us why?
A little on the word itself: you’d think that English tear and Latin lacrima could not possibly be cousins. You’d also think that English day and Latin dies would have to be related. Wrong both ways; the similarity between day and dies is strictly coincidental, as is the similarity between English have and Latin habere. And tear and lacrima are cousins in fact; so then also Latin’s descendant in Italian lagrima. So too are Welsh deigr and Irish der, and Greek dakru. Original Indo-European d became t in Proto-Germanic: think of Latin duo, but English two; Latin decem, but English ten. So the odd one in the bunch is lacrima, with the l instead of a d. By the way, you can ignore the -ima at the end, which is just an ancient suffix for making certain kinds of nouns out of verbs. How do we go from d to l? Well, it didn’t happen across the board in Latin, but it did happen to a small handful of words in which the Sabine pronunciation caught on and became the standard. Put your tongue in the position to make a d, but don’t press hard; keep your nasal passage shut so you don’t make an n, don’t force air out of your mouth, but let the vocal cords vibrate. You will be making a dental l. Linguists call it the “Sabine L.” It shows up also in Latin lingua, which is a cousin of English tongue; the insides of the word redolent, which has to do with odor; and remember what the Romans called Odysseus: Ulixes!
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