Round one - The dark forest

So a guy is walking through the forest...
Basically Dante begins his materpiece this way. (When I journeyed half of my life I found myself in a dark forest). 
Dante is many things to many people.  He is a master poet, one that creates a bridge between the epics of Homer and Virgil, and the novel.  His story is both a narrative and a poem.  He is a historian.  The Divine Comedy was the Google of its time. A who's who of historical and mythical characters, all known in Dante's Italy, inhabit the journey. Imagine writing a story that includes not only George Washginton and Abraham Lincoln, but also Snookie and the Kardashians (a frightening thought we should all hope never manifests itself in the written word.)  That is the scope of his work.  It was considered as close to sacred scripture for its time as any fictional work has acheived.  The work survived the Bonfire of the Vanities while so many of its contemporaries perished.  Dante himself had the hubris to set out writing the work as an addendum to the Bible.  That, my friends, takes considerable hutzpah.  The Divine Comedy is an intricate coded work, filled with hidden messages written acrostically.  He also utilizes the italian language itself for aural effect.  When Count Ugolino is suffering deep in the recesses of hell, we readers can hear in the language the sounds of the crunching bones as he devours his children (This is a much disputed passage by Dante scholars.  Did Dante truly wish to convey that Ugolino is spending eternity eating his kids.  I side with Jorge Luis Borges, who sees it both as poetic metaphor and  morality play.  By being nebulous, Dante managed to provide scholars centuries of debate.  Take note aspiring epic creators.  Make you work both explicit and nebulous if you want to acheive immortality.) 
But the Dante in the first several stanzas is pure new age Dante.  He is having a mid-life crisis.  What does a guy do when he looks around at his life and feels unfilled in 1300?  I mean, you can't just go out and get a Ferrari.  And although I have a theory that Dante's Beatrice obsession could be correlated to the 40 year who cheats on his wife with the 20 year old (more on this another time), actualized infidelity was a big no no for the Catholic Mr. Alighieri.   Unfortunately for Dante, Deepak Chopra was still a ways off.  Tuesdays With Morie? Nope.  Dr. Phil and Oprah couldn't help him.  Shoot, even Freud couldn't tell him about his mommy issues.  So Dante had to write the book himself.  And write it he did.  100 Cantos of inspired genuis, all because he turned 35 and wondered what had become of his life.  If all of us could acheive such an astounding work of genius from the most human of actions, the self-reflection, well this would be a very different world than the one we currently inhabit. As it stands most mid-life crises follow the predictable patterns mentioned above.  I say forget about the sports cars and let's all write epics.