On the Dante Trail trail: Groundhog Day

Basically, yesterday's offering with different postcard pics: Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves do Ravenna in a day, glowing.

Our tote update (no selfies, one food pic together with one of the building in which it was consumed):

Total pics: 13 - 100%

Selfies: 7 - 21% of total

Things Rod Ate: 3 - 18% of total

I probably shouldn't be prematurely dismissive. There are things to be gleaned from today's adventure that surely shed some light on what the Dante-book-to-be will contain, such as this megachurch mailer boilerplate:

A short film I saw at the Dante Museum next to his tomb speculated on how the mosaics the poet saw in Ravenna, where he lived the final years of his life and where he wrote Paradiso, may have given him visual ideas. It’s a lovely thought, and there might be something to it. They certainly give me thoughts — Dantean ones about God’s glory, and how everything in this world is a reflection of the world beyond it. And how all things can be made to work in harmony for God’s glory.

If only they could make potato chips this diaphanous and one-dimensional.

And for those of you holding on to hope that Rod will one day return to the Catholic Church, this follows:

Casella says I’m still culturally Catholic, and he’s right to a significant extent, but this trip has made me realize how deeply Orthodox the Divine Liturgy has made me over these last eight years. I felt at home in S. Vitale in a way that I did not in any of the Catholic churches we entered, except for the Baptistery in Florence — but its ceiling is covered with dazzling mosaics. The way we pray really is the way we believe. Anyway, Casella and I pray for the reunion of our churches.

Who doesn't pray for such things simple good and true if they do? Anyway, the best way to follow Rod's theological fan dance is to ensure that he keeps on writing about it, and right now the very best way to ensure that he keeps on writing about it is to make your generous tax-deductible contribution to TAC today. Just thought I'd connect those implicit dots for any takers out there.

So...today's Dante Trail trail takeaway. To me so far this pilgrimage doesn't remotely read like any sort of serious book research trip (mainly because so much time and energy has been spent food and travel blogging), and because I'm not the sort of person given to painting pants on emperors not wearing any, this leads me to think one or both of two possible things explain what I see.

First and foremost, that Rod is almost certainly doing this on his own very thin dime - if this is Wednesday, this must be Ravenna - I can almost see Mrs. Dreher counting the budget out of the cookie jar herself - and if it's his money, well by golly it's going to get spent primarily on what he wants to do most (eat; then eat some more).

Second, yep: he's going to try to wing the Dante book with just the sort of filler I first quoted above. After all, the central focus of the book is how Dante saved - whose? That's right, not yours: Rod's life.

So what you will end up getting, potential Rod's Dante book buyer, will be something much like our meta-derivative Dante Trail trail itself: a richly Dante-flavored Rod-centric soy product giving you (at hardback prices) that elusive hope that somehow reading about how Rod claims reading Dante saved him from a murky bouillabaisse of something - mono? depression? impacted colon? middle age? being loathed into deblogging by his home town? - that for the sake of economy he'll shorthand as "his life".

Because he wasn't really contemplating suicide, was he? Because that would be a sin. Remember that, you already fated to have read the Dante book some time from now.