I would begin the seminar with a quick review of Dante’s Divina Commedia. After all, written over six hundred years ago, this was the earliest description I knew of a midlife crisis and its resolution. “In the middle of the journey of our life,” writes Dante in the first line of his enormously long and rich poem, “I found myself inside a dark forest, for the right way I had completely lost.” What happens afterward is a gripping and in many ways still relevant account of the difficulties to be encountered in middle age.
