The poet David Whyte translates the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy as follows: “In the middle of the road of life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.”
Those who read this passage literally perceive the narrator of Dante’s poem as having a practical problem, having misread the landmarks on a woodland path. Those who recognize the metaphorical system of Dante’s work grasp the distinction of the emotional experience of feeling lost.
We don’t have to be in unfamiliar territory to feel lost. In the mirror image of J.R.R. Tolkien’s reminder that not all who wander are lost, not all who are lost have wandered. We might be in our very own home, with no dark woodland in sight, and yet be utterly lost.
To feel lost is more than to experience the emotional consequences of having gotten on the wrong track. To be emotionally lost also suggests feeling lost to the world, like a toy left behind and forgotten. There is the additional disconcerting dimension of having lost one’s own identity. When a person feels lost, they feel that they have become unfamiliar to themselves.
Without the self we knew, we find ourselves with no center, lost in the well-trod meaninglessness of life, as Albert Camus expressed when he wrote, “I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous. Then I lost the sea, and found all luxuries grey and poverty unbearable.”
