In Dante’s Inferno, the protagonist, a poet of a reawakening Christendom, groping for its authentic, pre-Christian heritage, declares himself to be “at the mid-point of life” traditionally regarded as 35 years of age. Though most folk died before seeing that 35th year, indeed before the 25th year, being slaves of toil or war, the educated man—who was by definition a member of the top 1% of society—was not considered lucky for reaching his seventieth year before perishing. Luck took one to 35 and social status provided the remaining trajectory. This declaration of 35 being the year halfway between birth and judgment, life and death, provides us with more than a clue that life was not nasty brutish and short for all, even in medieval civilization.

Indeed, in aboriginal societies, many folk having survived the savagery of youth as a hunter and warrior and even conquest by an alien force such as modernity, lived to old age. Wakashi, of the Shoshone did not attain chieftainship until his 40th year and led his tribe for another 60 years. Knowing the suffering in old age of many working men, it has become obvious that what kills the human body in medieval times and makes of old age a medical odyssey in modern times, is the unnatural levels of repetitive tasks which are intricate to civilized living on the physical end. Back injuries among laborers tend to emerge around age 30 to 35. Reflected in the mud and guts of Dante’s time, his year of awakening as an elite, was the year of death for the servant class, the time by which many a man would be destined for a roadside death, wheezing in the gutter or limping along the way where he had once jaunted or toiled until the implicit neglect of civilized living took its final toll.

Dante declares his awakened state just before he is taken under the guiding hand of Virgil, poet of antiquity, his ancestral light. What is it that permits Dante to finally see the world from a deeper and broader perspective?

Simply assigning such an awakening to an accumulation of information “knowledge” ignores the conditions within which the human mind is suspended and saturated in the social setting. Most people are not, nor can ever be, thinkers. Most humans are incapable of fulfilling the fallacious fantasy of the democratic citizen, of weighing evidence of social “good” and “bad” of looking into the well of mantras and lies spewed by his masters and making sense of the morass of mind control.

The awakening seems to me, from my athletic and coaching perspective, to be a result of the paradigm shift in personal duties, from fighter to coach, and in the workplace, from employee to manager. Also, the tension that comes from this coming into prime socially as you pass your prime as a fighter and physical tasker, seems to develop a lot of lower back pain, with the tense man always suffering severely more than the relaxed man. If you go onto a supermarket night crew or into a gym, you will find that those suffering the most from muscular and bio-mechanical concerns are 30 to 40 years old, and that the older guys, who have learned to relax with the pain of life are less debilitated by the same level of injury that takes out a younger, healthier man. In coaching, I have come to think of 35 as the year of the bad back. Once you have a serious back injury, just getting upset about something, anything, can cripple you, until you learn how to relax under the weight of the evil world.

Once the awakening occurs, crisis looms on the inner horizon of the mind, a mind designed by God and conditioned by society to seek balance with his fellows, not conflict, a subject beyond this current discussion of causes, not outcomes. To wherever the man at the mid-point of life is thrust by his often sudden realization that what his fellows believe represents nothing more than a malefaction of power to which they are naught but a tool, this awakening is in itself a life of a kind, a migratory struggle of the mind—a masculine phenomenon only oddly experienced by women. For this reason, the respect of the feminine uniquely built into Arуan culture, holds the secret to emasculating the civilized mind, of demonizing awakening, sharing civic sham power with women, and retarding men in their prime to a perpetual adolescence of the mind.