Despair

About the year 1300 A.D., the Italian poet Dante Alighieri went through one heck of a midlife crisis. Unrequited love, venomous political rivals, suicidal despair - Dante grappled with, and chronicled, it all in The Inferno. It was a vision of hell so graphic and detailed that, seven centuries later, it continues to grip artists' imaginations. If you go A Comic Strip will be performed at 8 tonight and 7 p.m. tomorrow at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Tickets cost $16 general admission; $11 for seniors and students.

MOSCOW -- The path to the Butyrka pre-trial prison is littered with hundreds of cigarette butts, small monuments to despair scattered in the dirty melting snow.The air weighs heavy with fear and resignation. Hope dissipates, like the smoke from the cigarettes of the relatives who stand listlessly, waiting to make their monthly deliveries of food, clothes, blankets and medicine, trying to keep the men inside alive until trial.Life inside a Russian pre-trial prison is hell, a place where innocent and guilty alike are doomed to brutal punishment, if not for eternity then for the years they spend awaiting their day in court.

BOSTON -- The 92-year-old woman was sitting in her wheelchair, talking with her psychiatrist at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged, when the phone she carries in a black canvas bag rang. She unzipped the bag and greeted her niece on the line: "Hello, Myrna. I'm in a meeting now. Can I call you back?"The psychiatrist, Dr. Eran Metzger, smiled. A year ago, the woman was so depressed that she had not only lost interest in talking to anyone, but she had stopped eating. Not long after he started her on an anti-depressant, her mood began to improve.

You've got to respect Bill Maher's willingness to blast through the pious cant that passes for political discourse in Hollywood, though the host of "Politically Incorrect" fails at that as often as he succeeds.To judge by a profile of him in the April US magazine, Maher is an easier guy to respect than to like. He comes across as smart but prickly, talented but tough on the people who work for him (he goes through writers "at a record clip," according to author Chris Mundy).Maher is candid about his desperate need to succeed, fueled by his fear of being left behind by the comedians with whom he launched his career, such as Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser.

BOSTON -- Kevin Cunningham, 17, was buried last month, four days after he hanged himself from the porch of his family's house, leaving no note.He was the sixth young man from fiercely proud, mostly white, mostly Irish South Boston to commit suicide since the end of December.His name was added to the roll call that echoes from the rows of tidy three-decker houses to the low-rise brick housing projects, from the saloons to the street corners, where groups of sad teen-agers remember their lost friends: Duane Liotti, 21; Kevin Geary, 17; Jonathan Curtis, 16; Tommy Mullen, 15; Tommy Deckert, 15. They all died the same way, by hanging.

11.44. The minuteson the waiting end begin to drag.Out there under staring planetsand a billion blinking stars,the children let their magic lagagainst the tide like waterlilies,all of them drifting the innocentdark immortal as Achillesdipped in gasoline. Their carsare marking time. For now,the pent-up powers of the cosmos gathershadows on cold metallic flanksthat never shiver, never lather,never frighten, never care.Windshields glitter where thelate moon banksits climb. 11.57.On the starless ceiling overheada glimmer from the light left onoutside plays movies of despair,stories of god-awfully deadchildren of other mothers, bodiesof the most impossible griefforever asking where God was -- ?

Ralph Harper, a theologian, philosopher and Johns Hopkins University professor widely credited for introducing the study of existentialism to North America, died of a brain tumor Friday at Stella Maris Hospice in Towson. He was 80.An adjunct professor, Mr. Harper taught more than 45 graduate-level classes at Hopkins on subjects ranging from existentialism to mysticism to American fiction. The classes featured lively discussions rather than long lectures."He didn't like to talk about trivial things," said former student Judy Adkinson, who became a close family friend.

Emile M. Cioran, 84, a Romanian-born writer and philosopher fascinated by the bleak themes of emptiness and death, died Tuesday in Paris. Two of his best-known works were "The Inconvenience of Being Born" and "On the Peaks of Despair."Harry Gwala, 74, a militant leader of the African National Congress who fought for years against rival Zulus, died Tuesday in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A Communist and 50-year veteran of the ANC, he was in prison with South African President Nelson Mandela.

It is a week now since the death of Kurt Cobain, who has already slipped into legend.Dying young is everything they say about being a great career move.Nirvana album sales are booming. And middle-aged social critics who knew little of Cobain or his music routinely call him the voice of a generation.Those most familiar with Cobain say that's everything he wouldn't have wanted. They say he hated the hype. He didn't want to be anyone's voice but his own, and a singularly anguished voice it was.But the thing about death is that you lose any rights to your future.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Jurag Petrlic sounds almost wistful as he recalls his first wartime visit to the battered streets of downtown Sarajevo.He rode there in an armored military vehicle -- "like a voyage inside a coffin," he says with a frown. But when he finally stepped onto the bombed cityscape, he was in wonderland."I thought, I am in a normal city again," he says. "The people who live there, they can walk around. They go to markets, to cafes. I envy them."His description sounds insane, but it is a coldly sober lesson in the relativity of Bosnian horrors.

I turned 50 this weekend. And I find myself both more contented and filled with great expectations than any other time in my life. Old enough to have learned a few important lessons -- some simple and hard, others obvious but elusive - I am still young enough to benefit from them. Long ago, I gave up booze and its sibling shenanigans, but still break out the cast iron skillet around 10 p.m. - lifting it the extent of my exercise - to fry up hard salami and cheese like they used to do at DiNitti's back when Little Italy was Little Italy.

We hate talking about it. We fear saying something awkward or intrusive. We think we'll only make it worse by acknowledging it, so we fall silent. "I think, in large part," Kathleen Kennedy Townsend says, "we don't have a culture that knows how to deal with death." Townsend, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, is, of course, sadly expert on the subject of death. When she was 12, her uncle was killed; when she was 16, her father. That these intimates were President John F. Kennedy and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is something that is a well-known part of her biography, if not necessarily something that she speaks extensively about in public.

It is almost impossible, when reading this guide, not to slap oneself on the forehead in despair that the Army knew so much of the Arabic culture and customs, and of the importance of that knowledge for achieving military success in Iraq, six decades ago - and forgot almost all of those lessons in the intervening years."

About the year 1300 A.D., the Italian poet Dante Alighieri went through one heck of a midlife crisis. Unrequited love, venomous political rivals, suicidal despair - Dante grappled with, and chronicled, it all in The Inferno. It was a vision of hell so graphic and detailed that, seven centuries later, it continues to grip artists' imaginations. If you go A Comic Strip will be performed at 8 tonight and 7 p.m. tomorrow at Theatre Project, 45 W. Preston St. Tickets cost $16 general admission; $11 for seniors and students.

With just a coin, people can now turn despair in Baltimore into hope. Of course the hope lasts only a few seconds, but what did you want for a dime? New parking meters, which debut downtown today, are part - albeit a small one - of the city's freshly launched effort to erase homelessness in 10 years. These old-fashioned meters, the type Baltimore began retiring last year, have re-emerged with bright paint and a new mission. They have nothing to do with parking fines and everything to do with getting people off the street.

I flew into Hyderabad, a thriving, modern city in southern India, amid the buzz of President Bush's arrival. My mission was not to write about the metamorphosis of India's high-tech cities. That was a story that has been told, is being told, in countless forums across the world. My stories were found in villages untouched by the benefits of globalization, in the vacant eyes of widows whose wails wouldn't subside. They were women, young and old, left alone by the desperate actions of their husbands, farmers who had taken their own lives - swallowed in debt traps as they struggled futilely to keep up with a modernizing world leaving them behind.

ANDIJAN, Uzbekistan - Sanjab Valiakhunov's family can't find him, no matter how hard they search. "In the last three days, I was everywhere. I was at the morgue, at the hospital. He's not there," his sister, Rakhat Valiakhunov, said yesterday, in despair after clashes in Andijan last week left a death toll of at least 169 by official count. "They didn't let me into the morgue, though," she said. "They just said, `Your brother is not here,' as if they know my brother. Or maybe they just don't have any bodies in the morgue and don't want to admit it. I know that many families have been going around town looking for their loved ones and can't find them."

SUN SCORE **1/2 This is really a city of lunatics," one of the minor characters in Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold repeats over and over, referring to a Tehran where nothing is as it once was, where morality is more concerned with appearances than realities and a sense of proportion seems nowhere to be found. Crimson Gold, banned in its country of origin, Iran, is about a society that has lost its bearings, as witnessed in the character of Hussein, a pizza-delivery man destined never to sample the good life, except by osmosis through the well-to-do customers to whom he caters.

It all started with a bunch of guys making fun of things. In the way guys do. This time the object of derision was a catalog of motivational knickknacks and "go get 'em" posters. And the guys wielding the verbal machetes were the most jaded people of all: three tech workers at the end of the dot-com boom. "We had dreams of financial windfall," says Lawrence Kersten, one member of the trio. "One day it become very clear that would not happen." Around the time of this painful realization, a motivational catalog arrived in the mail, with posters touting excellence and teamwork.

As if it leapt from the mind of Dilbert himself, Despair Inc., offers "demotivational" products for gift-giving in the workplace. "No matter who you are, you have the potential to be so very much less," the catalog touts. "Are you ready to unleash the power of mediocrity?" Among the season's offerings from this antidote to the ubiquitous Successories line are a variety of not-the-least-bit inspirational posters, such as "Get to work: You're not being paid to believe in the power of your dreams" and "Consulting: If you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."