This is the same situation that Dante, the main character in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy — a 1300 Italian poem — , was in in the middle of his life. At the beginning of the Comedy, he describes how he found himself inside a very deep and inextricable forest (the “dark wood of error”), having lost the right path. From there on, he starts a trip into darkness and toward light, which brings him through Hell, Purgatory, and, finally, Heaven. The trip represents an ascent of the soul towards God (or enlightenment).