At the end of each canto, he (Ciardi)…

What makes this word so amazing is that Dante wrote it in the early 1300′s.
His descriptions of the reciprocal nature of the sinners and their sins is also
of interest.

I couldn’t help but think of Dante when I heard that the Ft. Hood shooter has regained consciousness, is paralyzed, and complains of pain in the hand.

Whew.

25 Cantos in one sitting!

Cheri must be beside herself with pride about what she has started–namely, a Dante boomlet.

Let’s not feel bad that some of this is over our heads. The bits that aren’t are beautiful.

As to your style of faith, it appears to be Einsteinian. You are in good company.

I gave up at Canto XXV, and only got that far with Longfellow’s help.

It rapidly became apparent to me that without the necessary scholarship, I had no chance of acquiring anything more than a passing acqaintance with this work, and I have no chance whatever of ever gaining that scholarship.

I come away, however, glad that I am post-enlightenment. This Hell was a reality and life’s preoccupation for most in days gone by. How Dante sucks you in and and how you identify with those lost souls! How it is a metaphor for the darkest reaches of the mind! It is Freudian free association rather than poetry, I hazard.

I aspire to being a Christian, but one who marvels at the mysteries of a world I can see, touch, hear and assess for myself. If a sense of wonder, eternity, awe and love ensues, then so be it.

To bed!

Where does the “Foreign toe” fit in with the metaphor, Cheri?

Maybe bad people come back here, to be reborn and live a life on earth all over again aka Reincarnation, which would be my idea of hell.

Interestingly, between 20% and 25% of people in North America and Europe believe in reincarnation, regardless of how the previous life was lived. Those believers (in reincarnation) I’ve spoken with (who all belong to what JK Galbraith called the “contented” class) seem happy that they’ll live on earth again, obviously believing they’ll be reborn into the comfortable life they just left.

The “contented” class notwithstanding, it is a fact that death is the ultimate mystery. If we do continue to exist in some way or other, we will, in the moments after we breathe our last, be in the postion of the people in John Rawls’ hypothetical world, where “………no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like…….”

John Rawls’ world may not be so hypothetical after all!!!

Hearing that big idea at age 7 colored my observations of good and evil; but I must admit that the underworld that Dante fashioned in 1302
captured the child within who wonders still about where bad people go.
I know critics see the punishments in Inferno as “poetic justice” but I have also viewed them as great artistic ironic inversions.

And to make a tangential comment to your Circle 10, my daughter and her husband are there too with an 18 mo old and a 6 year old who are nocturnal.

But yes, the layers so far are, shall we say, exotically derived. Then again, the entire concept of Hell is utterly alien to me. I’ve always assumed that I either pay Charon a gold coin to cross Styx when my time comes, or that I re-merge into the Tao, the Brahman, the state of formless energy.

A lot of things are weird to me, even the little ones: The Centaurs are shooting arrows at the sinners who try to climb out of the river of blood, but why would I, a deceased and disembodied shadow boiling in blood, care about an arrow hitting me?

I will of course write more once I finish. But I’d quite like your take.

What I propose is something else: Future historians will use a different anatomy (perhaps a spider or a centipede) to explain to students how the “West” came about. There will be Athens, Jerusalem, the Middle Ages, but also Latino legs and Ellis Island and as-yet-unnamed influences.

We might even go one step further and say that “the West” stops at the head. For most of western history, we Westerners had no concept of it. We may soon stop finding it useful again. I venture to guess that we are moving into a Bladerunner future, where new concoctions of cultures produce new traditions.

Thomas, re the ideologies: Dante was actually a rigid ideologue in the civil war of his time, which was between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and which we can not even understand. What he does in the Inferno is different that mixing ideologies, I think. He effortlessly reflects a culture that is already mixed, as we think nothing of celebrating “Christmas” on (pagan) Yuletide, hiding (pagan) eggs on Easter, and so forth. Or as New Age types mix East and West, Om and E=MC2.

Who would be your nominee for residence in the. 9th Circle of Hell?