Good times. There’s little to report, but plenty done and plenty more to do. We sophomoric fellows finished Dante’s Purgatorio, and our next week’s seminars will be on Paradiso. The Inferno is the one that everyone knows about, because it’s become so involved into popular imagery and fiction (the modern cartoonized hell is certainly derivative of Dante’s verse); but Purgatorio struck me as a more sophisticated and personal poem, leaving me with the same sense of wondrous confusion I have after waking from an intense dream. So far the third of his trilogy is proving to be much harder to read, because the poet’s subject (or object?) is obscurer.
I liked the ending to Purgatorio so much because it actually shocked me. It was a feeling I wouldn’t get from a mystery novel or TV drama. At the beginning we can only guess at the mysterious Beatrice, but then when she appears she is not what his first poem seemed to suggest on the surface. I could not help of thinking about Lady Wisdom from the first nine chapters of the Proverbs. The opening question for our last seminar was, “Who, or what, is Beatrice?” The what seemed a more acceptable approach to it. I don’t like reducing Dante down to simple allegory, but the symbols in the language cannot be denied in the end. Paradiso, I assume, will have even more of the same.
I liked the ending to Purgatorio so much because it actually shocked me. It was a feeling I wouldn’t get from a mystery novel or TV drama. At the beginning we can only guess at the mysterious Beatrice, but then when she appears she is not what his first poem seemed to suggest on the surface. I could not help of thinking about Lady Wisdom from the first nine chapters of the Proverbs. The opening question for our last seminar was, “Who, or what, is Beatrice?” The what seemed a more acceptable approach to it. I don’t like reducing Dante down to simple allegory, but the symbols in the language cannot be denied in the end. Paradiso, I assume, will have even more of the same.
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