Grey Lock
Hi guys
I went to Grey Lock; now I’m back! It was a nice climb, I’m dying of sleep at the moment; but the place has a great history I’ll send later; here’s some more info about Dante’s Hell (inferno)
Dante's Inferno differs from its great classical predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer's Odyssey (Book XII) and Virgil's Aeneid (Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this because his poem's spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante's journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence it coincides with the season of Christ's own death. (In this way, Dante's method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise Lost, where the flamboyant but defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world. Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante's meetings with the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, the simoniacal popes, Ulysses, andUgolino impose themselves upon the reader's imagination with tremendous force.The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin. This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.
I went to Grey Lock; now I’m back! It was a nice climb, I’m dying of sleep at the moment; but the place has a great history I’ll send later; here’s some more info about Dante’s Hell (inferno)
Dante's Inferno differs from its great classical predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer's Odyssey (Book XII) and Virgil's Aeneid (Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this because his poem's spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante's journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence it coincides with the season of Christ's own death. (In this way, Dante's method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise Lost, where the flamboyant but defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world. Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante's meetings with the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, the simoniacal popes, Ulysses, andUgolino impose themselves upon the reader's imagination with tremendous force.The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin. This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.
posted by Keith at Thursday, May 26, 2005
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