Tag: Dante
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16. Life
We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. Miguel de Unamuno Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish writer and intellectual. One of the 20th century’s…
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Punishment
One of Dante’s great insights* is that out punishments are simply when we receive what we’ve chosen. The fact that what we’ve chosen makes us miserable is not some arbitrary punishment delivered by an authority figure, but a consequence of there being a path to happiness and peace and us stepping off that path. We…
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Excited to Read Dante Again
I saw a sun above a thousand lamps; it kindled all of them as does our sun kindle the sights above us here on earth; and through its living light the glowing Substance appeared to me with such intensity- my vision lacked the power to sustain it. O Beatrice, sweet guide and dear! She said…
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Thoughts (Borrowed) While Looking at the Sky in Maine
By such signs, and on foot of such examples, some say that bees have supped a draught that is divine, that, as a matter of true fact, a god pervades the whole wide world, sea’s expanse and heaven’s height, whence flocks and herds and men, and all species of savage beast, derive that fine line…
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I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Last quarter I was lucky enough to work as a writing intern for a course which read Dante’s Inferno. I love Dante, despite (more likely because of) feeling that I’ll never do more than scratch the surface of the Commedia. Mostly, I just hang back and wonder at it. A few images in particular that…