Status Updates From La Divina Comedia

To read Dante, you have to take a leap of faith. You have to believe this is divine. You have to believe this is perfection. You’ll be transformed by it. So why not just take the risk? Put away your beliefs about our world and fully embrace divinity.

“You shall know how salty is another’s bread and how hard the stairs are in another man’s house.”

Paradiso XVII: emotional heart of the Comedy. Dante finally learns the cost of his calling: exile, loneliness, and the certainty that telling the truth will make powerful people hate him. Sometimes the very thing that breaks your old life is what makes your life’s work possible.

Paradiso XVI surprised me. Dante spends an entire canto reminiscing about old Florence, but it isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. His argument is civilizations don’t necessarily collapse when they become poor—they often begin to unravel when they become prosperous enough to forget the virtues that made them flourish in the first place.