Nick Grammos > Recent Status Updates

I meant 'precacity', not precocity in the previous update.

We got to canto 31, two short of paradise. We ran out of time, we discussed too much after each canto. We tried to understand what was going on. We met Beatrice, she's a bit shirty. There's a sad farewell too Virgil who even as a virtuous pagan cannot go further. Tough break.
There's frolicking in water with nymphs, or something I don't understand the theology of. Bathing in Lethe, too. There's fire, precocity.

Back in 16thC the world's richest fellow, Jacob Fugger, financed social housing 500 years ago: it's still going in Augsburg today. Only condition is you have to be needy and pray 3 times a day for Fugger's soul in the chapel. Just in case he ended up in purgatory and needed prayer. Clearly an organised fellow. And people in need are happy to pray for him in return for housing. Pray for souls in purgatory, friends ;-)

Another Comedy Night Reading. We're in sight of Paradiso, only 9 cantos to go. Greed and Avarice, Lasciviousness all feature. The lesser vices it seems that a good christian can work through with the help of prayer. We meet residents of purgatory who have managed to get out, and listen to their testimonies - for some it took 500 years to get to paradise. But hey, salvation is good no matter the time it takes, innit.

We hit the half-way point. The mid cantos of Purgatory. Here we get a lesson on free will and a treatise straight from Aquinas.

You get the feeling that Dante really wants to clean up the Catholic Church. He knows its venal, of the flesh, too interested in earthly powers. Two popes after all.

He was a reformer from within. Well before Martin Luther but well after Peter Waldo.

We read 6 cantos aloud to No 14. Most deal with envy. Those encountered tend have some awareness of their sins.
Dante still travels with Virgil, but has assumed some of the characteristics of the penitents he encounters. He is a sinner, too.
Hope for eventual salvation emerges now and then. Prayer for stuck souls essential. And upward motion, gates and fissures tell us symbolically that progress is possible.

Still stuck in the opening cantos of purgatory. Our group couldn't meet this month because half our group couldn't make it. The slow movement of souls out of purgatory is like the slow movement of our reading aloud group towards the gates of heaven. Perhaps prayer will help? Pray for the cantos, pray for the voices of the readers, pray for anything to push it all along.

Purgatory is quite different to hell. During our reading of the first few cantos, one of our group reminded us all that limbo is not purgatory, but the place were unbaptised children go. Here was me thinking they were the same.
The souls in Purgatory move slowly. They rely on prayer from outside to help along. All souls day is for prayers to help those along. Dante is preoccupied by geography, and theres sunlight too

we leave Hell and enter Purgatory

Cantos 20-24 of Inferno featured Dante sliding down a hillside in layer 8-9. Virgil gets a little grumpy about something. We're in the zone of sinners living under pools of hot tar all day with just their noses sticking out like frogs in a pond. Now and then some capo devil will strip a bit of flesh off with pincers. Hypocrites, liars, fortune tellers and diviners down there.

"... everything comprising the essence of childhood came to him (Marcel). It is only in such moments of remembrance that we are truly alive."

And that word remembrance is unused today. It's passed, like Remembrance Day for the fallen in war (ie going back to WW1 and contemporary to Proust).

Szerb writes some lovely things about Proust. And with great clarity.

The tennis courts part of the garden. Bassani has attempted to recall, or recreate a world once it has vanished as though memory is an imperative. It requires details for those who have no personal record and prompts for those who forget. Details, the name of the woman with the recipes, the anchovy butter on bread served at lunch alongside chicken béchamel vol au vents, I mean anything likened to air risks forgetting

I loved the first two chapters, or prologue and chapter one especially for the sweeping historical approach.
Not read mr Bassani before, so here we go. Though I always feel out of step with those GR friends who had read it around the same time.
I think a little of the Leopard. Which makes sense since Bassani had a hand in Leopard's publication a few years earlier. The influence is obvious to me.

It has become a little tiresome this book, so I've stopped for a while. I'm reading Cesar Aira's fun little novel, The Little Buddhist Monk.

The monstrous up against the mundane and the ordinary.