Brendan’s Reviews > The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso > Status Update

700 years later, Dante is still capable of shocking the reader. Each time I read it, I’m blown away by Canto XXV, which reads like the script for a David Cronenberg film. The grotesque fusion of condemned thieves with serpents (representing their sneaking deceit in life) is straight out of ‘The Fly’. It is testament to Dante’s extraordinary fantastical abilities — this really is the first work of Sci-Fi!

“…the good of grace is in exact proportion / to the ardor of love that opens to receive it.”

“Opinions too soon formed often deflect / man’s thinking from the truth into gross error, / in which his pride then binds his intellect.”

“Then, just as fire yearns upward through the air, / being so formed that it aspires by nature / to be in its own element up there;

So love, which is a spiritual motion, / fills the trapped soul, and it can never rest / short of the thing that fills it with devotion.”

“…for who sees need / and waits a plea, already half refuses.”

“A breath of wind is all there is to fame / here upon earth: it blows this way and that, / and when it changes quarter it changes name.

Though loosed from flesh in old age, will you have / in, say, a thousand years, more reputation / than if you went from child’s play to the grave?

What, to eternity, is a thousand years? / Not so much as the blinking of an eye / to the turning of the slowest of the spheres”

“The double grief of a lost bliss / is to recall its happy hour in pain.”

Canto V