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CANTO I

Dante, having journeyed "half of our life's way", through a kind of spiritual absentmindedness, finds himself at the bottom of a hill in a dense forest. It is early morning, and as Dante climbs the hill he can just see a few shafts of sunlight along the crestline before he is frightened away by a leopard, lion, and she-wolf. He meets Virgil, who assures him that the greedy she-wolf will be tamed...

"Political correctness surrounds most of our public institutions, including above all colleges and universities, with an aura that prohibits using any word or allowing any discussion that might offend some minority group or victim or potential victim. It stifle[s] public discussion and debate... Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power."

This is from 1999?!

I'm nobody! Who are
you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us
-don't tell!
They'd banish us, you
know.

How dreary to be
somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the
livelong day
To an admiring bog!

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I've heard the hunter tell;
'Tis but the ecstasy of death,
and then the brake is still.


The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!


Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
and "You're hurt" exclaim!

https://100daysofdante.com/

Baylor University is hosting a digital group reading of The Divine Comedy beginning in September. The reading will be accompanied by commentaries on each canto from Dante scholars.

Are you down? Because I am.

Not the bees! Not the bees! Aaaarrrrghhhh!

"Now all that is left to me is not to spoil the end. For that I must die like a man. If death is really a thing to dread, I must meet it as a teacher, a man of science, and a citizen of a Christian country ought to meet it, with courage and untroubled soul. But I am spoiling the end; I am sinking, I fly to you, I beg for help, and you tell me 'Sink; that is what you ought to do'."

- "A Dreary Story"

"Moses and Elijah looked for Him; the humble one ascended from

the depth,

and the zealous one came down from the height, and they saw the

Son in the middle.

They represented a symbol of His coming: Moses was a type for the

dead,

and Elijah a type for the living who will fly to meet Him when He

comes.

Because the dead have tasted death, He will repair them first,

but those [living][...]meet Him at the end."

"One day...'tis Dixon's luck to discover the Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, 'Live long and prosper'"

Really bruh

"Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream? - in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp'd, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,[...]"

"The Sino-Jesuit conjunction may prove a greater threat to Christendom than ever the Mongols or the Moors. Pray that more than the Quarrel over Feng Shui divides them."

This book is incredibly strange.

I'm 20 pages in. There's a character named Reverend Cherrycoke, an inside joke about Bill Clinton, and a talking dog. I'm down for this.

"[T]here is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best."

Cicero, De re publica

Milady.

Tips cavalier hat

Gotta read some classics this year.

"Bright rose the sun next day; and all the flowers of the garden Bathed his shining feet with their tears, and anointed his tresses With the delicious balm that they bore in their vases of crystal."

This guy was brilliant at describing sunrises and night skies.

"Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."

from Evangeline

"Why would women want the WMD of nipple erectors other than to make them feel better in general? Any other reason?"

It's funnier without the context.

"And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

"Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon."

Literally every line of these poems is pure brilliance.

"Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time..."

what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business

"...Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction..."

Seems like a chick book, but I've heard it's good.

Not expecting to be a fan, but I'll try to keep an open mind.