Or as James Wood pointedly observed: it is less that Dante’s Hell is life-like, than that our life can be Hell-like. The Inferno may not outline our circumstances, but it does outline our condition. Yet we cannot but be impressed by him, by Ulysses, by all the towering personalities of Hell-even when their way was wrong. Farinata persists in his arrogance the scorn he entertains is eternal. Some here are anonymous, bent under the weight of their sin, but the splendor of others is found in their very damnation. “What I was living, that I am dead,” one soul tells the pilgrim. Change is no longer possible here, and damnation is the irrevocable, total removal from God-a separation that is more terrible for being freely willed by Hell’s inhabitants. Dante’s Hell is a diorama of sin, enacted as both moral exhortation and poetic prophecy.
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