And- as if you needed a cherry on top of this demented literary sundae-it was totally controversial when it came out. And it's also insanely important and eloquent. A tree being perpetually bitten by harpies. If you're a suicide (if you decided you didn't want life), boom-no humanoid afterlife for you: you spend eternity as a tree. When Dante and his host-with-the-most Virgil take a stroll through the netherworld, he sees that every sinful action has an equal and opposite Hellish reaction-if you're sullen, you spend eternity glubbing in mud like a catfish. Maybe that Disneyland metaphor doesn't actually work.īut you know what metaphors do work? Answer: all of the metaphors in Inferno. Except, you know, replace It's A Small World with a river of boiling blood, Splash Mountain with a desert nightmarescape complete with fiery rain, and The Matterhorn with a harrowing scaling of the legs of Lucifer. This is basically a 14th Century Italian poetry version of getting a VIP day at Disneyland with Donald Duck as a guide. and then gets an all-expenses paid, full-blown tour of Hell. We repeat: a guy wandering around in the forest outside of Florence meets a dead epic poet.
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