dante

Archie asked me if I knew Dante's definition of hell..."Proximity without intimacy," he said.

I wished it was raining," he said."I don't need the rain," I said. "I need you.

Try it again," I said. "Kiss me.""No," he said."Kis

It__ not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it__ any comfort, the dark wood isn__ just that. It__ also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn.

Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre _ La Vita Nuova _ in 14th century Florence. Since I__ compiling this collection _ my first indie publication _ in Florence, just blocks from Dante__ house, and since his book involves a lost love, and __ New Life,_ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.

DANTE: And what if you found out you were right? What if it meant that I could hurt you?RENEE: I would not say that I'm not scared. Everyone has the ability to hurt. It's the choice that matters.

...It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart...

I guess I didn't have it so bad.Maybe everybody didn't love me,but i wasn't one of those kids that everyone hated,either.I was good in a fight.So people left me alone.i was almost invisible.i think i liked it that way.And then Dante came along.

I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.

I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

Come on, shake off the covers of this sloth, for sitting softly cushioned, or tucked in bed, is no way to win fame.