A profound literature work -- Dante's Inferno
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(this thought of it brings back all my old fears),
bitter place! Death could scarce be bitter.”
-excerpt from Dante Alighieri <The Devine Comedy>
Dante Alighieri
(source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Portrait_de_Dante.jpg)
With these opening words, Dante compels the readers to re-contemplate upon our lives again with a more thorough mind to scan. The author, Dante, encourages all of us, no matter you are still young or you are already in your middle ages, to know ourselves again by sharing his own experiences with us. In fact, Dante wrote these marvelous stories after embittering the abject misery which was getting exiled by, Florence, his own country where he was born and raised up, in his mid-thirties with four children still left in Florence. Recalcitrant as he was, Dante could not really do a thing to ameliorate his agonizing condition. So, he started rambling around from city to city while re-discovering the deepest part of his mind and finishing this famous work, The Devine Comedy, to furtively affront the authority.
There are actually three different individual episodes in The Divine Comedy. The first and the most well-known one is Inferno followed by Purgatorio and Paradiso. These are three different places that the dead people would visit. But the stories after he entering the abysmal underworld are not the topic I’d like to address today. I would mainly focus on the previous part, which is Dante’s self-struggle and self-discovery in the dark wood with three fierce animals, each represented some certain challenges in the real world, chasing after him.
Chances are that but for Dante’s experiences of isolation, he might have not delved so deep into the society and analyzed and categorized these social behaviors as sins that we know today. As you might know, the punishment for each sin in the Inferno is poetic justice for the sin committed. For example, fortune-tellers have to walk forwards with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because they tried to do the same in life. During his journey, Dante found that his own personal experiences were like those of all humanity or said in another way: his trials are like all human souls seeking to achieve morality and find unity with God.
The Inferno
(source: https://eng324readingsinepic.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/6a00d8341c630a53ef010536c2a741970b-800wi.jpg)
However, self-discovery appears to be a very important and most easily neglected issue in today’s society. On the factual basis that the modern people tend to live in the frame that is set by either themselves or others: parents, teachers, or friends; mostly for the sake of personal reputation. This literature work indeed brings me to a different level of viewing my own life and what values that I possess. Frankly speaking, this works really gave me some special and untold experiences whether in my reading habits or in my perspective towards myself to some extent. But it is better to keep what I figured out secretly in my mind because that is the ultimate goal that I want to be in the future; it’s no fun telling around.
Good work! But the purpose of the "self-discovery" project is not to pry about your privacy. It is to give a chance for you to find out your new found strengths and sharable weaknesses so that others can also learn to be as strong. When in an era where our younger generation is so familiar with the open world (no fear of exposing themselves in the virtual world, Facebook, twitter, IG, etc), we are doing this for an optimistic purpose.
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