While purporting to be a show about nothing, Seinfeld is, of course, a show about everything. Furthermore, it is a show that is very particularly about the difficulty of explaining why we are inclined to blindly accept the norms of society. One hundred fifty years before Seinfeld, John Stuart Mill’s On Libertyobserved that, "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."
A Reading Room series on The Divine Comedy
Dante is awoken by a loud clap of thunder. He gets up to his feet, looks around, and tries to comprehend where he is. He is standing on the edge of a deep, dark, misty valley reverberating with the echoes of thunder. Dante strains to see into the valley but still cannot make anything out through the fog. “Let us descend now into the blind world,” says Virgil, pale (apparently) with terror. “I’ll go first, and you’ll follow closely behind me.”
French economist Frédéric Bastiat famously observed two centuries ago that Parisians slept peacefully each night confident that others all over France worked “in concert and without agreement” to supply the capital with food in a quantity that was “what is wanted, nothing more, nothing less.”
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina Commedia
Mentre Dante e Virgilio entrano nell'anticamera dell'Inferno, Virgilio dice a Dante che tutto il lamento agonizzante che sente sono le voci di coloro che <<visser sanza ‘nfamia e sanza lodo>>, coloro che non potevano impegnarsi né nel bene né nel male. In questa anticamera sono presenti anche angeli che non erano né fedeli a Dio né apertamente ribelli a Dio.
With Marvel's Eternals out in the theaters, and Garth Bond's post this week on the Eternals and Euhemerism, I'm thinking a lot about Marvel's other recent releases, and getting ready to rewatch their Disney+ series Loki. When Loki revealed that a female version of Loki exists in an alternate timeline (as well as a child Loki and an alligator Loki, among others), and when viewers noticed that Loki’s personal information at the Time Variance Authority listed his gender as “fluid” the internet went wild.
A Reading Room series on The Divine Comedy
As Dante and Virgil enter the antechamber of Hell, Virgil tells Dante that all the agonized wailing he’s hearing are the voices of those who “lived without infamy or praise”—those who could not bring themselves to commit to either good or evil. Also present in this antechamber are angels who were neither faithful to God nor outright rebellious against God.
The Eternals, the latest installment in the Marvel cinematic universe, premiered this weekend. While the Marvel universe has not been incorporated into the Online Library of Liberty—surely a temporary oversight—one of the film’s heroes is Gilgamesh, whose Sumerian epic is not only in the Library, but is the source of its “amagi” symbol (the earliest written reference to “liberty”).
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina Commedia
Dante è finalmente pronto per entrare all'Inferno, o almeno così crede. Giunto all'ingresso dell'Inferno, legge un'iscrizione sulle porte che, racconta a Virgilio, lo fa fermare:
Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, scheduled for theatrical release on Christmas and streaming on Apple TV+ three weeks later, offers as good an excuse as any to reflect on earlier film productions of Shakespeare’s classic meditation on the psychology of a tyrant.
A Reading Room series on The Divine Comedy
Dante is at last ready to enter Hell—or so he thinks. As he reaches the entrance of Hell he reads an inscription on the gates which, he tells Virgil, makes him pause:
In July’s Liberty Matters Discussion of the Declaration of Independence, a main theme of our deliberations was on the role and purpose of history. A distinction was made between an older ethic of understanding the past in its own terms versus judging past actions for their moral or ethical content. The idea of understanding context is old only in relation to modern practices, however, which are increasingly seeing the reassertion of the view that the past can and should be judged.
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina Commedia
Virgilio, sentendo per caso i dubbi di Dante che potrebbe essere indegno per questo viaggio, rimprovera Dante per la sua codardia e cerca di rassicurarlo sul fatto che varrà davvero la pena per Dante di viaggiare con lui attraverso l'inferno. Racconta Dante di come gli è apparso sulla terra in primo luogo. Rivela a Dante che mentre era sospeso nel Limbo (essendo un cristiano non battezzato vissuto prima dell'età di Cristo, Virgilio, secondo la teologia cristiana, non potrà mai ascendere al cielo), udì una <<bella, santa Signora>> che chiamava lui, e si sentì in dovere di ascoltarla. I suoi occhi brillavano più luminosi della Stella; con voce dolce, gentile e angelica, supplicò Virgilio di aiutare la sua amico.
I’ve never really been a fan of horror fiction. With the exception of spooky Victorian gothic novels, a long-standing affection for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the occasional particularly creepy Neil Gaiman moment, I just don’t care to be scared. There’s enough scary stuff in the real world that I just, in general, can’t find the fun in being scared by fiction.
A Reading Room series on The Divine Comedy
Virgil, overhearing Dante’s doubts that he might be unworthy for this journey, chides Dante for his cowardice, and tries to reassure him that it will indeed be worthwhile for Dante to journey with him through hell. He tells Dante how he came to appear to him on earth in the first place. He discloses to Dante that while he had been suspended in Limbo (as an unbaptized Christian who lived before the age of Christ, Virgil, according to Christian theology, can never ascend to heaven), he heard a “fair, saintly Lady” calling to him, and he felt compelled to listen to her.
At Halloween, the monsters gather at our doors for tribute. We expect the caped figures with fangs askew, the werewolves growling for candy, the square-headed toddler with bolts glued to his neck. We are not afraid, because we are not surprised.
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina Commedia
Prima che Dante intraprenda il suo viaggio attraverso l'inferno con Virgilio, invoca le muse (gli spiriti classici delle arti, nell'antica Grecia e a Roma) per aiutarlo a ricordare - e poi scrivere - ciò che vedrà nell regni di inferno. Dante ci rammenta che non sarà il primo a scendere all'inferno mentre è ancora in vita: lo aveva fatto il grande eroe troiano Enea durante il suo viaggio da Troia a Roma. L'idolo letterario di Dante, Virgilio, ha immortalato il viaggio di Enea nel suo poema epico L'Eneide.
“It was a beautiful place – wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it hides – that is not nothing.” Edward Fairfax Rochester, The Wide Sargasso Sea
A Reading Room Seriesby Daniel Ross GoodmanBefore Dante embarks upon his journey through hell with Virgil, he invokes the muses (the classical spirits of the arts in ancient Greece and Rome) to assist him in being able to remember—and then later write about—what he will see in the infernal realms. Dante reminds us that he will not be the first to descend to hell while still living: the great Trojan hero Aeneas had done so during his journey from Troy to Rome. Dante’s literary idol Virgil immortalized Aeneas’s journey in his epic poem The Aeneid.
Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetualwas released last May to considerable praise, unsurprising given the multiple awards received by its predecessor, Golden Hill. This new book is regularly referred to—by the author himself, as well as by reviewers—as the follow-up to his debut fiction novel, though usually with a nod to the nearly two decades of award-winning non-fiction that preceded the 2016 publication of Golden Hill.]
Without wishing to undermine or invalidate Spufford’s own truth, this account makes something of an awkward step-child of his actual fiction debut, 2010’s Red Plenty.
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina Commedia
La scorsa settimana abbiamo iniziato il nostro epico viaggio con Dante accompagnando Dante mentre si perde nei boschi, prima di incontrare il suo idolo letterario Virgilio e accettare di prendere con Virgilio un altro sentiero che lo porterà fuori dalle selve oscure ma che lo condurrà attraverso un rehmp pieno di suoni e visioni più terribili di quanto la maggior parte degli esseri mortali possa persino immaginare. Questa settimana esploreremo alcuni dei significati più profondi di questo canto introduttivo...
Pedaling my exercise bicycle is made tolerable by watching history lectures from The Teaching Company’s Great Courses. Today I watched part of a course on the French Revolution and Napoleon.
A Reading Room series on The Divine Comedy
Last week we began our epic journey with Dante by accompanying him as he is lost in the woods, before meeting his literary idol Virgil and agreeing to set forth with Virgil upon another path that will take him out of the dark woods and lead him through a domain filled with more terrible sounds and sights than most mortal beings can bear to even imagine. This week we shall explore some of the deeper meanings of this introductory canto…
This month’s featured birthday anniversary is the Swiss-born French political philosopher, activist and statesman, Benjamin Constant. Along with his long-time friend and lover Germaine de Stael, and Democracy in America author Alexis de Tocqueville he is probably the most famous and influential of the French liberals of the early nineteenth century.
Una serie di Reading Room su La Divina CommediaLa settimana scorsa abbiamo visto come Dante scrivesse del suo viaggio attraverso l'inferno, il limbo e il paradiso come se si trattasse di un viaggio vero, realmente intrapreso (a cominciare, nel suo racconto, dal Venerdì Santo - 25 marzo 1300) e abbiamo visto come proprio tale comprensione del suo viaggio come reale ci aiuta a capire l'importanza - e la realtà - della nostra immaginazione. Questa settimana guarderemo al Canto I e inizieremo il nostro viaggio con Dante attraverso l'inferno e oltre...