Virgil, Statius, and our pilgrim, Dante, walk along in deep contemplation, alone with their thoughts but still together. They are interrupted by a brilliantly shiny angel that points them up to the final terrace of Mount Purgatory. The pilgrim experiences a breeze without the help of his sight and the poet feels brave enough to rewrite one of Jesus’s beatitudes.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim begins his climb to the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory blinded and behind his two guides, Virgil and Statius. The drama of the pilgrim’s blindness is superseded by Virgil’s curiosity about Statius . . . complete with Virgil’s own misquotation of Francesca from INFERNO, Canto V.
Read MoreAwakened by the foul smell in his second Purgatorial dream, Dante the pilgrim finds himself out of tune with his surroundings: a bright new day, the sun at his back, and an angel who fans him on to the fifth terrace ahead. Most curious of all, those who mourn are promised “ladies of consolation,” which the pilgrim doesn’t seem to fully recognize.
Read MoreDante the poet is playing with light: physical/metaphysical, revelatory/imaginary, sunrise/sunset, illuminating/concealing, angelic/cosmic. All this as COMEDY finds its center and PURGATORIO itself divides on a beautiful moment with the stars.
Read MoreDante the poet begins the complex and brilliant process of helping us convert what seems into what is. But seeming and being are interconnected in so many ways that we can feel the ground shift under our feet as we begin our exit from the second terrace of Purgatory proper. And if all that were not enough, Virgil, Dante’s guide, undertakes a redefinition of “pleasure” or “delight.”
Read MoreDante and Virgil begin to leave the terrace of pride and all its art, but not before Virgil returns to form, becoming the guide to the afterlife with a penchant for quoting himself and not before an angel must guide them to the stairs, an angel who carries in his face an implicit reference to Lucifer (that is, Satan).
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