Curiosity

The Commedia is a poem with no end. Its conclusion is also its beginning, since it is only after the final vision, when Dante at last sees the ineffable, that the poet can begin to tell the chronicle of the journey. Borges, shortly before his death in Geneva in 1986, conceived a short story (which he did not have a chance to write) about Dante in Venice, dreaming of a sequel to the Commedia. Borges never explained what that sequel might have been, but perhaps in that second volume of his pilgrimage, Dante would have returned to earth to die and, as if in a mirror of his masterpiece, his soul would have roamed the world of flesh and blood engaging his contemporaries in conver­sation. After all, in his weary exile, he must have felt as exiles do, like a ghost among the living.

16

Why Do Things Happen?

My governess escaped Nazi Germany in the early forties and, after a difficult voyage with her family, arrived in Paraguay to be greeted by swastika banners waving on the dock at Asuncion. (This was during Alfredo Stroess- ner's military regime.) Eventually she came to Argentina, and there was en­gaged by my father to accompany us as my governess on his diplomatic mission to Israel. She seldom spoke of her years in Germany.

A melancholy, quiet person, in Tel Aviv she didn't make many friends. Among the few she had was a Swiss woman with whom she would go from time to time to the movies, who bore on her forearm a tattooed number, somewhat blurred. "Never ask Maria what that is," she warned me, but added no explanation. I never asked.

Maria didn't hide her tattoo, but she avoided looking at it or touching it. I tried to keep my eyes away, but it was irresistible, like a line of writing seen under water, taunting me to decipher its meaning. It was not until I was much older that I learned about the system used by the Nazis to identify their victims, mainly at Auschwitz. An old Polish librarian in Buenos Aires,

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil meet the evil counselors. Woodcut illustrating Canto XXVI of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

also an Auschwitz survivor and also the bearer of such a tattoo, said to me once that it reminded him of the call numbers in the books he used to sort out in the Lublin Municipal Library, where he had worked as a helper in his distant adolescence.

I believe I'm in Hell, therefore I am. —Arthur Rimbaud, Nuitde I'enfer

here are places on this earth from which those who return, return to die.

On 13 December 1943, the twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi was arrested by the Fascist Militia and detained at a camp in Fossoli, near Modena. Nine weeks later, having admitted to being an "Italian citizen of Jewish race," he was sent to Auschwitz along with all the other Jewish pris­oners. All, he says, "even the children, even the old, even the ill."¹

In Auschwitz, one of the tasks assigned to Levi and five others in his Kommando was to scrape out the inside of an underground petrol tank. The work was exhausting, brutal, and dangerous. The youngest of the group was an Alsatian student called Jean, a twenty-four-year-old who was given the job of Pikolo, or messenger-clerk, in the mad bureaucracy of the camp. During one of the assignments, Jean and Levi were obliged to spend an hour together, and Jean asked Levi to teach him Italian. Levi agreed. As he remembers the scene years later in his memoir Se questo e un uomo (If This Is a Man, retitled for the U.S. edition Survival in Auschwitz), suddenly the Ulysses canto of the Commedia comes to his mind, how or why he does not know. As the two men walk towards the kitchens, Levi tries to explain to the Alsatian, in his bad French, who Dante was and what the Commedia consists of, and why Ulysses and his friend Diomedes burn eternally in a double flame for having deceived the Trojans. Levi intones for Jean the ad­mirable verses:

The greater horn of the ancient flame Began to shake itself, murmuring, Just like a flame that struggles with the wind;

Then carrying to and fro the top As if it were the tongue that spoke Threw forth a voice, and said: "When . . . "

After that, nothing. Memory, which at the best of times betrays us, at the worst of times serves us no better. Fragments, tatters of the text return to him, but it is not enough. Then Levi remembers another line, "ma misi me per l'alto mare aperto . . .":

I launched forth on the deep open sea . . .²

Jean has traveled by sea, and Levi believes that the experience will allow him to understand the force of "misi me," so much stronger than "je me mis" in Levi's rough French translation; "misi me," the act of throwing oneself on the other side of the barrier, towards "sweet things, ferociously far away." Hur­ried by the approaching end of their brief respite, Levi remembers a little more:

Consider your origins: You were not made to live like brutes, But to follow virtue and knowledge.³

Suddenly, Levi hears the verses in his head as if he were hearing them for the first time, "like the blast of a trumpet," he says, "like the voice of God." For a moment, he forgets what he is and where he is. He tries to explain the lines to Jean. Then he recalls:

when there appeared to us a mountain, Dark because so far away, and to me it seemed higher Than any I had ever seen before.⁴

More lines go missing. "I would give today's soup," Levi says, "to know how to connect 'than any I had ever seen before,' with the final lines." He closes his eyes, he bites his fingers. It is late, the two men have reached the kitchen. And then memory throws him the lines, like coins to a beggar:

Three times it made her whirl with all the waters;

At the fourth it made the poop rise up

And the prow go down, as pleased Another.⁵

Levi holds Jean back from the soup line: he feels that it is vitally neces­sary for the young man to listen, to understand the words "as pleased An­other" before it is too late; tomorrow one of them might be dead, or they might never meet again. He must explain to him, says Levi, "about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today."

They arrive at the queue, among the sordid, ragged soup carriers of other Kommandos. An official announcement is made that that day's soup will be of cabbages and turnips. The last line of the canto comes back to Levi:

Till the sea was closed over us.⁶

Under Ulysses' engulfing wave, what is that "something gigantic" that Levi realizes and wants to communicate?

Primo Levi's experience is perhaps the ultimate experience a reader can have. I hesitate to qualify it in any way, even as ultimate, because there are things that lie beyond language's capacities to name. Nevertheless, without ever being able to convey the entirety of any experience, language can, in certain moments of grace, touch upon the unnamable. Many times through­out his journey Dante says that words fail him; that lack is precisely what allows Levi to seize in Dante's words something of his own incomprehensible condition. Dante's experience is in the words of his poem; Levi's in the words made flesh, or dissolved into flesh, or lost in flesh. The inmates of the camps were stripped and shorn, their bodies and faces emaciated, their names re­placed by a number tattooed on their skin; the words briefly restored some­thing of what had been torn away.

If the inmates of Auschwitz wished to keep their names, that is, if they wished to still be human, they have to find in themselves (says Levi) the

strength to do so, "to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains." This conversation with Jean was the first time (Levi says) that he became aware that language lacks words to ex­press the offence of demolishing a man. The term "extermination camp" acquires here a double meaning, but even that is not enough to name what is taking place. This is the reason why Virgil cannot open for Dante the doors of the City of Dis in the ninth canto of the Inferno: because Hell, ab­solute Hell, cannot be known by reason, as most things are known through language—not even through the silver words of the master poet Virgil. The experience of Hell escapes language because it can only be submitted to the ineffable, to what Ulysses means when he says "as pleased Another."

But there is one essential, all-important difference between Auschwitz and Dante's Hell. Beyond the innocent first circle where the only suffering is expectation without hope, Hell is a place of retribution, where each sinner is responsible for the punishment that he or she bears. Auschwitz, instead, is a place of punishment without fault or, if there is a fault (as there is in every one of us), it is not the fault for which the punishment is meted out. In Dante's Hell, all the sinners know why they are punished. When Dante asks them to tell their stories, they can put into words the reason for their suffer­ing; even if they don't agree that they have earned it (as in the case of Bocca degli Abati), that is only due to their pride or anger, or the desire to forget. The need of man, says Dante in De vulgari eloquentia, is to be heard rather than to hear, "out of the joy we feel in translating into an orderly act our natural affections."⁷ That is why the sinners speak to Dante, so that he may hear them out; that is why the dead are left language, against the opinion of the Psalmist. It is the living Dante who, over and over, lacks the words to describe the horrors and later the glories, not the condemned, who, stripped of all comfort and peace, are miraculously in possession of a tongue to speak of what they have done in order to continue to be. Language, even in Hell, grants us existence.

In Auschwitz, however, language was useless either to explain the non­existent fault or to describe the senseless punishments, and words took on other, perverted and terrible meanings. There was a joke told in Auschwitz (because even in the place of agony there is humor): "How does one say 'never' in camp slang?" "Morgen frith, 'Tomorrow morning.'"

For the Jews, however, language—specifically the letter beth—was the instrument with which God effected his Creation and therefore could not be debased, however much it was ill-used.⁸ The intellect, the seat of language, was humankind's driving force, not the body, its vessel. Accordingly, Ortho­dox Jews believed that the concept of heroism was inextricably linked to that of spiritual courage, and the notion of "bravery with holiness" or, in Hebrew, Kiddush ha-Shem (the sanctification of God's name) was at the root of their resistance to the Nazis. They believed that evil should not be fought physi­cally by mortals because evil cannot be defeated through physical action: only Divine Providence can decide whether evil is to triumph or not. The true weapons of resistance were, for most Orthodox Jews, conscience, prayer, meditation, and devotion. "They believed that the reciting of a chapter of the Psalms would do more to affect the course of events than would the kill­ing of a German—not necessarily immediately but at some point in the in­finite course of relations between the Creator and His creatures."⁹

Ulysses, like the other souls in Dante's Hell, suffers a punishment that he himself has fashioned during his own limited course of his relations with his Maker. In Dante's imagination, we, not God, are responsible for our ac­tions and for their consequences. Dante's world is not the world of Homer, where whimsical gods play with our human destinies for their entertainment or private purpose. God, Dante believes, has given each of us certain abilities and possibilities, but also the gift of free will, which allows us to make our own choices and assume the consequences of those choices. Even the quality of the punishment itself is, according to Dante, determined by our transgres­sion. Ulysses is condemned to burn invisibly in the forked flame because his sin, counseling others to practice fraud, is furtive, and since he has commit­ted it through speech, through the tongue, it is in tongues of flame that he is eternally tortured. In Dante's Hell, every punishment has a reason.

But Auschwitz is a very different kind of hell. Soon after Levi's arrival in the midst of a terrible winter, sick with thirst, locked up in a vast, unheated shed, he sees an icicle hanging outside the window. He sticks out a hand and breaks the icicle off, but a guard snatches it from him, throws it away, and pushes Levi back into his place. " Warum?" asks Levi in his poor German, "Why?" "Hier ist kein warum," the guard replies, "Here is no why."¹⁰ This infamous response is the essence of the Auschwitz hell: in Auschwitz, unlike in Dante's realm, there is no "Why."

In the seventeenth century, the German poet Angelus Silesius, trying to speak of the beauty of a rose, wrote, "Die Rose ist ohne warum," "The rose is without why."¹¹ This, of course, is a different "why": the "why" of the rose lies merely beyond the descriptive capabilities of language, but not beyond language's epistemological scope. Auschwitz's "why" is beyond both. To un­derstand this, we must, like Levi and like Dante, remain stubbornly curious because our relationship to language is always a dissatisfying one. To put our experience into words again and again falls short of our aim: language is too poor to conjure up experience fully: it disappoints us when the events are happy and pains us when they are not. For Dante, "to tell it as it was is hard," and yet he says he must attempt to do so, "to address the good I found there." But, as Beatrice tells him, "will and instrument among mortals . . . are unequally feathered in their wings."¹² Try as Dante might and try as we, so much less gifted, might to assert our will, the instrument of language creates its own semantic field.

That semantic field is always a multilayered one because our relationship to language is always a relationship with the past as well as with the present and the future. When we use words, we are making use of the experience accumulated before our time in words; we are making use of the multiplicity of meanings stored in the syllables we employ to render our reading of the world comprehensible to ourselves and others. The uses that have preceded our own nourish and alter, sustain and undermine our present use: whenever we speak, we speak in voices, and even the first-person singular is in fact plural. And when we speak with tongues of fire, many of those tongues are ancient flames.

The early Christian fathers, keen on finding a strategy to bring the wis­dom of the pagans into accord with the tenets of Jesus, decided, after reading in the Acts of the Apostles that "Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds" (7:22), that it was from Moses that the Greeks had learned their philosophy. Moses had been taught by the Egyptians, and it was through his words that the precursors of Plato and Aristotle received inklings of the truth. By a change of vowels, it was said, the name Moses had become Musaeus, a legendary pre-Homeric poet who had been a disciple of Orpheus.¹³ For this reason, in the twelfth century, the learned Richard of Saint-Victor, whom Dante placed next to Saint Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede in Paradise, declared that "Egypt is the mother of all arts."¹⁴

In the late fourth century, Saint Jerome defended himself from the ac­cusation of favoring the ancient flames of pagan poetry over the redeeming Christian fire by arguing that in order fully to explore the word of God, the best instruments must be used. Cicero and his brethren, though deaf to the true word, had perfected the instrument of language, which Christian writ­ers could now use for their benefit. But there should be no doubt as to which was the better source of wisdom. Writing to the cloistered Heloise towards 1160, Peter the Venerable praised her for having entered the cloister after her tragic love affair with Peter Abelard. "You have changed your studies of var­ious disciplines," he wrote, "for others that are far better, and instead of Logic you have chosen the Gospel, instead of Physics, the Apostle, instead of Plato, Christ, instead of the academy, the cloister. You are now a wholly and truly philosophical woman."¹⁵

A thousand years after Jerome, Dante argued that not only the language and early ideas but the entire pagan imaginaire could serve that higher purpose, and throughout the Commedia Christian saints and ancient gods, citizens of Florence and heroes of Greece and Rome share the long tripartite adventure in which anachronism has no place. In the first circle of Hell, Virgil is greeted by the poets who have preceded him, and Homer himself welcomes Virgil back to the Noble Castle with a solemn "Honor the very great poet." Dante too is welcomed into this "fine school" by Homer's companions, and even though Virgil smiles at this perhaps exaggerated estimation of the Florentine, Dante's art now forms part of that same great ageless circle of poetry, and shares with the work of his masters the same verbal triumphs and defeats.¹⁶ It is a question of shared inheritance. The same "traces of the ancient flame" confessed by Dido in the Aeneid burn again in Dante's address to Virgil in Purgatory upon finally seeing Beatrice: "I recognize the traces of the ancient flame," says Dante in awe.¹⁷ And the identical image serves Dante to depict, in a very different context and no longer as a metaphor, the forked flame from which the soul of Ulysses speaks to him in Hell: a flame colored by its amorous antecedents. We should not forget, however, that the ancient flame that embraces the soul of Ulysses embraces that of Diomedes as well. The ancient flame is double-tongued, but only one tip, the greater one, is al­lowed to make itself heard. It is therefore licit, perhaps, to ask how Diomedes, the silent one, would have told the shared story.

Recalling the tongues of the ancient flame in Auschwitz, Primo Levi hears in the railing words "fatti non foste a viver come bruti" (you were not made to live like brutes) a reminder of his own abused humanity, a warning not to give up even now, a life-giving draft of words that not Virgil, not Dante, but the intrepid and over-ambitious Ulysses (dreamt up of course by Dante) addresses to his men in order to convince them to follow him "be­yond the sun, to the world without people." But Levi does not remember these last, precise words of Ulysses' speech. The verses that dance in Levi's head bring memories of another life: the mountain, "dark because so far away," reminds him of other mountains seen in the dusk of evening as he returned by train from Milan to Turin, and the awful "as pleased Another," compels him to make Jean understand, in a flash of intuition, why they are where they are.¹⁸ But the revelation goes no further. Memory, which dives into our sunken libraries and rescues from the long-past pages only a few seem­ingly random paragraphs, chooses better than we know, and perhaps select­ing wisely prevented Levi from the realization that even though he might have followed Ulysses' cry and refused to live like a brute, he has nevertheless reached, like Ulysses and his men, the world beyond the gentle sun, a con­demned place inhabited by beings who have been incomprehensibly thrust below the human condition.

Diomedes in the Iliad is the reliable man, a courageous and bloodthirsty warrior, a disciplined strategist willing to fight to the end if he believes his cause to be just. "Not a word of retreat," he says when alerted of the danger of an advancing Trojan chariot. "You'll never persuade me. / It's not my na­ture to shrink from battle, cringe in fear / with the fighting strength still steady in my chest." Diomedes is more reasonable than Ulysses, more de­pendable than Achilles, a better soldier than Aeneas. Diomedes is driven by an almost unconscious curiosity to know whether our fate depends on our­selves or entirely on the will of apparently all-powerful gods; this drives him to attack even the gods themselves. The War of Troy is a war in which both men and gods take equal part. When Aphrodite sweeps down to rescue her son Aeneas from a huge boulder thrown at him by Diomedes, he slashes her wrist with his spear, then charges against Apollo, so that the god of the sun has to appeal to Ares, the god of war, to stop him. "That daredevil Diome­des, he'd fight Father Zeus!" Then Diomedes strikes against the god of war as well. "The gods are bloodless, so we call them deathless," says Homer, but they can be wounded, and when they bleed, they bleed not human blood but an ethereal fluid known as ichor.¹⁹ By attacking the immortal gods, Diome- des discovers that they too suffer pain, and that they can therefore know and understand what humans suffer: this wounding of the ancient gods fore­shadows another god's torture and death, centuries later, on a cross on Mount Golgotha. A god that can suffer and who allows the suffering he himself understands: that is the paradox. Martin Buber tells this story:

The emperor of Vienna issued an edict which was bound to make thoroughly miserable the already oppressed Jews in Galizia. At that time, an earnest and studious man by the name of Feivel lived in Rabbi Elimelekh's House of Study. One night he rose, entered the zaddik's room, and said to him: "Master, I have a suit against God." And even as he spoke he was horrified at his own words.

But Rabbi Elimelekh answered him: "Very well, but the court is not in session by night."

The next day, two zaddikim came to Lizhensk, Israel of Koznitz and Jacob Yithak of Lublin, and stayed in Rabbi Elimelekh's house. After the midday meal, the rabbi had the man who had spoken to him called and said: "Now tell us about your lawsuit."

"I have not the strength to do it now," Feivel said falteringly.

"Then I give you the strength," said Rabbi Elimelekh.

And Feivel began to speak. "Why are we held in bondage in this empire? Does not God say in the Torah: 'For unto Me the children of Israel are servants.' And even though he has sent us to alien lands, still, wherever we are, he must leave us full freedom to serve him."

To this Rabbi Elimelekh replied: "We know God's reply, for it also is written in the passage of reproof through Moses and the prophets. But now, both the plaintiff and the defendant shall leave the courtroom, as the rule prescribes, so that the judges may not be influenced by them. So go out, Rabbi Feivel. You, Lord of the world, we cannot send you out, because your glory fills the earth, and without your presence, not one of us could live for even a mo­ment. But we herewith inform you that we shall not let ourselves be influenced by you either."

Then the three sat in judgment, silently and with closed eyes.

After an hour, they called in Feivel and gave him the verdict: that

he was in the right. In the same hour, the edict in Vienna was

cancelled.²⁰

If Diomedes could speak from the forked flame, aware as he must have been that the gods are fallible, this is perhaps what he would have told Dante: that being human does not prevent us from suffering inhuman torture, that every human enterprise has its unspeakable shadow, that in this "brief vigil" of our life we may be made to capsize in sight of the longed-for mountain for no intelligible reason, merely because of the whim or the will of Something or Someone.²¹ Diomedes might have spoken to Dante with Ulysses' same words, but if they came from the other fork of the flame, Dante might have heard them differently, not as proud ambition but as despair and rage, and Levi might have then recalled the speech not as a promise of redemption but as a sentence both unjust and incomprehensible. Perhaps Diomedes' unspoken words are part of the "something gigantic" that Levi suddenly understands and wants to communicate to Jean.

Literature promises nothing except that however hard we may try to reach its farthest horizon we will fail. But even though no reading is ever complete, and no page is ever quite the last, coming back to a text we are familiar with, either reread or recalled, allows us a wider sailing, and our "mad flight," as Dante describes Ulysses' quest, will take us always a little farther into mean- ing.²² And as Ulysses discovers, whatever understanding we may reach at last, it will not be the expected one. Centuries of words transform Virgil's ancient flame into a forest of meanings, none lost, none definitive, and it may be that when the words come back to us in our hour of need, they will indeed save us, but only for the time being. Words always hold yet another meaning which escapes us.

Franz Kafka imagined in "The Penal Colony" a machine that punishes prisoners by inscribing on their bodies a mysterious script.²³ Only once the needle has dug deep into the flesh are the prisoners able to make out the nature of their fault and the reason for their punishment, in the instant be­fore the last. Kafka died sixteen years before Auschwitz was built, and his machine, though implacable and deadly, delivers nevertheless some sort of answer to the question "Why?"—an answer however crabbed, however late. Auschwitz did not. After Levi's liberation in January 1945, he lived on for a time as a writer among new readers. But no understanding came to him, however hard he tried to lead a normal life again, no understanding of the "why." And yet, catching traces of the other voice hidden somewhere in the double flame, Levi must have reached a better understanding of why no "why" ever existed there.

Less than a year before his death, in a letter addressed to the Latin poet Horace, Levi wrote this: "Our life is longer than yours, but it is neither gayer nor more secure, nor do we have the certainty that the gods will grant a to­morrow to our yesterdays. We too shall join our father Aeneas, Tullus, Ancus, and you in the realm of shadows; we too, so insolent, so self-assured, will re­turn to dust and shadows."²⁴ To dust and shadows Levi returned, like Dante and Virgil, and Horace too, and like theirs, Levi's flame continues to speak to us. Perhaps that perseverance of a voice is poetry's only true justification.

Poetry offers no answers, poetry cannot erase suffering, poetry will not bring the beloved dead back to life, poetry does not protect us from evil, poetry does not grant us ethical strength or moral courage, poetry does not avenge the victim or punish the victimizer. All poetry can do, and only when the stars are kind, is lend words to our questions, echo our suffering, assist us in recalling the dead, put a name to the works of evil, teach us to reflect on deeds of revenge and punishment, and also of goodness, even when goodness is no longer there. An ancient Jewish prayer humbly reminds us: "Lord, re­move the stone from the middle of the road, that the thief may not stumble at night."²⁵

This power of poetry is something we know from old, or perhaps always knew since the beginnings of language, a knowledge made wonderfully evi­dent in the first cantos of Purgatorio. Subtly overshadowing these cantos is the shadow of Ulysses' failed attempt to reach the solitary mountain. Follow­ing the instructions of Cato, the guardian of Purgatory, Virgil girdles Dante with the reed "as pleased Another" (the same words Ulysses used in the tale of his adventure). Standing with Virgil on the beach, Dante sees, on either side of the approaching ship of souls, "an I-knew-not-what white" that proves to be the wings of the piloting angel; in Ulysses' account, he and his men "made wings out of oars." Ulysses' powerful defense of his burning cu­riosity is countered by the angel's cold and eloquent silence, admonishing all errant souls to return to the true path. And even before the arrival of the ship, Dante implicitly opposes his expectations to those of the intrepid Ulysses, who physically sailed forth but whose soul remained landlocked:

We stood still by the edge of the sea Like those who think about the road they'll take And go with their heart, but with their body stay.²⁶

And then an extraordinary scene takes place.

Among the souls descending from the ship, Dante recognizes his friend Casella, who in happier days had put to music some of Dante's verses. Dante, to soothe his soul, "which, with its body / traveling to this place, is so very weary," asks Casella to sing for him once again—that is unless "a new law has not deprived / your memory or skill in the art of love songs / that used to calm all my longings." Casella consents, and begins to sing the words of a poem composed by Dante himself during the years of their friendship. The beauty of Casella's voice in the pure air of Purgatory's beach makes Virgil and the other newly arrived souls gather around to listen, enraptured. They stand there, "fixed and intent on his notes," until ancient Cato rushes towards them, angrily calling them back to their sacred business, reminding them of the tremendous purpose of their journey with echoes of God's admonition to Moses: "Neither let the flocks nor the herds feed before that mount."²⁷

The abashed souls disperse like a flock of startled doves, putting an end to Casella's song, but not before Dante has shown us, so humanely, so deli­cately, so truly, that even in the all-important moments of our life's journey, even when the very salvation of our soul is in question, art will still be of the essence. Even in Auschwitz, where nothing seemed any more to have had importance or meaning, poetry could still stir in inmates such as Levi the remnants of life, could offer the intuition of "something gigantic," light in the ashes a spark of the old curiosity, and make it burst once more into ever­lasting flames.

17

What Is True?

sometime in the late 1980s, the Canadian magazine Saturday Night sent me to Rome to report on a curious story. Two Quebecois sisters in their mid-fifties, the younger a widow with a son and a daughter, the elder un­married, had traveled together from their village in Quebec to India, on what they insisted was an exotic holiday. During a stopover in Rome, they were found to be carrying several kilos of heroin in one of their suitcases and were detained by the Italian police. The sisters explained that the suit­case had been given to them in India by a friend of the daughter, the man who had arranged for their travel and had taken them on a guided tour of several Indian cities. The police, however, were unable to trace the man; the daughter explained that he was a casual acquaintance who had kindly offered to help her mother and her aunt to arrange the holiday of a lifetime.

In Rome, I was allowed to interview both sisters. They had been spared the prison cell and had been lodged in a religious residence under the super­vision of Benedictine nuns. Both gave a coherent, believable account of their ordeal, saying that they had been completely unaware of the fact that the suitcase given to them had contained drugs. After all the man had done for

(Opposite) After riding Geryon into the abyss, Dante sees the punished usurers with their armorial pouches. Woodcut illustrating Canto XVII ofthe Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

them, they felt that they couldn't very well have refused his simple request to take a suitcase back to Canada. In Quebec, the daughter confirmed their story.

During the interviews, conducted in the Benedictine residence under the supervision of a smiling nun, I noticed in the older sister a puzzled look and a tone of voice that I read as disbelief or anger. There was something in her attitude that made me think that perhaps she suspected her sister of having had a hand in the plot, maybe with the help of the daughter. Or that she suspected the daughter of having set them up, and that now the mother was protecting her child by not telling the full story. Or perhaps I misinter­preted the look and tone, and both the sisters were guilty. Perhaps they had planned the smuggling together, perhaps the daughter knew nothing about it. Or perhaps they were both innocent, and they were telling the simple truth. The older sister's attitude meant something that I was unable to decipher. What had really taken place? It was impossible to know.

In the end, after a somewhat chaotic trial, the judge found both women not guilty, and they were allowed to return to their village. Nevertheless, the doubt remained. Several years later, the younger sister declared that their lives had become unbearable because so many people still suspected them of a crime they had not committed.

We all know that the events we experience, in their fullest, deepest sense, escape the boundaries of language. That no account of even the smallest oc­currence in our life can truly do justice to what has taken place, and that no memory, however intense, can be identical to the thing remembered. We try to relate what happened but our words always fall short, and we learn, after many failures, that the closest approximation to a truthful version of reality can be found only in the stories we make up. In our most powerful fictions, under the web of the narrative the complexity of reality can be discerned, like a face behind a mask. Our best way of telling the truth is to lie.

"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

—Francis Bacon, "Of Truth"

_A

ccording to the seventeenth-century Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, the light that bursts from the everlasting flames of the deity is twofold, like the forked tongue that holds Ulysses and Diomedes: one is a light "pregnant with thought," the other is "void of thought," and both qualities are present in the same fire, in dialogue one with the other. "This," wrote Gershom Scholem, "is the most radical and extreme affirma­tion of the process of dialectical materialism in God Himself."¹

The light of Dante's God embodies as well this apparent opposition. This becomes clear when, guided by Virgil, Dante arrives at the brink of the second cornice of the seventh circle of Hell. After circling the incandescent sands where the violent against nature are punished, Virgil leads Dante close to a loud waterfall. There Virgil has Dante loosen the cord from around his waist (the same cord with which, he says now, he tried to catch the leopard that first crossed his path outside the dark forest) and casts it into the abyss. On that signal, from the depths of the abyss rises the emblem of fraud, the winged monster Geryon.

The significance of this cord has worried commentators from the first. Most of the early readers of the Commedia understood the cord to be a sym­bol of fraud, but the explanation is not convincing: fraud is not capable of subjugating lust (the leopard) but rather is used to incite it (because lust entails deceit, just as false promises are part of the art of the seducer). Virgil must employ something good to counter evil, not a sin against another sin. The critic Bruno Nardi suggested that the cord has a twofold biblical sym­bolic meaning: in both the Old and the New Testaments, the cord is the girdle of justice worn against fraud and a chastity belt worn against lust.² Whatever its symbolic significance, Dante realizes that Virgil's gesture

Geryon conveying Dante and Virgil down towards Malebolge, one of the 102 watercolors produced by William Blake between 1824 and 1827 to illustrate the Commedia. (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Felton Bequest/Bridgeman Images)

will bring up a "novita," something new, in response to the "nuovo cenno," the new sign given by his guide. And Dante adds this warning to the reader:

Ah, how cautious ought men to be with those who not only perceive the deed but see also the thoughts, with their sense!³

About to enter the circle of fraud, Dante reminds the reader that though the enlightened Virgil can read his thoughts, most ordinary people judge others by their actions only, and are incapable of seeing the thought behind the deed. Too often, actions that are taken to be proof of a truth are shown to be false.

Summoned from the abyss, the monster Geryon appears as the incarna­tion of fraud, a creature with the face of an honest man,⁴ hairy paws, a body covered with whirls and circles like an Oriental carpet, and a scorpion's deadly tail. But before describing this prodigious vision to the reader, Dante pauses, and says:

Always about the truth that has an air of falsehood A man should seal his lips, as far as he is able, For even blameless, he'll be put to shame;

But here I can't be silent; and by the notes Of my Commedia, Reader, I do swear, So that they may not be deprived of lasting fame,

I saw . . .⁵

And then Dante tells us about Geryon.

The reader who has followed Dante's story up to this point and heard about many prodigies and marvels (not the least being the journey of Dante himself) is, for the first time, faced with a marvel so great that the poet feels the need to stop and swear by his own work that what he will now tell is true. That is to say, almost exactly halfway through Hell, Dante swears by the truth of his poem, indeed of his fiction, that the forthcoming episode in the poem truly happened. In a vertiginous logical circle, Dante informs the reader, his accomplice in this elaborate fabrication, that the poetic lie he will tell has the weight of a factual truth, and he offers as proof of this the very fictional edifice: the web of poetic lies from within which he addresses the reader. Whatever belief the reader has accorded the poet up to this point is now put to the test: if the reader has felt that there really was a forest, and a lofty mountain in the distance, and a ghostly companion, and a dreadful, eloquent portal leading into the circular landscape of Hell (and few are the readers who have not felt, verse after verse, the solid reality of Dante's story), then now that same reader must admit the truth of what the poet is about to tell or forfeit everything. Dante is not demanding from the reader the kind of faith demanded by the Christian religion; he is demanding poetic faith, which, unlike the tenets of divinely revealed truth, exists merely through words. However, Dante allows both truths to coexist in the Commedia. When at the summit of Purgatory, accompanying the divine pageant, Dante sees the four beasts of the Apocalypse advancing towards him, he describes their appearance—"each was plumed with six wings"—and adds, for the benefit of the reader: "read Ezekiel, who depicts them," "except . . . as to the wings, / where John and I differ from him."⁶ Dante claims for his side the authority of John of Patmos, who said that the wings were six (Rev. 4:8), while Ezekiel, in his vision, claimed they had four (1:6). Dante is not shy of placing himself in the same authorial plane as the author of the Apocalypse: he, the poet of the Commedia, certifies John's divine authority.

And Virgil certifies the authority of Dante. When first encountering the shade of Virgil come to guide him, Dante addressed the author of the Aeneid as "my master, and my author," confessing, "You alone are he from whom I took / the sweet style that has brought me honor."⁷ From Virgil's poetry Dante learned to express his own experience, and "mio autore" carries the double sense of "writer of the book I admire most" and "the one who made me." Words, syntax, music: all lies through which the reader's mind receives and reconstructs an experience of the world.

One of Dante's most lucid commentators, John Freccero, asks whether "a human author can imitate theological allegory . . . by imitating reality." He goes on: "In fact, mimesis has the opposite effect, short-circuiting allegory and transforming it into irony. Instead of reaching out for meaning allegori- cally, realism turns significance back on itself by repeatedly affirming and then denying its own status as fiction. In Dante's terms, we might say that realism is alternately truth with the face of a lie, and a fraud that looks like the truth."⁸

In his famous letter to Cangrande della Scala, Dante, explicitly quoting Aristotle, notes that according to how far from or how near its being some­thing is, we can say that it is far from or near the truth.⁹ He is referring to the literary form that Freccero mentions, the allegory, whose truth depends on how close the poet has managed to bring the image to the subject allegorized. Dante compares the relationship to one of dependency: son to father, ser­vant to master, singular to double, a part to the whole. In all these cases, the "being" of something depends on something else (we can't know what a double is if we ignore the singular), and therefore the truth of that something is dependent on something else. If that something else is fraudulent, the thing considered is also infected by fraud. Deceit, as Dante keeps reminding us, is contagious.

Saint Augustine, in the earliest of his two long treatises on lying (with which Dante may well have been familiar), argued that a person who says something false is not telling a lie if the teller believes or is convinced of its truth. Augustine distinguishes between "believing" and "being convinced": those who believe may recognize that they don't know much about what they believe in without doubting its existence; those who are convinced think that they know something without realizing that that they don't know much about it. According to Augustine, there is no lie without an intent to lie: lying is a question of the difference between appearance and truth. A person, he says, can be mistaken in supposing that a tree, for instance, is a wall, but there will be no fraud unless there is a will to commit it. "Fraud," says Au­gustine, "lies not in things themselves but in the senses." Satan, the arch- deceiver, "liar and father of lies" (as Virgil is reminded by a condemned soul in Hell), was aware of committing fraud when he deceived Adam and Eve, whose sin was to choose what they knew was forbidden. Our forefathers, through their willing senses, could have chosen not to be accomplices in the fraud; instead, they distanced themselves from the truth, and used their free will to take the wrong path. Every traveler can choose the path he will take. Dante, who had lost his way in the dark forest, which Augustine had called "this immense forest, so full of snares and dangers," chose to follow Virgil's advice and is now on the true path.¹⁰

The source of Augustine's argument on the question of lying is a contro­versial passage in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. "Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not" (1:20), says Paul, to establish a vantage point for his arguments. And as an example of deceit, Paul then tells a story drawn from his own experience, describing a moment when he was confronted with the peculiar behavior of a fellow apostle. Saul (as Paul was then called) had been a zealous Jew, notorious for his determined pursuit of Jews who had converted to Christianity. On the way to Damascus, he saw a blinding light and heard the voice of Jesus asking why he was persecuting him. Saul fell to ground and found that he could no longer see. After three days, his sight was restored by Ananias, who baptized him with the name of Paul (Acts 8:9). Following his conversion, Paul divided his missionary efforts with the apostle Peter: Peter would preach to the Jews while Paul would ad­dress himself to the Gentiles.

Fourteen years later, the leaders of the Christian church, gathered in Jerusalem, decided that Gentiles were not required to be circumcised (that is, to become Jews) before converting to the faith of Jesus. After the conference, Paul went to Antioch, where Peter joined him some time later. At first, Peter ate with the Gentiles of the Antioch church, but when Jewish members from the Jerusalem church arrived, he withdrew from the Gentile table, because "them which were of the circumcision" (the Jewish members) had insisted that Gentile Christians observe Jewish dietary laws. Paul, upset at Peter for not recognizing that the only thing that was required to sit at Christ's table was faith, "withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed": "If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?" (Gal. 2:12, 11, 14).

Saint Jerome, in his commentary on Paul's epistle, as well as in a letter to Augustine written in the year 403, argued that this passage did not repre­sent an authentic dispute between the two apostles. Without going so far as to say that the two leaders staged a didactic scene for the benefit of their audience, Jerome refused to see a doctrinal opposition between them. Ac­cording to Jerome, the dispute was a question of different points of view in which neither of the apostles acted deceitfully but merely took opposing stances in order to illustrate the argument.¹¹ Augustine thought otherwise. To admit that even a slight dissimulation had taken place during the meeting at Antioch, would be, he says, to admit a lie in the exposition of religious dogma, and therefore in Scripture. Furthermore, Paul's criticism of Peter was well founded because the old Jewish rites had no significance for a convert to the new faith; therefore it would have been useless for either man to dissemble. What happened, according to Augustine, was that Peter was not aware of his dissemblance until Paul exposed the truth to him. A deceit, under whatever circumstance, is never justified in the behavior of a true Christian.

In that light, are the lies of fiction really disguised truths? Or are they fraudulent stories that distract us from the truth that should be our main concern? In the Confessions, Augustine says that, in his adolescence, reading the Latin classics in school, "I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight." The young Augus­tine, if he were forbidden to read these books, "was sad not being able to read the very things that made [him] sad." The old Augustine thought that the curtains hung over the entrance of the classrooms where literature was taught were "not so much symbols in honour of mystery as veils concealing error."¹² When Dante first sees Geryon, the monster's appearance seems to him "marvelous to every steadfast heart." Only when Virgil has explained to him who the monster really is does Dante understand the truth of Geryon's being.

Behold the beast with the sharp pointed tail, That crosses mountains and breaks through walls and arms! Behold him who pollutes the entire world!

Virgil's references are historical: through deceit, Tomyris, queen of the Mas- sagetae, crossed the mountains and defeated Cyrus, king of the Persians; through deceit, the Greeks breached the walls of Troy. But the deceit of Geryon is worse. Legend has it that he was an Iberian king with three gigan­tic bodies united at the waist, who welcomed travelers in order to despoil and then kill them. Dante retains the name but changes his shape: Geryon is made to resemble the serpent from the Garden of Eden, who deceived Eve and thus caused the fall of all humankind.¹³

A discussion of the relation of fiction to truth takes place on the third cornice of Purgatory: Dante meets a learned Venetian courtier, Marco Lom- bardo, who is cleansing himself of the sin of wrath in a cloud of suffocating smoke. Lombardo lectures Dante on the problem of free will. If everything is predetermined, then a sin cannot be judged right or wrong, and wrath is simply a mechanical response to an unavoidable situation. But however fully things may be ordained in advance by universal laws, within this framework human beings are free to choose. The stars may have some influence on our conduct, but they are not responsible for our ultimate decisions.

You, the living, refer all causes only to the heavens, as if they alone must move everything in their course.

If it were this way, free will would be destroyed and it would not be fair that good be joyous and evil mournful.

The heavens set your impulses in motion; I don't say all, but suppose I said it, a light is granted you to know good and evil,

and free will, if it endure its first struggles with the heavens, wins everything, if it is nourished well.

To a better strength and a better nature you are subject in your freedom, which in your mind creates what the heavens are unable to control.¹⁴

What Marco Lombardo is arguing is that the universe is almost indif­ferent to our actions: we create in our minds the laws that we are constrained to follow. If this is so, then fiction (the world created by our imagination, that of the Aeneid for Augustine and Dante, and that of the Commedia for us) has the power of shaping our vision and our understanding of the world. And language, the instrument through which imagination presents itself to us and communicates our thoughts to others, not only assists our efforts but re-creates the very reality we attempt to communicate.

Four centuries after Dante, David Hume (whom we encountered at the beginning of this book) would reconsider the question from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment. In his Treatise of Human Nature he argued that human beings invented the "fundamental laws of the nature, when they observ'd the necessity of society to their mutual subsistence, and found, that 'twas impos­sible to maintain any correspondence together, without some restraint on their natural appetites," but then he went on to say that we could not have in­vented other laws but these: these are the laws required to explain the uni­verse we inhabit.¹⁵ Like any law, the laws of nature can be broken, but they can't be broken indiscriminately, or at any arbitrary time.

Hume's reasoning concerns the matter of truth. Truth is like a law that can be disregarded, but it is impossible for someone to disregard it continu­ally. If I disregard the truth by saying "white" every time the truth is "black," my "white" will eventually be interpreted as "black," and the words with which I lie will simply change their meaning through my constant usage. In the same way, moral laws must stem from a perception of what is true, rooted in our consciousness and expressed in a commonly accepted way: what Hume calls "any natural obligation of morality."¹⁶ Otherwise, morality is nothing but a relative concept, and arguments in favor of torture, for instance, ac­cording to the particular "natural law" of a Stalin or a Pinochet, would be as valid as the arguments against it. Free will allows for the question of whether an action is good or bad based on the "natural obligation of morality," and is independent of whether the person committing the action is guilty or not

g^uilty.

The question becomes more complex in the case of an act that can be judged bad in itself but is committed for a cause that is deemed good. When Nelson Mandela died, on 5 December 2013, politicians all over the world praised the man who had ended apartheid in South Africa and had stood for a moral law common to all. A handful of conservative British MPs, how­ever, recalling that Margaret Thatcher had described Mandela's African Na­tional Congress as "a typical terrorist organisation" that wanted to establish "a Communist-style black dictatorship," refused to mourn Mandela and con­tinued to argue that Mandela had been a terrorist who had thrown bombs from speeding motorcycles. And the Tory MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind declared that "Nelson Mandela was not a saint, as we have heard" but "a politician to his fingertips. He actually believed in the armed struggle in the earlier part of his career and perhaps to some degree for the rest of his career." Saints, in the opinion of Rifkind, who had obviously never heard of Saint Francis Xavier or Saint Joan of Arc, could not be politicians.¹⁷

In 1995, five years after the official abolition of apartheid, the people of South Africa set up what was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commis­sion, a judicial body assembled to allow victims of human rights abuses to give testimony. Not only were the victims called to testify; the abusers as well could defend themselves and request an amnesty from both civil and crimi­nal prosecution. In 2000, the Commission was replaced by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. The change in nomenclature was seen to repre­sent an evolution from the establishment of truth to the establishment of justice. Recognition of guilt without a system within which it can be judged was deemed a sterile exercise. "Guilt," declared Nadine Gordimer in 1998, "is and was unproductive."¹⁸

Mandela had said at his 1963 trial that he wanted to live for and achieve the ideal of a democratic and free society, but it was also an ideal for which he was prepared to die. "I, who had never been a soldier, who had never fought in a battle, who had never fired a gun at an enemy, had been given the task of starting an army," he wrote in his autobiography.¹⁹ With a warrant out for his arrest, Mandela went underground, learning how to make bombs and moving through Africa in disguise. After he was caught and sentenced to prison in 1963, he rejected offers of freedom until the South African govern­ment had removed all obstacles to a proper judicial hearing. He later said that what sustained him throughout the ordeal was "a belief in human dignity." The activities that the conservative MPs called "terrorist acts" were necessary for the attainment of this dignity. To break an unjust law, to commit the so-called terrorist acts, was for Mandela a just act and a moral obligation.

Gordimer, whose fiction offers a long and profound record of the injus­tice of the apartheid regime, argued that in a society of unjust laws, crime and punishment (as well as truth and deceit) become aleatory moral concepts. "If you're black," she said, "and you've lived during apartheid time, you're accustomed to people going in and out of prison all the time. They didn't carry the right documents in their pockets when they went out. They couldn't move freely from one city to another without acting against the law and being subject to imprisonment. So that there's no real disgrace about going to prison, because you didn't have to be criminal to go to prison."²⁰ But are terrorist-like acts committed under a criminal regime themselves criminal?

The question is not a simple one, as Dante knew. When Dante takes part in the torture of Bocca degli Abate in the frozen pit of Hell, is he mor­ally justified in his action merely because Dante is contaminated by Bocca's sin of treason, and by the inscrutability of divine judgment? Or has he been tempted into an immoral action by a setting in which betrayal of those one trusted has rendered all social conventions arbitrary, and language is no lon­ger able to communicate what is true? Is Dante acting truthfully within the natural moral laws of humankind, or is he breaking those laws as the now suffering sinners had done before their punishment?

Free will is, for Dante, an intellectual choice based on a given reality, but a reality that is transformed by our intelligence, imagination, dreams, and physical senses. We are free to choose, but at the same time we are bound by the acquired knowledge of the world translated into our understanding. To understand this paradox, Dante offers the metaphor of civil law, which nec­essarily curbs a citizen's absolute freedom but allows simultaneously a choice of how to act within the terms of that law. Because the soul, as an infant, indulges at first in the pleasures offered to it and then, unless guided by a teacher, seeks them out with the avidity of a spoilt child, a certain restraint must be placed on human desire. Ulysses and Nimrod are chastised examples. On the third cornice of Mount Purgatory, Marco Lombardo explains:

Therefore laws are necessary as a curb; necessary to have a ruler who might discern at least the tower of the True City.²¹

The Celestial City is unattainable in this life, but a just ruler might help the polis live by its tenets by having even a distant glimpse of it, a notion of that ideal. Laws, then, and good government will back our moral choices. Unfortunately, according to Dante, no such government existed in his time (and no such government exists in ours). Between the hopeful city founded by Aeneas and the divided Rome of the fourteenth century, with a corrupt pope who demeaned his holy office to preside over the base kingdom of this earth, Dante claimed our natural right to a society that does not foster deceit.

A century after Hume, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, against a deceit­ful society, what we must do is "to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates."²² This too, was Mandela's conviction.

Five centuries after Dante, another Italian sought to inquire into the nature of truth and the art of lying. Of all the adventures that Carlo Collodi imagined for his wooden puppet, one in particular has become part of uni­versal folklore: when Pinocchio lies to the Blue Fairy, his nose grows longer. After Pinocchio has been taken down from the oak tree where he had been left hanging by the wicked Cat and Fox, he is put to bed by the kind Blue Fairy, who asks him what happened. But Pinocchio is too afraid or ashamed to tell the truth, and, as we all know, after each lie his nose grows a little lon­ger. "Lies, my dear boy," the Fairy explains to him, "are quickly discovered; because they are of two kinds. There are lies with short legs, and lies with long noses."²³ Pinocchio's are obviously of the latter variety.

But what does the Fairy's distinction mean? Pinocchio's long-nosed lies are stubborn means to avoid confessing something he has done. As a result, his extensive nose becomes an impediment to moving freely, and even pre­vents him from leaving the room. These are the lies of the status quo, fibs that nail him to one spot, from which, because he won't acknowledge the truth of his own deeds, he is forbidden to go forward and advance in his life story. Like the lies of politicians and financiers, Pinocchio's lies undermine his own reality and destroy even that which he is supposed to treasure. As Pinocchio's adventures and Dante's Commedia make explicit, the acknowl­edgement of our reality leads us on, from chapter to chapter, and from canto to canto, towards the revelation of our true self. The denial of that reality renders any true telling impossible.

Of the short-legged lies, the Blue Fairy gives us no examples, but we can imagine what they might look like. In Canto V of Paradiso, in the inconstant Heaven of the Moon, Beatrice explains to Dante the way in which charity proceeds, "moving its foot to the apprehended good." Freccero noted that Thomas Aquinas, in one of his commentaries to Peter Lombard's Sentences, argued that the mind must move to God through intellect and affection, but because of our fallen state, our intellect is stronger in understanding than our affections are in loving. And since our ability to see the good has outdistanced our ability to do good on our own, we travel through life with one foot lagging behind. That is exactly how Dante describes his own prog­ress at the beginning of the Commedia, after leaving the dark wood and seeing the mountain peak lit in the dawn light:

After I had rested a little my weary body I took again the path along the desert strand, So that the firm foot was always the lowest.²⁴

Boccaccio, in his commentary on the Commedia, lends a literal explana­tion to this limping advancement, describing merely the process of an ascent that naturally causes one foot to be always lower than the other. However Freccero, in his learned discussion of the symbolic function of the parts of the body, reads Dante's image as depicting the soul advancing on the twin "feet" of intellect and affect, just as our feet of flesh and blood allow us to move forward. Following the Scholastic thinkers of Dante's time, who thought that the strongest foot (pesfirmior) was the left, Freccero associates the right foot with intellect ("the beginning of choice, the apprehension, or the reason") and the left one with affect.²⁵ Rooted still to the earth, the left foot prevents the traveler from advancing properly, from disengaging himself from earthly concerns and setting his mind on higher things.

Unable, without the help of divine grace, to reach the good perfectly, the poet struggles on, hobbled by the eager love of his left foot, which wishes to remain attached to the world of sensation, and urged by the intellect of his right to press ahead with the journey of metaphysical discovery; Dante must, as best he can, use his intellect to fashion something coherent out of his blurred perceptions and uncertain intuitions. He knows he sees now "through a glass, darkly, but then face to face," in the words of Saint Paul, and believes in the promise that "then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Saint Paul's words are from his discourse on charity, the same charity that Beatrice described with the image of the moving feet and that now binds

Dante to earthly things. To be faithful to what he has been allowed to see and understand, Dante must, on one hand, not be distracted from the charity, the "warmth of love" that has been granted him, and, on the other, sharpen his intellect to put the forthcoming vision into words. Beatrice tells him:

I see distinctly how in your intellect the eternal light shines brightly, which once seen, kindles love forever.²⁶

As he approaches his intended goal, Dante's love will have to turn to the ineffable Supreme Good, and his intellect will have to reach down to his fellow pilgrims on earth. And both to embrace the vision and to report it, Dante understands that he must lie, lie truthfully, admit "non-false errors,"²⁷ construct a monster much like Geryon, but one that will exalt and not betray its matter. And so, like all true poets who acknowledge their faulty intellect and their restraining affect, Dante offers us, his readers, short-legged lies so that we too can share something of the journey and follow hopefully our ongoing quests.

The knowledge writers seek, through both affect and intellect, lurks in the tension between what they perceive and what they imagine, and that fragile knowledge is passed on to us, their readers, as a further tension be­tween our reality and the reality of the page. The experience of the world and the experience of the word compete for our intelligence and love. We want to know where we are because we want to know who we are: we magically believe that context and contents explain one another. We are self-conscious animals—perhaps the only self-conscious animals on the planet—and we are capable of experiencing the world by asking questions, putting our curiosity into words, as literature proves. In a continuous process of give-and-take, the world provides us with the puzzling evidence that we turn into stories, which in turn lend the world a doubtful sense and an uncertain coherence that lead to further questions. The world gives us the clues that allow us to perceive it, and we order those clues in narrative sequences that seem to us truer than the truth, making them up as we go, so that what we tell about reality be­comes for us reality. "By the very fact that I get to know them, things cease to exist," says the Devil in Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony. "Shape is perhaps an error of your senses, substance a fancy of your thoughts. Unless, since the world is in a constant flow of things, appearance, on the contrary, is the truest of truths, and illusion the only reality."²⁸ Illusion is the only re­ality: this is perhaps what we mean when we say that a writer knows.

notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. All biblical quotations are from the King James Bible.

Introduction

"Infants talk, in part, to re-establish 'being-with' experiences . . . or to re-establish the 'personal order'": Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), p. 171.

Michel de Montaigne, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond," 2.12, in The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991), p. 591. Ac­cording to Pausanias (2nd century c.E.), the sayings "Know Thyself" and "Nothing Too Much" were inscribed on the front of the Temple of Delphi and dedicated to Apollo. See Pausanias, Guide to Greece, vol. 1: Central Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1979), 10.24, p. 466. There are six Platonic dialogues which discuss the Delphic saying: Charmides (164D), Protagoras (343B), Phaedrus (229E), Philebus (48C), Laws (2.923A), I. Alcibiades (124A, 129A, and 132C). See The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ¹973⁾.

Michel de Montaigne, "On Physiognomy," 3.12, in Complete Essays, p. 1176.

Michel de Montaigne, "On Educating Children," 1.26, in Complete Essays, p. 171.

Job 28:20. The book of Job provides no answers but poses a series of "real ques­tions" that are, according to Northrop Frye, "stages in formulating better questions; an-

(Opposite) Dante and Virgil meet Plutus, the ancient god of riches. Woodcut illustrating Canto VII of the Inferno, printed in 1487 with commentary by Cristoforo Landino. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

swers cheat us of the right to do this." See Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, ed. Alvin A. Lee, volume 19 in the Collected Works (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 217. Michel de Montaigne, "On Democritus and Heraclitus," 1.50, in Complete Essays, p. 337.

See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 63-65.

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London: John Calder, 1983), p. 46.

Honore de Balzac, Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (Paris: Editions Climats, 1991), p. 58.

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 245.

Putting a question into words distances our own experience and allows it to be explored verbally. "Language forces a space between interpersonal experience as lived and as represented": Stern, Interpersonal Worldofthe Infant, p. 182.

MS lat. 6332, Bibliotheque nationale, Paris, reproduced in M. B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 32-33.

Paradiso, XXV:2, "al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra."

Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), p. 81; Jorge Luis Borges, "Prologo," in Nueve ensayos dantescos, ed. Joaquin Arce (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982), pp. 85-86; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Reading Dante (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 1; Osip Mandelstam, "Conversation on Dante," in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), p. 151; Olga Sedakova, "Sotto il cielo della violenza," in Esperimenti Danteschi: Inferno 2008, ed. Simone Invernizzi (Milan: Casa Editrice Mar- iett, 2009), p. 107.

This text was never written, but in 1965 I witnessed Borges and Bioy discuss their intention to write it as part of their collection of mock essays, Cronicas de Bustos Domecq (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1967).

Paradiso, XVIII:20-2i, "Volgiti e ascolta; / che non pur ne' miei occhi e paradiso."

Martin Buber, Tales ofthe Hasidim, vol. 1, trans. Olga Marx (Oxford: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1948), p. 76.

Inferno, I:9i, "A te convien tenere altro viaggio."

Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," 2.12, p. 512, quoting Purgatorio XXVL34—36, "cosi per entro loro schiera bruna / s'ammusa l'una con l'altra formica, / forse a spiar lor via e lor fortuna."

Michel de Montaigne, "On Educating Children," 1.26, in Complete Essays, p. 170; Inferno XI:93, "Non men che saver, dubbiar m'aggrata."

Paradiso II:i—4, "O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, / desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti / dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, // tornate a riveder li vostri liti."

What Is Curiosity?

Chapter opener: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound ofthe Baskervilles (1902) (Lon­don: John Murray, 1971), p. 28.

Roger Chartier, "El nacimiento del lector moderno. Lectura, curiosidad, ociosidad, raridad," in Historia y formas de la curiosidad, ed. Francisco Jarauta (Santandor: Cuader- nos de la Fundacion Boti'n, 2012), pp. 183—210; The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition, gen. ed. Alexander Jones (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 905.

Plato, Theaetetus 149A—B, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

¹973⁾> pp. ⁸53^—54.

Inferno, VIII:i, "Io dico, seguitando, che assai prima."

Giovanni Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, ed. Luigi Sasso (Milan: Gar- zanti, 1995), p. 70.

Ibid., pp. 71—72. Luigi Sasso notes that these verses come from the letter from Brother Ilaro to Uguccione della Faggiuola preserved in Boccaccio's own Zibaldone Lau- renziano; the letter itself is most probably the creation of Boccaccio himself.

Francesco Petrarca, Familiares, 21:15, quoted in John Ahern, "What Did the First Copies of the Comedy Look Like?" in Dante for the New Millennium, ed. Teodolina Bar- olini and H. Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 5.

Gennaro Ferrante, "Forme, funzioni e scopi del tradurre Dante da Coluccio Salu- tati a Giovanni da Serravalle," in Annali dell'Istituto Italianopergli Studi Storici, 25 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010), pp. 147-82.

Inferno I:ii4, "per loco etterno"; IP31—32, "Ma io, perche venirvi? o chi 'l con­cede? / Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono."

Apocalypse de Pierre, 16:2—3, and Apocalypse de Paul, 32 a—b, in Ecrits apocryphes chretiens, vol. 1, ed. Francois Bovon and Pierre Geoltrain (Paris: Gallimard, 199), pp. 773,

Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, II:5, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dan- tesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), p. 3.

Dante Alighieri, Questio de aqua et terra, I:3, in Opere di Dante, p. 467.

Paradiso, XXXIII:33, "si che 'l sommo piacer li si dispieghi"; Convivio III:XI, 5, in Opere di Dante, p. 229.

Paradiso X:89, "la tua sete"; X:90, "se non com'acqua ch'al mar non si cala."

G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 59.

Ibid., p. 21.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, prologue, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. xix.

Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980.a.2i; Thomas Aquinas, "Exposition of Metaphysics," 1.1—3, in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pen­guin, 1998), pp. 721—24.

Saint Augustine, The Retractions, 2.24, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 60, ed. and trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), p. 32; Saint Augustine, De Morib. Eccl. 21, quoted in Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 2.2, q. 167, art. 1, vol. 4, p. 1868.

Aquinas quotes Jerome (Epist. XXI adDamas): "We see priests forsaking the Gos­pels and the prophets, and reading stage-plays, and singing the love songs of pastoral idylls" (Summa Theologica, pt. 2, art. 1, vol. 4, p. 1869).

Bernard de Clairvaux, Sermones super Canticum Canticorum, Ser. 36, in S. Bernardi Opera II, ed. J. Leclerq (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1958), p. 56; Alcuin, De Grammat- ica, PL 101, 850 B, quoted in Carmen Lozano Guillen, "El concepto de gramatica en el Renacimiento," Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 41 (1992): 90.

Bruno Nardi, "L'origine dell'anima umana secondo Dante," in Studi di filosofia medievale (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, i960), p. 27.

Paradiso XXXIII:i42—45, "All' alta fantasia qui manco possa; / ma gia volgeva il mio disiro e il velle, / si come rota ch' egualmente e mossa, / l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."

David Hume, "My Own Life" (1776), quoted in Ernest C. Mossner, "Introduc­tion," in Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), p. 17.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London, 1739), title page; Hume, "My Own Life," quoted in Mossner, "Introduction," p. 17.

Hume, "My Own Life," quoted in Mossner, "Introduction," p. 17.

Isaiah Berlin, The Age of Enlightenment: The Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1956), quoted in Mossner, "Introduction," p. 7; Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Mossner, p. 4¹.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Mossner, pp. 499—500; Aquinas, Summa Theo­logica, pt. 2.2, q. 167, vol. 4, p. 1870.

Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 495, 497.

The chevalier de Jaucourt, "Curiosite," in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alem- bert, Encyclopedie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers (Paris, 1751), vol. 4, pp. 577-7⁸.

Inferno, XXVIII:i39-4i, "Perch' io partii cosi giunte persone, / partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso! / dal suo principio ch' e in questo troncone."

Boccaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, p. 5i.

Inferno, XX:i9-2i, "Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto / di tua lezione, or pensa per te stesso / com' io potea tener lo viso asciutto."

See Denise Heilbronn, "Master Adam and the Fat-Bellied Lute," Dante Studies i0i

(i983): 5i-65.

Inferno, XXX:i3i-32, "Or pur mira! / che per poco e teco non mi risso"; i48, "che voler cio udire e bassa voglia."

Seneca, "On Leisure," 5.3, in Moral Essays, vol. 2, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, i990), pp. i90-9i. I have slightly altered the translation.

What Do We Want to Know?

Chapter opener: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; ou, De l'education, bk. i, ed. Charles Wirz and Pierre Burgelin (Paris: Gallimard, i969), p. 89.

Inferno, XXVI:25, 29, "Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa, / . . . vede lucciole giu per la vallea"; 52—53, "chi e 'n quel foco che vien si diviso / di sopra"; 82, "quando nel mondo li alti verse scrissi"; 93, "prima che si Enea la nomasse."

Ibid., 97—98, "dentro a me l'ardore / ch'i' ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto"; Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (i842), in Selected Poems, ed. Michael Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ^63), p. 88.

Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Lanfranco Caretti, XV:25 (Milan: Mon- dadori, i957), p. 277.

Abd-ar-Rahman b. Khaldun Al-Hadrami, Al-Muqaddina: Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, translated from the Arabic and edited by Vincent Monteil, 3rd ed., 6.39 (Paris: Sinbad/Actes Sud, i997), p. 948. Ibn Khaldun quotes Qur'an 2Л42.

Inferno, XI:60, "e simile lordura"; XXVL58—63, "e dentro da la lor fiamma si geme / l'agguato del caval che fe la porta / onde usci de' Romani il gentil seme. // Pianges- visi entro l'arte per che, morta, / Deidemia ancor si duol d'Achille, / e del Palladio pena vi si porta." Leah Schwebel, "'Simile lordura,' Altra Bolgia: Authorial Conflation in Inferno 26," Dante Studies i33 (20i2): 47—65.

See Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet ofthe Desert: History and Allegory in the "Di­vine Comedy" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i979), pp. 66—ю6.

It is not clear whether Dante's Ulysses left on his last fatal journey after his return to Ithaca (as Tennyson believed) or whether he never returned and kept on traveling after his Homeric adventures.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Nick Hern Books, i995), p. 3².

"Philo," in Louis Jacob, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford Uni­versity Press, i995), p. 377.

ю. Saint Augustine, On Genesis (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002), p. 83.

Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. Dorothea Wender (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i973), pp. 42, 6i; Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome, quoted in Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, i962), pp. 58—59.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Letter to Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, December 26, i880, in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, vol. i, ed. Sidney Colvin (New York: Scribner's, i899), pp. 227—29.

Paradiso XXXIII:94—96, "Un punto solo m'e maggior letargo / che venticinque sec- oli a la 'mpresa / che fe Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo."

Cited in "Questions," in Jacob, Jewish Religion, p. 399.

Paradiso, XXXIII:85—87, "Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna, / legato con amore in un volume, / cio che per l'universo si squaderna."

See Agostino Ramelli, Diverse et artificiose macchine (Paris, 1588). Discussed in Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografici nell'eta della stampa, (Milan: Einaudi, 1995), p. 64.

Orazio Toscanella, Armonia di tutti i principali retori (Venice, 1569). Discussed in Bolzoni, Stanza della memoria, pp. 69—73.

"La scienza del perche," quoted in Bolzoni, Stanza della memoria, p. 48.

Purgatorio, II:ii—i2, "gente che pensa suo cammino / che va col core, e col corpo dimora." The canto ends with a simile of the opposite impulse: "come uom che va, ne sa dove riesca" (i32), "like a man who goes, but doesn't know where he'll come out."

Carlo Ossola, Introduzione alla Divina Commedia (Venice: Marsilio, 20i2), p. 40.

Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:72, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, i92i), p. 440; Inferno, I:9i, "A te convien tenere altro viaggio"; V:22, "Non impedir lo suo fatale andare."

Seneca, Epistulae morales, ed. and trans. R. M. Gummere, vol. i, Ep. 88 (Cam­bridge: Harvard University Press, ^85); Heraclite, Allegories d'Homere, 70:8, translated from the Greek by Felix Buffiere (Paris: Belles Lettres, i962), p. 75; Dio Chrysostom, "Dis­course 7i," in Discourses 61—80, trans. H. Lamar Crosby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, i95i), p. i65; for Epictetus see Silvia Montiglio, From Villain to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 20ii), pp. 87—94.

See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, ^64), p. 77.

³

How Do We Reason?

Chapter opener: Fernando de Rojas y "Antiguo Autor," La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calistoy Melibea, 3.3, ed. Francisco J. Lobera, Guillermo Seres, Paloma Diaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Inigo Ruiz Arzaluz, and Francisco Rico (Madrid: Real Academia Espanola, 20ii), p. ii0; Simone Weil, quoted in Roberto Calasso, I quarantanove gradini (Milan: Adelphi, i99i), p. i2i.

Paradiso, XXIV:25—27, "Pero salta la penna e non lo scrivo: / che l'imagine nostra a cotai pieghe, / non che 'l parlare, e troppo color vivo."

Ibid., 40, "ama bene e bene spera e crede"; 46—5i, "Si come il baccialier s'arma e non parla / fin che l'maestro la question propone, / per approvarla, non per terminarla, // cosi m'armava io d'ogne ragione / mentre ch'ella dicea, per esser presto / a tal querente e a tal professione."

Ibid., 79—8i, "Se quantunque s'acquista / giu per dottrina, fosse cosi 'nteso, / non li avria loco ingegno di sofista."

Bonaventure, Les Sentences 2, in Les Sentences; Questions sur Dieu: Commentaire du premier livre de sentences de Pierre Lombard, translated from the Latin by Marc Ozilou (Paris: PUF, 2002), p. i.

See Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, i955), pp. 246-50.

Aristotle, Topics, Books I and VIII with Excerpts from Related Texts, trans. Robin Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, i997), p. i0i (slanderers and thieves); Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations; On Coming-to-be and Passing Away; On the Cosmos, trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200i), esp. pp. I3-I5 (leading others into error); Aristotle, Topics, p. 127 (irrelevant premise).

G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 1.

Thomas Mautner, The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2005), p. 583; Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 169; Lucian, "The Passing of Peregrinus," in Lucian, ed. and trans. A. M. Harmon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), vol. 5, chap. 13.

Quoted in Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y Espana, translated from the French by An­tonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2007), p. 506.

Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 1, chap. 19, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 66.

See Lucien Febvre, Leprobleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle: La religion de Rabelais (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942).

See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Blooming- ton: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 362-63.

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 5, chap. 48, p. 806; chap. 37, p. 784; chap. 48, p. 807.

Deleuze, quoted in Barbara Cassin, L'Effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 20.

See W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 282.

See Kerferd, Sophistic Movement, p. 38.

The Greek Sophists, ed. and trans. John Dillon and Tania Gregel (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2003), pp. 119-32.

Plato, Lesser Hippias, 363c-d, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 202.

W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (London: Rout- ledge, i960), p. 66.

I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), pp. 41-42; Harry Sidebottom, "Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and the Philosopher," in Philostratus, ed. Ewen Bowie and Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 77-79.

Xenophon, "On Hunting" 13, quoted in Jacqueline de Romilly, Les Grands Sophistes dans l'Athene de Pericles (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988), p. 55.

Philostratus, quoted in Sidebottom, "Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and the Philosopher," p. 80; Lucian of Samosata, The Rhetorician's Vade Mecum, 15, in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H. W. and F. Fowler (Oxford: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1905), p. 52.

See Mario Untersteiner, Isofisti (1948; repr. Milan: Mondadori, 2008), p. 280.

Plato, The Republic, bk. 5, 462c—e, 463a—e, trans. Paul Shorey, in Collected Dia­logues ofPlato, pp. 701—3.

Plato, Protagoras, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 319-20.

Plato, Lesser Hippias, 365b, p. 202.

Ibid., 376a-b, p. 214.

Ibid., 376c, p. 214.

Stone, Trial ofSocrates, p. 57.

Michel de Montaigne, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond," 2.12, in The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1991), p. 656.

George Steiner, "Where Was Plato?" Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 2013, p. 11.

Plato, Theaetetus, 149A—B, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, pp. 853-54.

⁴

How Can We See What We Think?

Chapter opener: Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 25.

R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), p. 75.

Paradiso, XVIII:73—78, "E come augelli surti di rivera, / quasi congratulando a lor pasture, / fanno di se or tonda or altra schiera, // si dentro ai lumi sante creature / volitando cantavano, e faciensi / or D, or I, or L in sue figure."

In Fariduddin Attar's Conference of the Birds (twelfth century), the birds set out to seek their king, the Simurgh. After many adventures, they realize that they all are the Simurgh and the Simurgh is all of them. Jorge Luis Borges made the association between the two birds in "El Simurgh y el aguila," in Nueve ensayos dantescos (Madrid: Espasa- Calpe: 1982), pp. 139—44.

Purgatorio, X:95, "visibile parlare"; Inferno, III:i—9, "Per me si va ne la citta do- lente, / per me si va ne l'etterno dolore, / per me si va tra la perduta gente. // Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore; / fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapienza e 'l primo amore. // Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create / se non etterne, e io etterno duro. / Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

Inferno, III:i7, "genti dolorose"; 21, "dentro alle segrete cose."

Purgatorio, IX:ii2—i4; 131—32, "Intrate; ma facciovi accorti / che di fuor torna chi 'n dietro si guata."

Saint Augustine, De Magistro, 8, in Les Confessions, precedees de Dialogues philoso- phiques, bk. i, ed. Lucien Jerphagnon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 370.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).

Plato, Phaedrus, 274d-e, trans. R. Hackforth, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 520; G. K. Chesterton, "A Defense of Nonsense," in The Defendant (London: Dent, 1901), p. 14.

Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields (New York: Walker, 2005), p. 82.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales, in Obras completas del Inca Garcilaso, vol. 2 (Madrid: Coleccion Rivadeneira, i960).

Ibid., p. 67.

All the information on Sansevero comes from the superb edition of Sansevero's Apologetic Letter, translated into Spanish and edited by Jose Emilio and Lucio Adrian Burucua: Raimondo di Sangro, Carta Apologetica (Buenos Aires: UNSAM Edita, 2010).

This is true in both written and oral societies. "All societies known as 'oral' employ two different and parallel communication systems: one based on language, the other on sight": Anne-Marie Christin, L'Image ecrite ou la deraison graphique (Paris: Flammarion, ⁱ995⁾> p. 7.

Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style (Vancouver: Hartley and Marks, 1992) p. 9.

See Marcia and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), p. 102.

Pedro Cieza de Leon, Cronica del Peru: Cuarta parte, vol. 3, ed. Laura Gutierrez Arbulu (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru y Academia Nacional de la His- toria, 1994), p. 232.

Bringhurst, Elements of Typographic Style, p. 19.

5

How Do We Question?

Chapter opener: Solomon Volkov, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet's Journey Through the Twentieth Century, trans. Marian Schwartz (New York: Free Press, 1998), p. 139; Joseph Brodsky, "The Condition We Call Exile," in On Grief and Other Reasons: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 33; Brodsky, "Venetian Stanzas I," in To Urania (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 90.

1. Purgatorio, III:34-42, "Matto e chi spera che nostra ragione / possa trascorrer la infinita via / che tiene una sustanza in tre persone. // State contenti, umana gente, al quia: / che, se potuto aveste veder tutto, / mestier no era parturir Maria; // e disiar vedeste sanza frutto / tai che sarebbe lor disio quetato, / ch' etternalmente e dato lor per lutto."; 43-44, "io dico d'Aristotile e di Plato / e di molt' altri."

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. i, q. 2, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (i948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, i98i), vol. i, p. i2; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, I:v.8, in The Advancement of Learn­ing and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i974), p. 35.

Paradiso, XXVI:ii5—i7, "non il gustar del legno / fu per se la cagion di tanto es- ilio, / ma solamente il trapassar del segno"; i24—32, "La lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta / innanzi che a l'ovra iconsummabile / fosse la gente di Nembrot attenta: // che nullo effetto mai razi'onabile, / per lo piacere uman che rinovella / seguendo il cielo, sem- pre fu durabile. // Opera naturale 'ch'uom favella; / ma cosi o cosi, natura lascia / poi fare a voi secondo che v'abbella."

Ibid., i32—38.

Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, i99i), pp. i4—i5.

See Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., vol. i: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, i998), pp. 5—8.

Quoted in Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorset, i974), p. i2. In the Jewish tradition, the Mishnah is held to be infallible.

Cf. Matthew 6:22—23: "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light."

Jorge Luis Borges, "La biblioteca de Babel," in Ficciones (Buenos Aires: Sur, i944), pp. ⁸5^—95.

The ten sefirot are the Crown, wisdom, understanding, loving kindness, power or judgment, beauty, victory, splendor, foundation, and sovereignty. There are said to be 6i3 mitzvot, of which 365 are negative ("do not") and 248 positive ("do this"). See Louis Ja­cobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i995), pp. 450,

Purgatorio, XXII:i37—38, "cadea de l'alta roccia un liquor chiaro / e si spandeva per le foglie suso." In Dante's condemnation of the Epicureans in Inferno VI, only their notion that the soul dies with the body is mentioned, not the Epicurean exaltation of pleasure.

On the spring, see Purgatorio, XXIL65; Purgatorio, XXL97—98, "mamma / fumi, e fummi nutrice, poetando."

Purgatorio, XXI:i3i—32, "Frate / non far, che tu se' ombra e ombra vedi"; ц6, "trattando l'ombre come cosa salda"; Inferno, L82—84, "lungo studio e 'l grande amore / che m' ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume."

See Sandra Debenedetti Stow, Dante e la mistica ebraica (Florence: Editrice La gi- untina, 2004), pp. i9—25.

Umberto Eco, La ricerca della linguaperfetta (Rome: Laterza, i993), pp. 49—5i.

See Stow, Dante e la mistica ebraica, pp. 4i—5i; Paradiso, XXXIII:i40, "la mia mente fu percossa."

See Plato, The Republic, bk. 2, 376d—e, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dia­logues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton Univer­sity Press, i973), p. 623; Purgatorio, XV:ii7.

See Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, Cima da Conegliano: Mattre de la Renaissance venitienne, translated from the Italian by Renaud Temperini (Paris: Reunion des musees nationaux, 20i2), p. 32.

H. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduccion a la literatura talmudica y midrdsica (Valencia: Institucion San Jeronimo, i988), p. 76.

See B. Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel, Statesman and Philosopher, 5th ed., rev. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, i998), p. i22.

See Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 72.

Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer: The Chapters ofRabbi Eliezer the Great According to the Text of the Manuscript Belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna, trans. Gerald Friedlander (New York: Sepher Hermon Press, i98i), p. 63.

See Eco, Ricerca della linguaperfetta, p. 50.

See Attilio Milano, Storia degli ebrei in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, ^63), p. 668; Rainer Maria Rilke, "Eine Szene aus dem Ghetto von Venedig," in Geschichten vom lieben Gott (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, i955), p. 94.

The mathematically backed promise of salvation conjured up by Abravanel (which no doubt Abravanel himself would have repudiated with horror) cast its lengthy shadow over the next centuries of Jewish patience, so that, as late as i734, the rabbinical council of Venice had to issue a decree of excommunication against a certain Mose Chai'm Luz- zatto for proclaiming one of his associates to be the expected Messiah, his arrival inexpli­cably delayed for 23i years since Abravanel's calculation. See Riccardo Calimani, The Ghetto of Venice, trans. Katherine Silberblatt Wolfthal (New York: M. Evans, ^87), pp. ²3ⁱ—35.

Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 2008), pp. 358—59.

See Marvin J. Heller, Printing the Talmud: A History of the Earliest Printed Editions ofthe Talmud (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Im Hasefer, i992), p. 7.

Bomberg, quoted in Calimani, Ghetto ofVenice, pp. 8i—82.

Editoria in ebraico a Venezia, catalogo de la mostra organizzata da Casa di Rispar- mio di Venezia, Comune di Sacile (Venice: Arsenale Editrice, i99i).

Heller, Printing the Talmud, pp. i35—82.

Quoted ibid., p. i42.

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Invito al Talmud, trans. Roberto Salvadori (Turin: Bottati Bor- inghieri, 2009), p. 56; for the map, see the front endpaper in Calimani, Ghetto ofVenice.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane, i909), p. ю8.

I am grateful to Arthur Kiron, of the Jewish Institute Collections at the University of Pennsylvania, for this information. Mr. Kiron referred me to George M. Stratton, "The Mnemonic Feat of the 'Shass Pollak,'" Psychological Review 24, no. 3 (May i9i7): i8i—87.

Saint Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaemeron, i3.i2, quoted in Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, i98i), p. 73.

See, e.g., Marina del Negro Karem, "Immagini di Potere: Il Leone Andante nel

Battistero di San Marco di Venezia," Atti dell'Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte i62 (2003-4): i52-7i.

37. Mishneh Torah: The Book of Knowledge by Maimonides, edited according to the Bodleian codex, with introduction, Biblical and Talmudical references, notes, and English translation by Moses Hyamson (Jerusalem: Feldheim, i98i).

6

What Is Language?

Chapter opener: Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson Potter, i960), p. 269; Paradiso, XXXIII:i40-4i, "la mia mente fu percossa / da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne"; Inferno, XXVIII:i39-4i.

See, e.g., Inferno, XXX:i30-32; Purgatorio, XIII:i33-4i.

Inferno, XXVIII:4-6, "Ogne lingua per certo verria meno / per lo nostro sermone e per la mente / c'hanno a tanto comprender poco seno."

Ovide, Les Metamorphoses, 6.382-400, bilingual edition, edited and translated from the Latin by Daniele Robert (Paris: Actes Sud, 200i), pp. 246-49; Paradiso, I:i9-2i, "Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue / si come quando Marsi'a traesti / de la vagina de le membra sue."

Inferno, I:i-7.

Though there is no proof that Cervantes read the Commedia, some of its episodes were well known in the seventeenth century, and the scene in which Don Quixote attacks the towering windmills which he believes are giants may have been inspired by the epi­sode in which Dante believes that the giants are towers.

Genesis 6:4; Dante's source for the story, other than Genesis itself, is Saint Augus­tine's commentary; see The City ofGod, i5.23, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i984), p. 639. Inferno, XXXI: 76-8i, "Elli stessi s'accusa; / questi e Nem- brotto per lo cui mal coto / pur un linguaggio nel mondo non s'usa. // Lascianlo stare e non parliamo a voto; / che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio / come 'l suo ad altrui, ch'a nullo e noto."

Domenico Guerri, Di alcuni versi dotti della "Divina Commedia"(Citta di Castello: Casa Tipografica-Editrice S. Lappi, i908), pp. i9-47.

Jorge Luis Borges, "La muerte y la brujula," in La muerte y la brujula (Buenos Aires: Emece Editores, i95i), p. i3i.

Inferno, VII:i. A brief history of the various interpretations of the line is to be found in Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi's edition of the Commedia (Milan: Mondadori, i994), p. 233. (Following medieval tradition, Dante may have confused Pluto, god of the Underworld, and Plutus, god of riches.) Inferno VII:i4, "l'alber fiacca."

Herodotus, The Histories, II:2, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, revised, with an intro­duction and notes by A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i972), pp. ^9-30.

Salimbene de Adam, Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, ed. and trans. Joseph L. Baid, B. Giuseppe, and J. R. Kane (Tempe: University of Arizona Press, i986), p. i56.

Oliver Sacks, Awakenings, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1983), pp. 188-89; Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Panther," in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982), pp. 24-25.

Inferno, XXXI:i27-29, "Ancor ti puo nel mondo render fama, / ch'el vive, e lunga vita ancor aspetta / se 'nnanzi tempo grazia a se nol chiama"; 142-43, "al fondo che divora / Lucifero con Giuda"; 145, "come albero in nave."

Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols., vol. 1: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 177-80. Ginz­berg lists rabbinical sources giving God, at the time of the Creation, as the first ruler. God was followed by seven mortals: Nimrod, Joseph, Solomon, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, and Alexander of Macedon. These in turn will be followed by the ninth and last universal ruler, the Messiah. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 5: From the Creation to Exodus, p. 199.

Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 180.

Michael A. Arbib, How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis (Ox­ford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. ix.

Ibid., pp. 84-85.

Franz Kafka, "Ein Bericht fur eine Akademie," in Die Erzdhlungen, ed. Roger Her­mes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Tagebuch Verlag, 2000), pp. 322-33. In 1906, the Ar­gentine writer Leopoldo Lugones imagined a story in which a man tries to teach an ape to speak, convinced that apes are able to speak but that for thousands of years they have not done so in order not be forced to work for humans. In the story, the man first tries a method for teaching deaf-mutes, then resorts to threats and punishments; nothing suc­ceeds. The efforts end up by weakening the poor beast to the point where the man under­stands that it is dying. Suddenly, in his agony, the ape cries out ("how to explain the tone of a voice that had not spoken for ten thousand centuries?") the words "Master, water, master, my master." For Lugones, in the beginning humans and apes shared a common language: Leopoldo Lugones, "Yzur," in Las fuerzas extranas (Buenos Aires: Arnoldo Moen y hermanos, 1906), pp. 133-44.

Paradiso, I:70-7i, "Trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria"; Thomas Aqui­nas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 12, art. 6, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. 53.

From the Niti Sataka of Bhartrihari. Quoted in Barbara Stoler Miller, ed. and trans., The Hermit and the Love-Thief: Sanskrit Poems of Bhartrihari and Bilhana (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 3.

I-Tsing, quoted in Amartya Sen, "China and India," in The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 161.

See R. C. Zaehner, ed. and trans., Hindu Scriptures (New York: Knopf, 1992), p. x.

The Upanishads, trans. Swami Paramananda (Hoo, U.K.: Axiom, 2004), p. 93; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Brahma," in Selected Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Wil­liam H. Gilman (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 471.

See Romila Thapar, A History of India, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pelican, 1966), pp. 140-42.

K. Raghavan Pillai, ed. and trans., The "Vakyapadtya": CriticalText of Cantos I and II, with English Translation, Summary of Ideas and Notes (Dehli: Motilal Banarsidass, i97i), p. i.

B. K. Matilal, The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Lan­guage (Delhi: Oxford University Press, i992), p. 52.

Jorge Luis Borges, "La biblioteca de Babel," in El jardm de los senderos que se bi- furcan (Buenos Aires: Sur, i94i), pp. 85—95;. Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.37.93, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 2i3, quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, "La biblioteca total," Sur 59 (August i939): i3—i6.

Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 25b

See Tandra Patnaik: Sabda: A Study of Bhartrihari's Philosophy of Language (New Delhi: D. K. Print World, i994).

Italo Calvino, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, i979), p. 7².

Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, i99i), p. 23.

Ibid., p. 99.

⁷

Who Am I?

Chapter opener: Inferno, XIII:i05, "che non e giusto aver cio ch'om si toglie."

Inferno, I:66, "qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!"

Craig E. Stephenson, "Introduction," Jung and Moreno: Essays on the Theatre of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 20i4), p. i4.

Purgatorio, XXII:i27—29, "Elli givan dinanzi, ed io soletto / diretro, ed ascoltava i lor sermoni / h'a poetar mi davano intelletto"; XXIII:32—33, "Chi nel viso de li uomini legge 'omo' / ben avria quivi conosciuta l'emme"; Pietro Alighieri, Il "Commentarium" di Pietro Alighieri nelle redazioni Ashburnhamiana e Ottoboniana, ed. Roberto della Vedova and Maria Teresa Silvotti (Florence: Olschki, i978).

See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 3.6, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cam­bridge: Harvard University Press, i995), vol. i, p. 28i; Plato, "Cratylus," trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i973), p. 422.

Paradiso, VI:i0, "Cesare fui, e son Giustiniano"; XII:68—69, "quinci si mosse spirito a nomarlo / dal possessivo di cui era tutto"; Vincenzo Presta, "Giovanna," in Enciclopedia Dantesca, vol. 9 (Milan: Mondadori, 2005), p. 524; Paradiso, XII:79—8i, "Oh padre suo veramente Felice! / oh madre sua veramente Giovanna, / se, interpretata, val come si dice!"

Purgatorio, XXX: 62—63, "quando mi volsi al suon del nome mio, / che di necessita qui si registra"; 73—75, "Guardaci ben! Ben son, ben son Beatrice. / Come degnasti d'ac- cedere al monte? / non sapei tu che qui e l'uom felice?

Ibid., 76—78, "Li occhi mi cadder giu nel chiaro fonte; / ma veggendomi in esso, i trassi a l'erba, / tanta vergogna mi gravo la fronte."

William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 4Л.48—49 and 4.3.37^74, in The Complete Works ofShakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, ^69).

William Butler Yeats, "A Woman Young and Old," in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, i979), p. 308; Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in Col­lected Dialogues ofPlato, pp. 542—45.

David Macey, "Mirror-phase," in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (Har- mondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2000), p. 255; Arthur Rimbaud, Lettre a Georges Izambard, i3 mai i87i, in Correspondance, ed. Jean-Jacques Lefrere (Paris: Fayard, 2007), p. 64. An almost identical expression is used in Rimbaud's letter to Paul Demeny, i5 mai i97i.

Carl Gustav Jung, "Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation" in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i980), p. 279; Saint Augustine, Confessions, ii.28, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i96i), p. 278.

Jung, "Conscious, Unconscious and Individuation," p. 275; Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Win­ston, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, ^65), p. 359.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 3i8.

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gard­ner (New York: Clarkson Potter, i960), p. 22.

Ibid., pp. 22—23; Osip Mandelstam, "Conversation on Dante," in The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004), p. П7.

Purgatorio, XXVIII:i39—4i.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, i962), p. 54.

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. i58.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.93, in Complete Works; Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 30, 3i.

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. i6i.

Ibid., p. 67.

Ibid., p. 32; Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, p. 238.

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, pp. 37—38, 59, 75; Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, pp. 20i, 287; Oscar Wilde, "Narcissus," in Poems in Prose, in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London: Collins, i948), p. 844.

Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 39.

8

What Are We Doing Here?

Chapter opener: Peter Levi, Virgil: His Life and Times (London: Duckworth, i998), p. 35; Drieu La Rochelle, L'Homme a cheval(Paris: Gallimard, i943), p. i5; Jose Hernandez, El gaucho Martm Fierro (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pardo, i962), pp. 44, i0 (ellipsis in the original).

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 3 (Lon­don: Chesterfield Society, n.d.), pp. 208, 209; Purgatorio, XXVIII:2, "foresta spessa"; In­ferno, I:2, "selva oscura"; Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 214.

Inferno XIII:i-ii, "Non ra ancor di la Nesso arrivato, / quando noi ci mettemmo per un bosco / che da neun sentiero era segnato. // Non fronda verde, ma di color fosco, / non rami schietti, ma nodosi e 'nvolti; / non pomi v'eran, ma stecchi con tosco. // Non han si aspri sterpi ne si folti / quelle fiere selvagge che 'n odio hanno / tra Cecina e Cor- netto i luoghi colti."

Inferno, XIII:2i, "cose che torrien fede al mio sermone"; 32, "Perche mi schiante?"; 35-39, "ricomocio a dir: 'Perche mi scerpi? / non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno? // Uomini fummo, e or siam fatti sterpi: / ben dovrebb' esser la tua man piu pia / se state fossimo anime di serpe."; Virgil, Aeneid, 3.19-33, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, 2 vols., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 348-50.

Inferno, XIII:52-53, "'n vece / d'alcun' ammenda"; 72, "ingiusto fece me contra me giusto."

Saint Augustine, City of God, 1.20, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1972), p. 32.

Inferno, XIII:37, "uomini fummo"; Olga Sedakova, "Sotto il cielo della violenza," in Esperimenti Danteschi: Inferno 2008, ed. Simone Invernizzi (Milan: Casa Editrice Mar- ietti, 2009), p. 116; Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), p. 9.

See Sir Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (Oxford: Clar­endon, 1980), p. 194.

Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. 212.

Inferno, ^39-40, "quando l'amor divino / mosse di prima quelle cose belle." Con- trapasso is a term Dante borrowed from Thomas Aquinas to describe the punishment or purgation of a specific sin. For example, thieves, who take what does not belong to them, are punished by losing everything that does belong to them, including their human shape.

Virgil, Georgics, 1.155-59, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, vol. 1, pp. 90-91.

Porphyry, De abstinentia, 1.6, and Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, 16.24.62, quoted in J. Donald Hughes, "How the Ancients Viewed Deforestation," Journal of Field Archeology 10, no. 4 (winter 1983): 435-45.

Alfred Wold, "Saving the Small Farm: Agriculture in Roman Literature," Agricul­ture and Human Values 4, nos. 2-3 (spring-summer 1987): 65-75. In eighteenth-century England, Samuel Johnson mocked his contemporaries' bucolic interests. Commenting on a certain Dr. Grainger's "The Sugar-Cane, a Poem," he remarked to his biographer and friend James Boswell: "What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the 'Parsely-bed, a Poem,' or 'The Cabbage-garden, a Poem'": see James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), vol. 3, p. 170. In South Amer­ica, the classic nineteenth-century example is the Chilean Andres Bello's "Silva a la agri- cutura en la zona torrida," "Ode to Agriculture in the Torrid Zone."

Inferno, XL48, "spregiando Natura, e sua bontade."

Linda Lear, "Afterword," in Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i999), p. 259; Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (Wood- bridge, U.K.: Boydell and Brewer, i994), p. i29. Traditionally, the "sinners against nature" are sodomites, who have wilfully forgone intercourse, the "lawful" purpose of sexual con­gress. However, a number of scholars, notably Andre Pezard (Dante sous la pluie de feu [Paris: Vrin, i950]), suggest that the "sinners against nature" have sinned in a different way, through "blindness of judgment" of what is natural. Neither "sodomy" nor "sod­omites" are mentioned in the Commedia.. In Purgatorio XXVL40, however, a group of souls cries out, "Sodom and Gomorrah," in reference to the "great sin" of the Cities of the Plain (Genesis i8:20), to which another group responds in the next two lines with a refer­ence to Pasiphae, wife of Minos, who copulated with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur. Both groups belong to the excessively lustful, homosexual and heterosexual, and since they are found on the highest cornice of the mountain (the closest to Eden), they repre­sent for Dante the least serious of the seven sins.

Carson, Silent Spring, p. 257.

Aristotle, The Politics, i.8, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i962), pp. 38-40.

"Assessing Human Vulnerability to Environmental Change: Concepts, Issues, Methods, and Case Studies" (Nairobi: United Nations Environmental Programme, 2003), www.unep.org/geo/GEO3/pdfs/AssessingHumanVulnerabilityC.pdf; "Social Issues, Soy, and Defenestration," WWF Global, http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/ deforestation/forest_conversion_agriculture/soy_deforestation_social/.

Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Phanes, i992), p. 2; Ruskin, Modern Painters, p. i55; Anita Barrows, "The Ecological Self in Childhood," Ecopsychology Newsletter 4 (Fall i995), quoted in David Suzuki (with Amanda McConnell), The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, i997), p. i79.

Inferno, XXIV:i-i5, "In quella parte del giovanetto anno / che 'l sole i crin sotto l'Aquario tempra / e gia le notti al mezzo di sen vanno, // quando la brina in su la terra assempra / l'imagine di sua sorella bianca, / ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra, // lo vil- lanello a cui la roba manca, / si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna / biancheggiar tutta; ond' ei si batte l'anca, // ritorna in casa, e qua e la si lagna, / come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia; / poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna, // veggendo 'l mondo avec cangiata faccia / in poco d'ora, e prende suo vincastro / e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia." Virgil, Geor- gics, i.I45-46, in Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, vol. i, pp. 90-91; Georgics 2.9-i6, ibid., pp. ii6-i7.

Working Group II, AR5, Final Drafts, IPCC, available at http://ipcc-wg2.gov/ AR5/report/final-drafts/ (accessed November 2013). The intergovernmental panel was not the first group of world-renowned scientists to issue such a warning. On November 18, 1992, five months after an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the largest gathering of heads of state in history, i,600 scientists from all over the world, many of them Nobel Prize winners, issued their "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," which laid out the dan­ger in strong language: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about. . . . No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated." In The Sacred Balance (pp. 4—5), the ecologist David Suzuki remarks that when the document was released to the press, few papers took notice. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times rejected it as "not newsworthy"; the papers' editors wilfully avoided recognition of the warning and of their responsibility in the lack of response that followed it.

2i. Inferno IV:i3i, "maestro di color che sanno."

⁹

Where Is Our Place?

Chapter opener: Derek Walcott, "The Star-Apple Kingdom," in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. i29; James Joyce, A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Random House, i928), pp. ii—i2; Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Wahlverwadtschaften, ed. Hans-J. Weitz (Frankfurt-am-Main: Insel Verlag, i972), p. i74; Lawrence Durrell, Constance; or, Solitary Practices (London: Faber and Faber, i982), p. 50; Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys John- son-Davies (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 2003), p. 30; Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, ed. Martin Gardner (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i967), p. 55; Northrop Frye, "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry" (26 April i976), in Northrop Frye on Canada,, ed. Jean O'Grady and David Staines (To­ronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 476.

Inferno, I:5, "selvaggia e aspra e forte"; 7, "amara"; 2i, "la notte, ch'i' passai con tanta pieta."

See Purgatorio II:i46, Convivio II:i, 6—8, and EpistolaXIII:2i, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dantesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, i92i), pp. i72, 438, respectively.

The only exception is when Virgil sends his ward off on his own to observe the punishment of the usurers in Inferno, XVIL37—78.

Henry James, Substance and Shadow; or, Morality and Religion in Their Relation to Life (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, i863), p. 75.

Inferno, XXXII:i00—i02, "Ond' elli a me: 'Perche tu mi dischiomi, / ne ti diro ch'io sia, ne mostrerolti, / se mille fiate in sul capo tomi'"; i04, "piu d'una ciocca"; ю6, "Che hai tu, Bocca"?

Ibid., XXXIII:94, "Lo pianto stesso lf pianger non lascia"; ii2, "i duri veli"; ii6—i7, "s'io non ti disbrigo, / al fondo de la ghiaccia ir mi convegna"; i50, "e cortesia fu lui esser villano."

Ibid., VIII:45, "benedetta colei che 'n te s'incinse."

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. i.2, q. 47, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (i948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, i98i), vol. 2, p. 785. Among Dante's defenders are Luigi Pietrobono, "Il canto VIII dell' Inferno," L'Alighieri i, no. 2 (i960): 3—i4, and G. A. Borgese, "The Wrath of Dante," Speculum i3 (i938): i83—93; among his detractors, E. G. Parodi, Poesia estoria nella "Divina Commedia" (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, ^65), p. 74, and Attilio Momigliano, La "Divina Commedia" di Dante Alighieri (Florence: Sansoni, i948), pp. 59—60, but there are innumerable voices on both sides of the question.

Giovanni Boccaccio, IlDecamerone, 9.8 (Turin: Einaudi, i980), pp. 685—89.

Inferno, V:i4i—42.

Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. i, q. 2i, art. 2, vol. i, p. П9.

Ricardo Pratesi, introduction to Galileo Galilei, Dos lecciones infernales, translated from the Italian by Mati'as Alinovi (Buenos Aires: La Compania, 20ii), p. i2.

Galileo Galilei, Studi sulla Divina Commedia (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, i855); see also Galileo, Dos lecciones infernales, and Galileo Galilee, Legons sur l'Enfer de Dante, translated from the Italian by Lucette Degryse (Paris: Fayard, 2008).

Inferno, XXXI: 58—59 (Nimrod's face); XXXIV:30—3i (Lucifer's arm).

Nicola Chiaromonte, The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays, ed. Miriam Chiaromonte (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, i976), p. i53.

Homer, The Odyssey, 8.55i, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, i996), p. 207.

See Francois Hartog and Michael Werner, "Histoire," in Vocabulaire europeen des philosophies, ed. Barbara Cassin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2004), p. 562; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i975), pp. 27, 560.

Laszlo Foldenyi, Dostoyevski lee a Hegel en Siberia y rompe a llorar, translated from the Hungarian by Adan Kovacsis (Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006); Max Brod, Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, i960), p. 75.

Foldenyi, Dostoyevski lee a Hegel en Siberiay rompe a llorar, p. 42.

See John Hendrix, History and Culture in Italy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2003), p. i30.

Al-Biruni, Le Livre de l'Inde, edited and translated from the Arabic by Vincent Mansour-Monteil (Paris: Sinbad/UNESCO, i996), pp. 4i—42; Virgil, TheAeneid, 6.847— 53, trans. C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i952), p. i54.

Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Lon­don: Jonathan Cape, i973), p. 4ii.

Inferno, II:i2i—23, "Dunque: che e? perche, perche restai, / perche tanta vilta nel core allette? / perche ardire e franchezza no hai?"

Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, p. 4i4.

i0

How Are We Different?

Plato, The Republic, i.20, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, i973),

p. 597.

Ibid., 2.i, p. 605; 2.i0, p. 6i4.

Ibid., i.i2, p. 589.

Virginia Woolf, "Speech to the London and National Society for Women's Ser­vice," in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5: 1929—1932, ed. Stuart N. Clarke (London: Hogarth, 2009), p. 640; Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 368—70, in The Theban Plays, trans. David Grene (New York: Knopf, i994), p. 78. The argument about men's and women's roles in the Iliad is made by Alessandro Baricco, Omero, Iliade (Milan: Feltri- nelli, 2004), pp. i59—60.

Homer, The Odyssey, i.4i3, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, i996), p. 89; Mary Beard, "Sappho Speaks," in Confronting the Classics (London: Profile, 20ц), p. 3i. (In the afterword to her collection, Beard noted that, in retrospect, she may have been "per­haps a bit over-enthusiastic" about the different mouths of the Delphic priestess [p. 285].)

Saint Augustine, The City of God, i8.9, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i984), pp. 77i—72; Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, i986), p. 2i3.

Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, i949), p. 3i; Paradiso, I:i09—i4, "Ne l'ordine ch'io dico sono accline / tutte nature, per diverse sorti, / piu al prin- cipio loro e men vicine; // onde si muovono a diversi porti / per lo gran mar de l'essere, e ciascuna / con istinto a lei dato che la porti."

Purgatorio, V:i30—36, "Siena mi fe, disfecemi Maremma."

Inferno, V:i42, "E caddi come corpo morto cade." The thirteenth-century ro­mances Lancelot du lac and Mort Artu have both been suggested as possibilities for Paolo and Francesca's book.

Paradiso, III:ii7, "non fu dal vel del cor gia mai disciolta"; i23, "come per acqua cupa cosa grave."

Lerner, Creation ofPatriarchy, p. 222.

Inferno, IL94—95, "che si compiange / di questo'mpedimento"; 98, "il tuo fedele"; Ю4, "che non soccori quei che t' amo tanto."

Marina Warner related this story in a personal communication.

"S'il y a cent femmes et un cochon, le cochon l'emporte." Nicole Brossard, "The Volatility of Meaning," the Paget/Hoy lecture delivered on ii March 20i3 at the Univer­sity of Calgary.

Robespierre, "Discours du 15 mai," in Oeuvres de Maximilien Robespierre, 10 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), vol. 6, p. 358.

J.-P. Rabaut Saint-Etienne, Precis historique de la Revolution (Paris, 1792), p. 200, quoted in Jeremy Jennings, "The Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen and Its Critics in France: Reaction and Ideologie," Historical Journal 35, no. 4 (1992): 840.

The comte d'Antraigues, quoted ibid., p. 841; Archives parlemantaires, VIII (Paris, 1875), p. 453, quoted ibid.

Ibid., pp. 842-43.

Chaumette, quoted in Joan Wallach Scott, "French Feminists and the Rights of 'Man,'" History Workshop 28 (Autumn 1989): 3; Marquis de Condorcet, Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de cite (1790), in Oeuvres, ed. A. Condorcet O'Connor and A. F. Arago, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847), vol. 2, pp. 126-27.

Convention of 1893, quoted in Benoite Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges (Paris: Grasset, 2013), p. 57.

Ibid., p. 50; Voltaire en sa correspondence, ed. Raphael Roche, vol. 8 (Bordeaux: L'Escampette, 1999), p. 65.

Olympe de Gouges, Memoire de Mme de Valmont (Paris: Cote-Femmes, 2007), p. 12.

Pompignon, quoted in Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges, pp. 25-26.

The anti-slavery movement in America read in the Commedia arguments to sustain their struggle, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African American writers found in it inspiration and guidance. See Dennis Looney, Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the "Divine Comedy" (Notre Dame, Ind.: Uni­versity of Notre Dame Press, 2011).

Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (Paris: Adolphe Delahays,

ⁱ⁸55⁾, p. ¹⁰5.

Groult, Ainsi soit Olympe de Gouges, pp. 75-77.

Ms 872, fols. 288-89, Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris, quoted in Olympe de Gouges, Ecritspolitiques, 1792-1793, vol. 2 (Paris: Cote-femmes, 1993), p. 36.

Miguel de Cervantes, ElIngenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1.13.

Plato, The Republic, 10.15, p. 835.

11

What Is an Animal?

Chapter opener: Barry Holstun Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Scribner's, 1978), pp. 4, 284; Pablo Neruda, "Si Dios esta en mi verso," in Crespuculario (1920-1923), in Obras Completas, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, Circulo de Lectores, 1999), pp. ⁱ3^i-3².

1. Inferno, VIII:42, "via costa con li altri cani"; XIII:i25, "nere cagne, bramose e cor- renti"; XVII: 49-51, "non altrimenti fan di state i cani / or col ceffo or col pie, quando son morsi / o da pulci o da mosche o da tafani"; XXL44, "mastino sciolto"; XXI:68, "cani a

dosso al poverello"; XXIII:i8, "'l cane a quella lievre ch'elli acceffa"; XXX:20, "si come cane"; XXXII:7i, "visi cagnazzi"; XXXII:i05, latrando"; XXXIII:77—78, "co' denti, / che furo a l'osso, come d'un can, forti"; Purgatorio, XIV:46—47, "botoli . . . ringhiosi."

Paradiso, VIII:97—i48.

Guillaume Mollet, Les Papes d'Avignon, 9th rev. ed. (Paris: Letouzey and Ane, i950),

p. 39².

Paradiso, XXXIII:i45.

Ibid., II:8—9, "Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, / e nove Musi mi dimostran l'Orse"; XXII:i52; XXXIII:i43.

Purgatorio, XX:i3—i4, "nel cui girar par che si creda / le condizion di qua giu tras- mutarsi"; Inferno, I:i0i; Purgatorio, XX:i3—i5.

"D'enz de sale uns veltres avalat": La Chanson de Roland, 57.730, edited and trans­lated into modern French by Joseph Bedier (Paris: L'Edition d'art, i922), p. 58; Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, ed. Giorgio Padoan, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, i900), vol. 6, p. 73; Inferno, I:i02, "che la fara morir con doglia"; Dante Alighieri, Epistola VII:5, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dantesca italiana,, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, i92i), p. 426.

Purgatorio I:i3, "dolce color d'oriental zaffiro."

Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:i0, in Opere di Dante, p. 437.

Inferno, III:9, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate."

Ismail Kadare, Dante, l'incontournable, translated from the Albanian by Tedi Pa- pavrami (Paris: Fayard, 2005), pp. 38—39.

Inferno, V:i2i—23, "Nessun maggior dolore / che ricordarsi del tempo felice / ne la miseria"; XXIV:i5i, "E detto l'ho perche doler ti debbia!"; Paradiso, XVII:55—60, "Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta / piu caramente; e questo e quello strale / che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta. // Tu proverai si come sa di sale / lo pane altrui e come e duro calle / lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale."

Ibid., XXXIII:55—56, "maggio / che 'l parlar mostra."

Dante Alighieri, Convivio I:3, in Opere di Dante, p. i47; Inferno, XV:88, "Cii che narrate di mio corso scrivo"; Paradiso, XVII:98—99, "s'infutura la tua vita / via piu la che 'l punir di lor perfidie."

Paradiso, XV:97—i26.

Franco Sacchetti, Trecentonovelle (Rome: Salerno, i996), p. i67; Leon Battista Al- berti, Il libro della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti; rev. ed., ed. Fran­cesco Furlan (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, i996), p. 2i0.

Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou tresor (The Book of the Treasure), trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, i993), pp. i33—34; Pierre de Beauvais, Besti- aire, in Bestiaires du Moyen Age, set in modern French by Gabriel Bianciotto (Paris: Edi­tions Stock, i980), p. 65; San Isidoro de Sevilla, Etimolog^as, chap. i2, ed. J. Oroz Reta and M. A. Marcos Casquero (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, la Editorial Catolica, 2009).

Tobit 5:16 and 11:4; David Gordon White, Myths of the Dog-Man (Chicago: Uni­versity of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 44.

Inferno, I:4, "dir qual era e cosa dura."

Inferno, XVIL74-75; XVIII:28-33; Purgatorio, XVII:i-9; Paradiso, XIL86-87.

Inferno, XXV:58-66.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 1, q. 102, art. 2, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 1, p. 501; Saint Augustine, On the Free Choice ofthe Will, 3.23.69, in On the Free Choice ofthe Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 52 (animals do not suffer); Saint Augustine, The City of God, 2.4, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1984), p. 475; Cicero, De natura deorum, 2.53.133, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 251; Pierre Le Hir, "8,7 millions d'especes," Le Monde, 27 Au­gust 2011.

Saint Ambrose, Hexameron, chap. 4, trans. John. J. Savage (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), p. 235.

Marie de France, "Le Lai de Bisclavret," in Lais, ed. G. S Burgess (London: Bristol Classical Press, G. Duckworth, 2001); Inferno, VI:i8, "graffia li spiriti ed iscoia ed isqua- tra"; Paradiso, XIL58-60.

Paradiso, XXX:22, "vinto mi concedo"; X:27, "quella materia ond'io son fatto scriba."

Inferno, I:85, "lo mio maestro"; Purgatorio, XXVII:86; XXVIL139-40, "Non aspet- tar mio dir piu ne mio cenno; / libero, dritto e sano e tuo arbitrio"; XXVIII:2, "la divina foresta."

12

What Are the Consequences of Our Actions?

Chapter opener: Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Editions Garnier Freres, 1958), p. 376; obituary of General Jorge Rafael Videla, El Pa^s, 17 May 2013; Andrew Kenny, "Giving Thanks for the Bombing of Hiroshima," The Spectator, 30 July 2005.

Purgatorio, III:76-77, "dove la montagna giace, / si che possibil sia l'andare in suso"; 79-87, "Come le pecorelle escon del chiuso / a una, a due, a tre, e altre stanno / timedette atterando l'occhio e l'muso; // e cio che fa la prima, e l'altre fanno, / addossandosi a lei, s'ella s'arresta, / semplici e quete, e lo 'mperche non sanno; // si vid' io muovere a venir la testa / di quella mandra fortunata allotta, / pudica in faccia e ne l'andare onesta."

Ibid., 107-8, "biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto / ma l'un de' cigli un colpo avea diviso"; Paradiso, III:i09-20.

Inferno, X:ii9. Friedrich Ruckert, "Barbarossa" (1824), in Kranz der Zeit (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1817), vol. 2, pp. 270-71.

Purgatorio, III:i32, "a lume spento." "Sine croce, sine luce" (without cross, without light) was a medieval incantation used for the burial of excommunicants.

Paradiso, XXVII:22-27, "Quelli ch'usurpa in terra il luogo mio, / il luogo mio, il luogo mio che vaca / ne la presenza del Figliuol di Dio, // fatt' ha del cimitero mio clo­aca / del sangue e de la puzza; onde 'l perverso / che cadde di qua su, la giu si placa."

Christ's injunction appears three times: Mark 12:17, Matthew 22:21, and Luke 20:25; Inferno, XXVIII:30, "vedi com'io mi dilacco."

Lorenzo Valla, On the Donation of Constantine, trans. G. W. Bowersock (Cam­bridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Purgatorio, XXXIII:55-57; Paradiso, XX:56, "sotto buona intenzion che fe mal frutto."

Purgatorio, III:i20, "piangendo, a quei che volontier perdona"; 137, "al fin si penta." The Catholic Encyclopedia defines anathema thus: "The Roman Pontifical distinguishes three sorts of excommunication: minor excommunication, formerly incurred by a person holding communication with anyone under the ban of excommunication; major excom­munication, pronounced by the Pope in reading a sentence; and anathema, or the penalty incurred by crimes of the gravest order, and solemnly promulgated by the Pope. In pass­ing this sentence, the pontiff is vested in amice, stole, and a violet cope, wearing his mitre, and assisted by twelve priests clad in their surplices and holding lighted candles. He takes his seat in front of the altar or in some other suitable place, and pronounces the formula of anathema which ends with these words: 'Wherefore in the name of God the All- powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N— himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.' Whereupon all the assistants respond: 'Fiat, fiat, fiat.' The pontiff and the twelve priests then cast to the ground the lighted candles they have been carrying, and notice is sent in writing to the priests and neighboring bishops of the name of the one who has been ex­communicated and the cause of his excommunication, in order that they may have no communication with him" ([New York: Appleton, 1905-14], vol. 1).

John Freccero, "Manfred's Wounds," in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Ra­chel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 200-201.

Purgatorio, III:i2i-4i, "Orribili furon li peccati miei; / ma la bonta infinita ha si gran braccia, / che prende cio che si rivolge a lei. // . . . Per lor maladizion si non si perde, / che non possa tornar, l'etterno amore, / mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde. // Vero e che quale in contumacia more / di Santa Chiesa, ancor ch'al fin si penta, / star li convien da questa ripa in fore, // per ognun tempo ch'elli e stato, trenta, / in sua presunzion, se tal decreto / piu corto per buon prieghi non diventa."

Purgatorio, III:25-27, 124-32; Ezekiel 37:3.

Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung, Le Roman de la rose, Continuation par Jean

de Meung, vv. 6705—6726, ed. Daniel Poition (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, i974), p. 204; The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest (London: Dent, i906), pp. i42—50; Charles of Anjou, quoted in Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists, trans. Eric Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, i992), p. 209.

See Charles W. C. Oman, The Art ofWar in the Middle Ages, A.D. 378-1515, rev. and ed. John H. Beeler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, i953), pp. 7—9.

Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Giovanni Porta (Parma: Ugo Guanda, i99i).

Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Ho Ping-Yu, Lu Gwei-Djen, and Wang Ling, Chemistry and Chemical Technology: Military Technology; The Gunpowder Epic, vol. 5, pt. 7 of Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, i986), pp. i—7 and 579.

Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, i0 vols. (London: W. Baynes and Son/ Dublin: R. M. Tims, i824), vol. 9, p. i67.

James Burke, Connections (London: Macmillan, i978), p. 70.

Inferno, XXI:7—i8.

Ibid, 88—90, "E 'l duca mio a me: 'O tu che siedi / tra li scheggion del ponte quatto quatto, / sicuramente omai a me to riedi.'"

Proust, quoted in Ray Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center (New York: Anchor, 20i2), p. П4.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005).

"A Petition to the President of the United States," i7 July i945, U.S. National Archives, Record Group 77, Records of the Chief of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District, Harrison-Bundy File, folder 76, available at http://www.dannen.com/decision/ 45-07-i7.html.

Oppenheimer, quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, trans. James Cleugh (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i960).

Tibbets, quoted in Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. 462, ellipsis in original.

Father Siemes, quoted in John Hersey, Hiroshima (New York: Knopf, i946), pp. ii7—i8; Paradiso, XVIII:9i—93.

Oppenheimer, quoted in Monk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, p. ii5, ellipsis in original.

i3

What Can We Possess?

Chapter opener: Bruno Ducharme, Estelle Lemaitre, and Jean-Michel Fleury, eds., ABCD: Une collection d'Art Brut, ouvrage realise a l'occasion de l'exposition "Folies de la beaute," au Musee Campredon de l'Isle-sur-la Sorgue, du 8 juillet au 22 octobre 2000 (Arles: Actes Sud, 2000), pp. 282—83; James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, i997), pp. i8, 269; Inferno, XV:37—39, "qual di questa gregga / s'arresta punto, giace poi cent' anni / sanz' arrostarsi quando 'l foco il feg- gia"; World Bank indicators in Le Monde diplomatique, February 2002, p. 13; Felix Luna, Argentina: de Peron a Lanusse, 1943-1973 (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2000), p. 43.

Leonardo Bruni, History ofthe Florentine People, 1.2.30, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 141; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Giovanni Porta (Parma: Ugo Guanda, 1991), vol. 2, p. 52.

Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII, in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dan- tesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, 1921), pp. 436-46.

Inferno, I:32-33, "leggera e presta molto, / che di pel macolato era coverta"; on the leopard as Venus's familiar see Virgil, Aeneid, 1.323; Inferno, I:47, "con la test' alta, e con rabbiosa fame"; 49-54, "Ed una lupa, che di tute brame / sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza, / e molte genti fe gia viver grame, // questa mi porse tanto di gravezza / con la paura ch'uscia di sua vista, / ch'io perdei la speranza de l'altezza."

Ibid., 94-99, "che questa bestia, per la qual tu gride, / non lascia altrui passar per la sua via, / ma tanto lo 'mpedisce che l'uccide; // e ha natura si malvagia e ria, / che mai non empie la bramosa voglia, / e dopo 'l pasto ha piu fame che pria."

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, pt. 2, q. 32, art. 5, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (1948; repr. Notre Dame, Ind.: Christian Classics, 1981), vol. 3, p. 1322.

Inferno, VII:8, "maledetto lupo"; 30, "'Perche tieni?' e 'Perche burli?'"; 53-54, "la sconoscente vita che i fe sozzi, / ad ogne conoscenza or li fa bruni"; 64-66, "tutto l'oro ch'e sotto la luna / e che gia fu, di quest' anime stanche / non potrebbe fare posare una."

Purgatorio, XXII:43-45, "Allor m'accorsi che troppo aprir l' ali / potean le mani spendere, e pente' mi / cosi di quel come de li altri mali."

Inferno, XVII:46-5i, "Per li occhi fora scoppiava lor duolo; / di qua, di la soccorrien con le mani / quando a' vapori, e quando al caldo suolo: // non altrimenti fan di state i cani / or col ceffo o col pie, quando son morsi / o da pulci o da mosche o da tafani."

Gerard of Siena, "On Why Usury Is Prohibited," translated from MS 894, fol. 68r-68v, Leipzig, Universitatsbibliothek, quoted in Medieval Italy, ed. Katherine L. Jan- sen, Joanna Drell, and Frances Andrews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 106; Jorge Manrique, "Coplas a la muerte de su padre," in Obras completas, ed. Augusto Cortina (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1979), p. 117.

John T. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 218.

Ibid., p. 221.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in The Complete Works of Charles Dickens, vol. 25 (New York: Society of English and French Literature, n.d.), p. 34.

Ibid., pp. 5, 4; Pseudo-Macarius, Spiritual Homilies, quoted in Jacques Lacarriere, Les Hommes fous de Dieu (Paris: Fayard, 1975), p. 1.

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, in Complete Works of Charles Dickens, vol. 25, pp.

35².

Paul Krugman, "Bits and Barbarism," New York Times, 22 December 2013.

Aristotle, The Politics, i.8 and i.ii, trans. T. A. Sinclair (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i962), pp. 42—43, 46.

Dante Alighieri, Convivio, IV:XVII, i0, in Opere di Dante, p. 285.

Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London: Chatto and Windus, i998), pp. 250—5! Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, i990), p. 487.

Sebastiao Salgado, Trabalhadores: Uma arqueologia da era industrial (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, i997), pp. 3i8—3i9; Inferno, III:ii2—i7, "Come d'autunno si levan le foglie / l'una appresso de l'altra, fin che 'l ramo / vede a terra tutte le sue spoglie, // simil- mente il mal seme d'Adamo / gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una / per cenni come augel per suo riciamo." The image appears in Homer; Dante probably took it from Virgil.

Oscar Wilde, "The Young King," in A Garden of Pomegranates (i89i), in The Works ofOscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (London: Collins, i948), p. 232.

Ibid., p. 229.

i4

How Can We Put Things in Order?

Inferno, III:5—6, "fecemi la divina podestate, / la somma sapi'enza e 'l primo amore."

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 7.i—6.

Purgatorio, XVIL94—96, "Lo naturale e sempre sanza errore, / ma l'altro puote errar per mal obietto / o per troppo o per poco di vigore."

Paradiso, III:70—72, "Frate, la nostra volonta quieta / virtu di carita, che fa vol- erne / sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta"; 85, "E 'n la sua volontade e nostra pace."

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures in Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, i980), pp. 62, 3i, 257, 303.

Ashmolean Museum catalogue, quoted in Jan Morris, The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i978), pp. ii0—ii.

George R. Marek, The Bed and the Throne: The Life of Isabella d'Este (New York: Harper and Row, i976), p. i64.

Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum (i688) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, i9i4), p. 35; Roger Chartier, ed. A History of Private Life, vol. 3: Passions ofthe Renaissance, trans. Ar­thur Golhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, i989), p. 288; Patrick Mauries, Cabinets ofCuriosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 20ii), p. 32.

Lorenza Mochi and Francesco Solinas, eds. Cassiano dalPozzo: Isegreti di un Col- lezionista (Rome: Galleria Borghese, 2000), p. 27; Marsilio Ficino, Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Irving, Tex.: Spring, i980), p. 7.

Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa (Palermo: Sellerio, i987), p. 56; Mustafa El-Abbadi, La antigua biblioteca de Alejandna: Vida y destino, translated from the Arabic by Jose Luis Garcia-Villalba Sotos (Madrid: UNESCO, i994), p. 34.

Otlet, quoted in Fran^oise Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde: Paul Otlet et le Mundaneum (Brussels: Impressions Nouvelles, 2006), p. 33.

i2.Ibid., pp. 107, 271.

Paradiso, XXXIII:i24-i26, "O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, / sola t'intendi, e da te intelleta / e intendente te ami e arridi!"

See Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011).

Quoted in Levie, LtHomme qui voulait classer le monde, p. 72.

Ibid., pp. 69-70.

Henry James, Letter of 4 April 1912, in Letters, vol. 4, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 612; Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (London: Bodley Head, 1967), pp. 38, 44.

Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde, p. 225.

Quoted in W. Boyd Rayward, "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext," Jasis 45 (1994): 242.

Levie, L'Homme qui voulait classer le monde, pp. 293-308.

Ibid., pp. 47-48.

Jorge Luis Borges, "El congreso," in El libro de arena (Buenos Aires: Emece, 1975).

ⁱ5

What Comes Next?

Chapter opener: The Book of Common Prayer (1662), 90:10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 463; Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm, "Die Boten des Todes," Die Mdrchen der Bruder Grimm (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910), pp. 294-95; May Swenson, "The Centaur," in To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems (New York: Scribner's, 1963), p. 86; Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, vol. 3: bks. 12-19, 22:2, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Florence: Casa editrice Le Lettrere, 2009), p. 68; Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," in The Stoic Philos­ophy of Seneca, trans. Moses Hadas (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), p. 73; Samuel L. Knapp, The Life of Lord Timothy Dexter, with Sketches of the Eccentric Characters That Composed His Associates, Including His Own Writings (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1858).

Purgatorio, III:26, "dentro al quale io facea ombra"; Purgatorio, XXX:i24-25, "su la soglia fui / di mia seconda etade"; Inferno, XXXIII: 13-75; "The famous verse 75 of the penultimate canto of the Inferno has created [for Dante's commentators] a problem that stems from a confusion between art and reality. . . . In the gloom of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and that wavering impreci­sion, that uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made. Thus, with two possible agonies, Dante dreamt him and thus shall dream him the generations to come" (Jorge Luis Borges, "El falso problema de Ugolino," in Nueve ensayos dantescos [Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1982]), pp. 105 and 111; Inferno, XIII:3i-i5i; Paradiso, XXI:i24; see Chapter 12, above.

Inferno, I:ii6-i7, "li antichi spiriti dolenti / ch'a la seconda morte ciascun grida."

Yukio Mishima, La etica del samurai en el Japon moderno, translated from the Jap­anese by Makiko Sese y Carlos Rubio (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2013), p. 108.

Anagata Vamsadesance: The Sermon of the Chronicle-To-Be, trans. Udaya Medda- gama, ed. John Clifford Holt (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 20i0), p. 33.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 200i), pp. 56—70.

Talmud Megillah i5a.

The Koran, sura 76, trans. N. J. Dawood, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Pen­guin, i993), p. 4i3—i4; Ibn 'Arabi, quoted in Mahmoud Ayoub, The Qur'an and Its Inter­preters (Albany: State University of New York Press, i984), vol. i, p. i25; Abu Huraryra, quoted ibid., vol. i, p. 89.

Koran, sura 75, p. 4i2; sura 33, p. 299; sura 6, p. 97; sura i7, p. 200; Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, vols. i—4, trans. Abdul Hamid Sidiqi (Dehli: Kitab Bharan, 2000), p. 67.

Miguel Asm Palacios, Dante y el Islam (i927) (Pamplona: Urgoiti, 2007), p. ii8; Louis Massignon, "Les recherches d'Asi'n Palacios sur Dante," Ecrits memorables, vol. i (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2009), p. Ю5; Abu l-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, The Epistle of Forgiveness, vol. i: A Vision of Heaven and Hell, ed. and trans. Geert Jan van Gelder and Gregor Schoeler (New York: New York University Press, 20ц), pp. 67—323.

"Why We Die," in Rasa'ilIkhwan al-Safa (The Epistles of the Sincere Brethren), in Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology, select. and trans. Geert Jan van Gelder (New York: New York University Press, 20ц), pp. 22i—22.

G. B. Caird, A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine (New York: Harper and Row, i966), p. ii.

"Victorinus," in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (Farmington Hills, Mich.: CUA Press and the Gale Group, 2002).

See Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, eds., Literature and the Scottish Reformation (Cape Breton, Canada: Ashgate, 2009), p. i5. The Scientologist L. Ron Hub- bard and his followers also adopt this apocalyptic reading,

See E. Ann Matter, "The Apocalypse in Early Medieval Exegesis," in The Apoca­lypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press i992), pp. 38—39.

Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i984), pp. 906—i8, 907, 9i8.

Philippe Aries, Essais sur I'histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age a nos jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, i975), p. 2i.

Fernando de Rojas y "Antiguo Autor," La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Me- libea, 4.5, ed. Francisco J. Lobera, Guillermo Seres, Paloma Diaz-Mas, Carlos Mota, Inigo Ruiz Arzalluz, and Francisco Rico (Madrid: Real Academia Espanola, 20ii), p. ii0. The image of the inn also appears in Cicero's "On Old Age" (De senectute): "When I leave life, therefore, I shall feel as if I am leaving a hostel rather than a home." In Cicero, Selected Works, trans. Michael Grant, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i97i), p. 246.

Aries, Essais sur l'histoire de la mort en Occident, p. 30.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," in On Poetry and the Poets,

vol. 6 of The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry (New York: Scribner's, i9i4), p. 46.

Aries, Essais sur I'histoire de la mort en Occident, p. 67; Isherwood, quoted in Gore Vidal, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," Nation, i4 October i98i.

Tim Radford, "A Prize to Die For," The Guardian, i9 September 2002. For those winners who preferred not to wait for the resurrection prize, the alternative was a trip to Hawaii. Freezing the body to be resurrected in the future is the subject of a Howard Fast story, "The Cold, Cold Box," in Time and the Riddle (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie Press,

ⁱ975⁾ pp. ²ⁱ9^—3ⁱ.

Cicero, "On Old Age," p. 247.

Paradiso, XXXIII:32—33, "ogne nube li disleghi / di sua mortalita co' prieghi tuoi."

Inferno, IV:i4i, "Seneca morale"; Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," p. 48.

The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL) is a comprehensive collection of an­cient Latin inscriptions from all corners of the Roman Empire. Public and personal in­scriptions throw light on all aspects of Roman life and history. The Corpus continues to be updated with new editions and supplements by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and can be accessed at http://cil.bbaw.de/cil_en/index _en.html.

Inferno, IX:ii2—20.

Giorgio Bassani, Ilgiardino dei Finzi-Contini (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, i962), p. 3.

i6

Why Do Things Happen?

Primo Levi, Se questo e un uomo (Milan: Einaudi, i958), p. i0.

Inferno, XXVL85—90, "Lo maggior corno de la fiamma antica / comincio a crollarsi mormorando / pur come quella cui vento affatica. // Indi, la cima in qua e in la menando / come fosse la lingua che parlasse, / gitto voce di fuori e disse: 'Quando . . . '"; i00 ("ma misi . . .").

Levi, Se questo e un uomo. The episode appears in pages ГО2—5; Inferno, XXVI:ii8—20, "Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza."

Inferno, XXVI:i33—35, "quando n'apparve una montagna, bruna / per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto / quanto veduta non avea alcuna."

Inferno, XXVI:i39—4i, "Tre volte il fe girar con tutte l'acque; / a la quarta levar la poppa in suso / e la prora ire in giu, com' altrui piacque."

Inferno, XVI:i42, "infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso."

Dante, De vulgare eloquentia, I:v, edited and translated from the Latin by Vittorio Coletti (Milan: Garzanti, i99i), pp. i0—ii.

Louis Ginzberg, Legends ofthe Jews, 7 vols., vol. i: From the Creation to Jacob, trans. Henrietta Szold (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, i998), pp. 5—8. For more on this legend of creation, see Chapter 5, above.

9. Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust, ed. Ada June Fried­man (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1980), p. 393.

Levi, Se questo e un uomo, p. 25.

Angelus Silesius, Cherubinischer Wandersmann, bk. 1, sect. 289, ed. Louise Gnadinger (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1984), p. 69.

Inferno, I:4, "dir qual era e cosa dura"; 8, "per trattar del ben ch'i' vi trovai"; Parad­iso, XV: 79-81, "Ma voglia e argomento ne' mortali . . . diversamente son pennuti in ali."

Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebac (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 41. Lubac says that Musaeus was Or- pheus's master, not his disciple.

Paradiso, X:i3i; Richard de Saint-Victor, Liber exeptionum, pt. 1, bk. 1, chap. 23, p. 3, ed. Jean Chatillon (Paris: Vrin: Paris, 1958), p. 12.

Giles Constable, The Letters of Peter the Venerable, 2 vols., vol. 1, bk. 4:21 (Cam­bridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

Inferno, IV:80, "Onorate l'altissimo poeta"; 94, "bella scuola."

Virgil, Aeneid, 4.23, " veteris vestigia flammae"; Purgatorio, XXX:48, "cognosco i segni de l'antica fiamma."

Inferno, XXVI:ii7, "di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente"; 133-34, "bruna / per la distanza."

Homer, The Iliad, 5.279-81, 526, 384, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Viking/Penguin, 1990).

Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1991), pp. ²5^8-59.

Inferno, XXVI:ii4, "picciola vigilia."

Ibid., 125, "folle volo."

Franz Kafka, "In der Strafkolonie," in Die Erzdhlungen und andere ausgewdhlte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Verlag, 2000).

Primo Levi, "Caro Orazio," in Racconti e saggi (Turin: La Stampa, 1986), p. 117.

"Lord, let Your light," in George Appleton, ed., The Oxford Book of Prayer (Ox­ford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 275.

Purgatorio, I:i33, "com' altrui piacque"; II:23, "un non sapeva che bianco"; Inferno, XXVI:i25, "de' remi facemmo ali"; Purgatorio, II:i0-i2, "Noi eravam lunghesso mare ancora, / come gente che pensa a suo cammino, / che va col cuore e col corpo dimora."

Purgatorio, IIaro-ii, "l'anima mia, che, con la sua persona / venendo qui, e affan- nata tanto!"; 106-8, "Ed io: 'Se nuova legge non ti toglie / memoria o uso a l'amoroso canto / che mi solea quetar tutte mie voglie"; the poem is in Convivio, bk. 3: "Amor che ne la mente mi raggiona"; Purgatorio, II:ii8—19, " . . . tutti fissi e attenti / a le sue note"; Exo­dus 34:3.

ⁱ7

What Is True?

Chapter opener: The sisters told their story a few months after their release. See Lau­rence and Micheline Levesque, Les Valises rouges (Ottawa: Editions JCL, i987).

Gershom Scholem, Dix propositions anhistoriques sur la Cabale (Paris: Editions de l'eclat, 20i2), p 43.

Bruno Nardi, Saggi e note di critica dantesca (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, i966), p. 333; see, for example, Isaiah ii:5: "And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins." In the Catholic Church, before mass the priest puts on the girdle and prays, "Gird me, O Lord, with the girdle of purity."

Inferno, XVI: ii8—i20, "Ahi quanto cauti li uomini esser dienno / presso a color che non veggion pur l'ovra, / ma per entro i pensier miran col senno!"

Boccaccio speaks of Geryon in the feminine, "daughter of Erebus and Night" (Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, bk. i, chap. 2i, ed. and trans. Jon Solomon [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 20ii], pp. Ц7—39). William Blake, in one of his illustrations for the Commedia, gave Geryon a beardless, androgynous face.

Inferno, XVI:i24—30, "Sempre a quel ver c'ha faccia di menzogna / de' l'uom chiu- der le labbra fin ch'el puote, / pero che sanza colpa fa vergogna; // ma qui tacer non posso; e per le note / di questa comedia, lettor, ti giuro, / s'elle non sien di lunga grazia vote, // ch'i' vidi . . ."

Purgatorio, XXIX:94, "ognuno era pennuto di sei ali"; i00, "ma leggi Ezechiel, che li dipigne"; ГО4—5, "salvo ch'a le penne, / Giovanni e meco e da lui si diparte."

Inferno, I:85, "lo mio maestro, e il mio autore"; 86—87, "tu se' solo colui da cu'io tolsi / lo bello stilo che m'ha fatto onore."

John Freccero, "Allegory and Autobiography," in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed., ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.

i74—75.

Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII:5 in Le opere di Dante: testo critico della Societa dan­tesca italiana, ed. M. Barbi et al. (Florence: Bemporad, i92i), p. 436.

Inferno, XXIII:i44, "bugiardo e padre di mensogna"; Saint Augustine, Confessions, ю.35, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i96i), p. 242.

Jerome, quoted in Jean-Yves Boriaud, note to "Le Mensonge" in Saint Augustin, Les Confessions, precedees de Dialogues philosophiques, vol. i, edition publiee sous la direc­tion de Lucien Jerphagnon (Paris: Pleiade, i998), p. Ц63.

Augustine, Confessions, i.i3, pp. 33, 34.

Inferno, XVI:i32, "meravigliosa ad ogni cor sicuro"; XVII:i—3, "Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza, / che passa i monti e rompe muri e l'armi! / Ecco colei che tutto 'l mundo apuzza!"; Herodotus, The Histories, i.205—i6, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, revised, with an introduction and notes, by A. R. Burn (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, i972), pp. i23—26; for the legend of Geryon see Boccaccio, Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, bk. i, chap. 22, vol. i,

p. i39.

Purgatorio, XVI:67-8i, "Voi che vivete ogne cagion recate / pur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto / movesse seco di necessitate. // Se cosi fosse, in voi fora distrutto / libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia / per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto. // Lo cielo i vostri mov- imenti inizia; / non dicco tutti, ma posto ch'i 'l dica, / lume v'e dato a bene e a malizia, // e libero voler; che, se fatica / ne le prime battaglie col ciel dura, / poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica. // A maggior forza e a miglior natura / liberi soggiacete; e quella cria / la mente in voi, che 'l ciel non ha in sua cura."

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.2.8, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Har­mondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1969), p. 594.

Ibid., p. 594.

Julian Borger, "World Leaders Not Ready for Reconciliation with Mandela," Guardian, 6 December 2013; Jason Beattie, "Tory Grandee Smears Nelson Mandela," Daily Mirror, 9 December 2013.

Dwight Garner, "An Interview with Nadine Gordimer," Salon, 9 March 1998.

Nelson Mandela, Long Road to Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2000), p. 176.

Garner, "Interview with Nadine Gordimer."

Purgatorio, XVI:94-96, "Onde convenne legge per fren porre; / convenne rege aver, che discernesse / de la vera cittade almen la torre."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 4.573-74, in Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 313.

Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio, bilingual edition, trans. Nicolas J. Perella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 211.

Paradiso, V:6, "cosi nel bene appreso move il piede"; John Freccero, "The Firm Foot on a Journey Without a Guide," in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 29-54.

Inferno, I:28-30, "Poi ch'ei posato un poco il corpo lasso, / ripresi via per la pieaggia diserta, / si che 'l pie fermo sempre era 'l piu basso"; Freccero, "Firm Foot on a Journey Without a Guide," p. 31.

Paradiso, V:i, "caldo d'amore"; 7-9, "Io veggio ben si come gia resplende / ne l'intelletto tuo l'etterna luce, / che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende."

Purgatorio, XV:ii7, "non falsi errori."

Gustave Flaubert, La Tentation de Saint Antoine, ed. Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 214.

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acknowledgments

To write this book, I've used many editions and commentaries of Dante's Commedia. The best Italian edition in my view is the one by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, first published by Mondadori in i994. In English, the version that to my taste comes closest to the music and power of the original is that of W. S. Merwin, who unfortunately translated only the Pur­gatorio and two cantos of the Inferno because he said he didn't like Saint Bernard and did not wish to suffer his company throughout much of the Paradiso. Other than Dante, duca, signore e maestro, I notice that several other writers have led me through these pages: Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, Hume, and the secret authors of the Talmud seem to be more present in this book than in all my previous ones, whose presiding deities were Lewis Carroll, Flaubert, Cervantes, and Borges.

Several of my editors have faithfully helped me with their comments and corrections. Among them, Hans-Jurgen Balmes, Valeria Ciompi, John Donatich, Luiz Schwarcz, and Marie-Catherine Vacher: to them my deepest thanks. Also to Fabio Muzi Falconi, Frangoise Nyssen, Guillermo Quijas, Arturo Ramoneda, Javier Seto, and Guven Turan for their trust in a book that, for the longest time, consisted simply of a one-word title. And to Lise Bergevin, for her constancy, friendship, and generosity.

My deepest thanks to the book designer, Sonia Shannon, to the picture researcher, Danielle D'Orlando, to the indexer, Alexa Selph, and the proof­reader, Jack Borrebach, and to the eagle-eyed Susan Laity, whose meticulous copyediting pointed out my errori falsi.

My deepest gratitude, as always, to my old friend and agent Guillermo Schavelzon, from the days when our conversations were not about illnesses. And also to Barbara Graham, for all her efforts on my behalf.

A number of other friends helped with support and information: Profes­sor Shaul Bassi, Professor Lina Bolzoni, Father Lucien-Jean Bord, Professors Jose and Lucio Burucua, Professor Ethel Groffier, Professor Tariq S. Khawaji, Piero Lo Strologo, Dr. Jose Luis Moure, Lucie Pabel, Gottwalt Pankow, Ileene Smith (with whom the project was first discussed and who encouraged me to pursue it), Dr. Jillian Tomm, Dr. Khalid S. Yahya, and Marta Zocchi.

I was greatly assisted by a few vastly efficient librarians, especially Dona- tino Domini, director of the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna; Patricia Jaunet of the Bibliotheques departementales de la Vienne; Arthur Kiron, director of the Jewish Institute Collections of the University of Pennsylvania; and Guy Penman, Amanda Corp, and Emma Wigham at the London Library. They justify the definition that, according to Diodorus Siculus, was inscribed above the door of the ancient Egyptian libraries: "Clinic of the Soul." Thanks also to C. Jay Irwin for his help in the first stages of the project.

A few pages of this book, in various early forms, were published in Descant, Geist, the New York Times, Parnassus, La Repubblica, the Threepenny Review, and Theodore Balmoral. To Thierry Bouchard, Kyle Jarrard, Herbert Leibowitz, Wendy Lesser, Karen Mulhallen, Stephen Osborne, and Dario Pappalardo many thanks.

Dante believed that during our voyage through life, if grace allows, we'll find a fellow soul to assist us on our way beyond the dark wood, to reflect back our questions and to help us discover whatever it is we are meant to be; above all, one whose love keeps us alive. To Craig, dolce guida e cara, as ever.

Alberto Manguel

mondion, 5 may 2014

index

Abelard, Peter, 304 Abravanel, Isaac, 93—97, 339П25 Abu Huraryra, 283 Abulafia, Abraham, 89-91 Acts of the Apostles, 303, 318 Adam, 38, 86-87; Ulysses as, 35-36 Aeneid (Virgil), 14, 19, 28-29, 33 Aeolus, 46-47

afterlife. See death and the afterlife Aggadah, 281

agriculture: in ancient Rome, 158; and humans' responsibility towards na­ture, 157-59 Akiva ben Yoseph, 98 Alberti, Leon Battista, 210 Albertus Magnus, 22 Al-Biruni, 179 Alboino della Scala, 17 alchemy, 76 Alcidamas, 59 Alcuin of York, 23-24 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 26 Alexander, Pope, 223-24 Alexandria, Library of, 266 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. See

Carroll, Lewis All's Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 134

al-Ma'arri, Abu l-'Ala', 284

alphabet: combinatory possibilities of,

123; Hebrew, 88 Al-Rashid, Haroun, 66 Ambrose, Saint, 214, 244 Anastasius, Pope, 257 anathema, 225, 352n8 Andersen, Hendrik, 269-70 animals: Augustine's view of, 213-14; as constellations, 205-6; devil mani­fested as, 214. See also dogs Antaeus, 116

Apocalypse (Revelation): as described in the Commedia, 316; interpretations of, 285-88 Apocalypse of Paul, 20 Apocalypse ofPeter, 20 Aquinas, Saint Thomas. See Thomas

Aquinas, Saint Arabian Nights, 66, 120 Argenti, Filippo, 171 Argentina: economic crisis in, 237; mili­tary atrocities in, 219-20; under Peron, 238 Aries, Philippe, 288, 289 Aristophanes, 135

Aristotle, 21, 22, 54, 108-9, ^:73, 316; on money, 247; nature as viewed by, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163; Nicomachean Ethics, 258

artistic endeavor, as "false image," 91—92. See also literature; poetry, power of; stories

Ashmolean Museum, 263, 264 Asm Palacios, Miguel, 284 astrology, as science in Dante's time, 205-6

Athens, naming of, 187-88 atomic bomb, building of, 230—33 Attar, Fariduddin, 336Щ Atwood, Margaret, 185 Auden, W. H., 84, 85 Augustine, Saint, 23, 38, 136, 154, 168, 187; animals as viewed by, 213—14; City of God, 287—88; Confessions, 319; on fy^ 3^ 3i^8—i9 Augustus, Emperor, 158 Auschwitz, 307—8, 309; as distinguished from hell, 302; language as instru­ment of resistance at, 30i—2; Primo Levi at, 297—300, 304—5 automata, 76 avarice, sin of, 242—43

Babel, Tower of, 21, 45; curse of, 86 Bacon, Francis, 4, 86, 265, 3i3 Bacon, Roger, 228 Barbari, Jacopo de', 101, 102 Barrows, Anita, i6i Bartolomeo della Scala, i7 Basil, Saint, 24i Bassani, Giorgio, 292 Beard, Mary, i87

Beatrice: as Dante's guide in the Comme­dia, 7, 21, 24, 52, 67, 130, 133—34, 145, 189, 208—9, 241, 325—26; as venerated in the Vita nova, 19, 20 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de,

i97

Beauvais, Pierre de, 2i0 Beauvoir, Simone de, 189

Beckett, Samuel, 151 beekeeping, i47—48 Bellay, Joachim du, 40 Benedict XI, Pope, 17 Benevento, Battle of, 226—27 Berlin, Isaiah, 25

Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 21, 23, 209, 29i

Bertran de Born, 27—28 Bezzuoli, Giuseppe, 227 Bhagavad Gita, 232 Bhartrihari, i20—25 Biblia rabbinica, 99 bitcoins, 246

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 6, i4, i6, i8, 28, 86, i7i, 206, 325 Boethius, i6

Bomberg, Daniel, 99—i0i Bonaiuto, Andrea di, 2i3 Bonaventure, Saint, 53, 103, 133 Bonet de Lattes, 97 Boniface VIII, Pope, 17 bonobo apes, 118—19 books: alternative forms of, 267—68; ar­ranging of, 255—56; as oracles, 83—84. See also Jewish books, published in Venice; literature; reading Borges, Jorge Luis, 6, 89, 113, 279,

292—93, 336n3; "The Congress," 271; Universal Library of, 123 Bragadin, Pietro, 99 Breughel, Pieter the Elder, Tower of

Babel, 250 Bringhurst, Robert, 80, 8i Brod, Max, ii9, i78 Brodsky, Joseph, 84 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 20i Bruni, Leonardo, 239 Buber, Martin, 306—7 Buchan, James, 236—37 Buddha, 280—8i Buddhism, and death, 280—8i

Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 169 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 230

cabinet de curiosites, 265 Cacciaguida, 67, 208, 209, 210 Caedmon, 139 Cage, John, 72 Caligula, Emperor, 277 Calvino, Italo, 124 Camus, Albert, The Outsider, 202 Cangrande della Scala, 14, 16, 18, 213,

^ 3i⁶ cannons, 228

Caravaggio, Dormition of the Virgin,

249^-5° Carnegie, Andrew, 270 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodg- son): Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 138—45; The Hunting of the Snark, 166—67; language and questioning in works of, 140—45; Through the Looking-Glass, 123, 139 Carson, Rachel, 159—60 Carvajal, Luis de, 55 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 6 Casella, 309 Cassiano dal Pozzo, 265 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 44 categorical systems, meaning imposed

upon, 264—66 Cato, 158, 308 Cavafy, Constantin, 84 center of the universe, as perceived by

various cultures, 178—79 Cerberus, 214—15 Champollion, Jean-Francois, 79 Charlemagne, 206 Charles III, King, 76 Charles de Valois, 17 Charles of Anjou, 223, 226, 227 Chartier, Roger, 13

Chaumette, Pierre-Gaspard, 194—95 Chesterton, G. K., 72, 102 Chiaromonte, Nicola, 177 chimpanzees, 118

China, firearms invented in, 227—28 Christian dogma, Dante's acknowledg­ment of, 128, 189, 258 Cicero, 4, 5, 123, 214, 290, 303; Scipio's

Dream, 19 Cieza de Leon, Pedro, 81 Cino da Pistoia, 18 Clement V, Pope, 205 climate change, 162—63 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 139 collections and collectors, 263—66 Collodi, Carlo, 324 Columella, 158

Comentarios reales (the Inca Garcilaso), 73^-75

Commedia (Dante), 5—7, 52—53; ancient influences on, 304; beasts in, 239—40; Beatrice's role in, 7, 21, 24, 52, 67, 130, 133-34, ^:45, ^j89, 208-9, 241, 325-26; as catalogue of losses, 208—9; death in, 279, 282; and Dickens's Christmas Carol, 245—46; dogs in, 204, 207, 212-13, 217; early copies of, 18-19; ethical dilemmas in, 191-92; geogra­phy of, 173-76, 257; human suffering in, 190-92; Inferno, 27-28, 29, 70, 111, 112-13, 114, 116, 151, 152-53, 161-62, 170, 207-8, 224, 229-30, 240-41, 243, 252, 257, 260, 314-15; Islamic influ­ences in, 284; as journey through the forest, 168-71, 180-81, 217, 288, 325; Primo Levi's recitation of, 297-99; maps of the three realms of, 260-62; Montaigne's reading of, 8; natural world as described in, 151-57, 161-62; Paradiso, 23, 24-25, 41-42, 52, 67-69, 87, 111-12, 133, 189, 224, 257, 262, 268, 325, 326; poetic truth inherent in,

Commedia (Dante) (continued) 315-17, 319-20, 324-26; probable sources for, 19—20; Purgatorio, 8, 68-69, 70, 85, 90-91, 133-34, 222-23, 225-26, 242-43, 257, 261, 308-9, 320, 323, 345П14; readings of, 7-9; role of language in, 68-70; Ulysses as char­acter in, 33-34, 36, 40-41, 44-46, 297-99, 302, 304-5; Virgil as Dante's guide in, 19, 27-29, 36, 44, 68-70, 113, 116, 130, 145, 152-53, 170-71, 180, 216-17, 222-23, 230, 257-58, 308-9, 313-14, 316; the writing of, 14, 16, I7^-I9

concentration camps. See Auschwitz Condorcet, marquis de, 195 Conegliano, Cima de, The Lion of Saint

Mark, 92, 104-5 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 233 Constantine, Emperor, Donation of, 224-25 Constanza, 191-92 constellations, 205-6 Convivio (Dante), 21, 209, 248 Copernicus, I76-77 Corbusier, Charles-Edouard-Jeanneret Le, 270

Corinthians, First Epistle to the, 325 Corinthians, Second Epistle to the, 19

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, 291, 358n25

Cortejarena, Domingo Jaca, 147 Cousin, Jean the Elder, 39 Covarrubias, Sebastian de, 13 covetousness, sin of, 241-42 Cranach, Lucas the Elder, 273, 274 Cratylus, 131-32 cryonics, 290

curiosities, collectors of, 265-66 curiosity, I-2; Aquinas's perspective on, 23-24; in Dante's Commedia, 13-14, 27-29, 52-53; about death and the

dead, 292-93; definitions of, 13, 23-24; encyclopedistes' perspective on, 26-27; Hume's perspective on, 25-26, 27; methods of pursuing, 42-44; Montaigne's perspective on, 2-3; as motivating force, 24-25; the nature of, 11-12; obstacles to, 27-29; paradox inherent in, 42; perversions of, 23; punishment for, 39-4I; and ques­tioning, 4-5, 45-47, 85-86; Seneca's perspective on, 29 Curiosity (exploratory spacecraft), 46-47 curiosity machines, 42-44 Cusi, Meshullam, 98

Damian, Peter, 279

Dante Alighieri: and composition of the Commedia, 14, 16, 211-12; in exile from Florence, 17, 67, 207, 208-9, 211-13; on the history of language, 86-88; portrait of, 15; women in so­ciety of, 189-92. See also Beatrice; Commedia; Convivio; De vulgari eloquentia; Questio de aqua et terra; Vita nova

death and the afterlife, 273-78; and the Apocalypse, 285-88; Buddhist beliefs regarding, 280-81; Christian beliefs regarding, 285-88; in the Commedia, 279, 282; experienced as absence of others, 290-9I; iconography of, 280; Islamic beliefs regarding, 283-84; Judeo-Christian beliefs regarding, 281-82; metaphors of, 284-85; person­ification of, 275-76; prophetic visions of, 281-82; Seneca on, 291; Zoroas- trian beliefs regarding, 28I Declaration ofthe Rights of Man, 193-95 Declaration ofthe Rights ofWoman, 195,

I97-99

Dedalus, Stephen. See Joyce, James

deforestation, 160. See also forests; nature Deleuze, Gilles, 57 delle Vigne, Pier, i53, i54 Delphi, i78—79 Deuteronomy, book of, 96, 98 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 65—66, 86—88, i25, i54, 30i Dewey, Melvin, 267 Dewey decimal system, 267, 268 Dexter, Timothy, 278 Dickens, Charles, 250; A Christmas Carol, 245—46; Little Dorrit, 246; Oliver Twist, 201—2 Diderot, Denis, 26 Dio Chrysostom, 45 Diocletian, Emperor, 285 Diomedes, 33, 305—6, 307 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge. See Carroll, Lewis

dogs: in the Commedia, 204, 207, 212—13, 2i7; as constellations, 205; "dog" as term of insult, 204, 207; as faithful companions, 210—11; in literature, 201—3; as omen, 215; rage embodied by, 214—15 Dominic, Saint, 2i5 Donati, Corso, i7 Donati, Forese, i9i

Don Quixote (Cervantes), 49, 109, 135,

i99, 340n5 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 177—78 Doyle, Arthur Conan, i3 Duckworth, Robinson, i38, i39—40 Durer, Albrecht, 176 Durrell, Lawrence, Constance, 166 Durrenmatt, Friedrich, 222

Ecclesiasticus, i3, 26 Eco, Umberto, 9i ecopsychology, i60—6i educational institutions, 3—4, 8

Einstein, Albert, 222 Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, Rabbi, 94—95, 98 Encyclopedie (Diderot and Alembert), 26—27, Encyclopedie Larousse, 267 Epictetus, 45

Epistle of Forgiveness (al-Ma'arri), 284

Erasmus, 55, 63

Este, Isabella d', 264—65

Etruscan tombs, 291—92

Eve, as Pandora, 39—40

Exodus, book of, 94

Ezekiel, book of, 94, 285, 3i6

Faulkner, Barry, 95

Felice da Prato, 99

Ferdinand, King, 96

Ficino, Marsilio, i74, 266

Flaubert, Gustave, 327

Florence, domestic life in, 2i0

Foldenyi, Laszlo, 177—78

forests: in the Commedia, 151—56, 168—70;

as metaphor, i69—70. See also nature Francesca, i54, i72, i90—9i Francesco da Barberino, i8 Freccero, John, 225, 316, 324—25 Frederick II, Emperor, ii5, i53, 223 free will, i90, i92, 3i9—20; and civil law, 323; dilemma of, i9i, 3i7; as gift of God, 302, 320; and morality, 32i, 323 French Revolution, 220—21; equality for

women in, 193—99 Freud, Sigmund, i37 Frost, Robert, 84 Frye, Northrop, 167 Fucci, Vanni, 208

Galatians, Epistle to the, 3i7—i8 Galileo Galilei, i74—76, 257—58 Garcilaso de la Vega, the Inca, 74—75, 77

Garden ofthe Finzi-Contini (Bassani), 292

gauchos, 148-50 geese, 210

gender identity: grammatical manifesta­tions of, 192-93; in literature, 183-84; and patriarchal authority, 187-89; and social equality, 192-99; symbolic representations of, 192-93; and tradi­tional roles, 186-87. See also women Genesis, book of, 38, 113, 117-18, 131 Gerard of Siena, 244 Geri del Bello, 28 Geryon, 243, 313-15, 319 Ghibellines, 16-17, 223-24 Gigli, Octavo, 176 Gilgamesh, King, 73 Giorgi, Domenico, 79-80 Girondins, 198-99 Giustiniani, Marco, 99 God, as light, 313

God, word of: interpretation of, 87-90,

119; Torah as, 88-89, 93-97, ^ю4 God's justice: Aquinas's view of, 172; Dante's understanding of, 171-73, 204, 215-16, 225, 233 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 31 good, the, 326; curiosity as path towards, 24, 27; death perceived as, in Chris­tian tradition, 288-89 Gordimer, Nadine, 322-23 Gouges, Olympe de, 195-99 Gracchi brothers, 158 Graffigny, Fran^oise de, 78 Graham, Billy, 287 Greece, ancient, women in, 187-88 greed. See avarice, sin of Grimms' Fairy Tales, 65, 66, 275-76 Groves, Leslie, 231 Guelphs, 16-17, 223-24 Guerri, Domenico, 113

Guido Novelo da Polenta, 17, 18 Guignefort, Saint, 211 Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, 220-21 gunpowder, early use of, 227-29 Gupta, Chandra II, 121 Gupta, Kumara, 121 Gupta dynasty, 121-22 Guthrie, W. K. C., 58

Ham (son of Noah), 117 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 41, 141, 142 Harpies, 152, 156 Hebreo, Leon, 74, 94 Hebrew, preeminence of, 87-88, 89-90, 113

Hebrew alphabet, 88

Hebrews, Epistle to the, 215

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 57;

history as conceived by, 177-78 Heidegger, Martin, 54 Hell, Dante in, 68-70, 300-301, 311 Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, 191 Henry VII, Emperor, 207 Heraclitus, 45 Hermes, 60-61 Hermogenes, 132

Hernandez, Jose, Martm Fierro, 147,

148-50 Herodotus, 114-15 Hesiod, 38-39 Hevelius, Johannes, 206 hima, 158-59

Hippias, 45, 57-58, 59-60, 61-63 Hiroshima, atomic bomb dropped on, 220, 232

history, Hegel's concept of, 177-78 Hitler, Adolf, 270

Homer, 131; Iliad, 7, 14, 187, 305; Odyssey,

14, 19, 46-47, 177, 187, 201 homophobia, 186-87

Horace, 308

Hu, Georgine, 235, 236

humanism, 53

Hume, David, 29; A Treatise of Human

Nature, 25-26, 320-21 Huns, 122

Ibn 'Arabi, 283 Ibn Khaldun, 35

identity, 127-29; adolescents' search for, 49-50; children's awareness of, 135; name as, 132-33; and place, 165-67. See also gender identity Ikhwan al-Safa, 284-85 imagination: and humans' sense of place, 178-79; as tool for survival, 3; truth embodied in, 315-27; of the writer, 9 individuation, Jung's concept of, 136-37 injustice: justifications for, 219-20;

Thrasymachus on, 185, 186 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

Change (IPCC), 162-63, 345-46n20 International Monetary Fund (IMF),

²37^-3⁸ Irenaeus, Saint, 40, 285 Isherwood, Christopher, 290 Isidore of Seville, 210 Islam, and death, 283-85 I-Tsing, 120-21

Jacopo Alighieri (Dante's son), 16, 18 James, Henry, 169; Spoils of Poynton, 269-70

Japan: concept of death in, 280; as target

of atomic bomb, 220, 232 Jason (captain of the Argonauts), 40-41 Jaucourt, chevalier de, 27 Jaynes, Julian, 71-72 Jeremiah, book of, 239

Jerome, Saint, 92, 287, 318 Jewish books, published in Venice, 98-101

Jews, persecution of, 295-96; and lan­guage as instrument of resistance, 301-2. See also Auschwitz; Judaism, principles of Job, book of, 2-3, 171 John, Gospel of, 225 John of Patmos, 279, 285, 287, 316 Johnson, Samuel, 344Ш2 John the Baptist, Saint, 92 John the Evangelist, Saint, 88, 92 Joyce, James, 34; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Dedalus char­acter in), 165-66 Judah the Prince, Rabbi, 89 Judaism, principles of, 93-98. See also Kabbalah; Talmud; Talmudic tradi­tion; Torah, as word of God Judeo-Christian beliefs, about death,

281-82, 285-88 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 154 Jung, Carl Gustav, 136-37 justice. See God's justice; Socrates: on

justice and equality just society, 199; Socrates' concept of, 185-86. See also natural rights

Kabbalah, 88-89, 97-98 Kabbalists, 79-80 Kadare, Ismail, 207-8 Kafka, Franz, 16, 119, 141, 178; "The

Penal Colony," 307-8 Kalidasa, 121 Kant, Immanuel, 177 Keats, John, 16 Kenny, Andrew, 220 Kerford, G. B., 54 Keynes, John Maynard, 247

Kipling, Rudyard, 66, 169 knowledge, as virtue, 36 Knox, John, 287 Kommareck, Nicolas, 76 Krugman, Paul, 246-47

Lacan, Jacques, I35 La Celestina (Rojas), 49, 50-51, 289 Lafontaine, Henri, 267 Landino, Cristoforo, I74 landscape. See forests; nature language: Bhartrihari's theories of, 122-25; Dante's history of, 86-88, I25; as gift, 35-36; as human attribute, 118-19, 125; as instrument of curiosity, 14, 33, 45-47, 86-87; layers of mean­ing in, 303-4; limitations of, 9, 68, III-I2, 3II-I2; origins of, II3-I5, 34ini8; power of, 299-300, 303-5, 308-9; theories of, 7I, II8, I20-25 La Rochelle, Drieu, 148-49 Latini, Brunetto, 208, 209, 210, 224, 237 laws: Hippias's view of, 59-60; and moral

choices, 323-24 Lear, Linda, I59 lectura dantis, 7-8 Leo X, Pope, 99 Lerner, Gerda, 188-89, 191 Lerner, Isaias, 49-5I Levi, Peter, I48

Levi, Primo, 307, 308, 309; at Auschwitz,

297-300, 304-5

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 179-80, 181 Liddell, Alice, I38-40 Life of Adam and Eve, 67 literature: creation of, 16; dogs in, 201-3; gender as manifested in, 183-84; as instrument of compassion, 190-91; as mirror of ourselves, 137; revisiting of, 307 Lives ofthe Fathers, 20

Livy, 76

Lombard, Peter, 324-25 Lombardo, Marco, 3I9-20, 323 Lopez, Barry, 202 love, categories of, 258-59 Lucian of Samosata, 54, 59 Lucifer, 242, 258 Lugones, Leopoldo, 34InI8 Luke, Gospel of, I7I, I92, 225; Mary and Martha in, 248-49

Mabinogion, 226 Macarius of Egypt, 246 Madoff, Bernard, 246 Magi, 44 Mago, I58

Maimonides, 90, 93, I04, I05 Malaspina, Moroello, I4 Malot, Hector, I83 Malraux, Andre, 279 Mandela, Nelson, 321-23, 324 Mandelstam, Osip, 6, 138-39 Manetti, Antonio, I74, I75 Manfred: at the Battle of Benevento, 226-27, 279; conflicting views of, 223-24; as symbol, 225-26, 233; wounds of, 225-26, 227 Manguel, Alberto: reflections on the end of life, 274-78; stroke suffered by, I07-I0

Manrique, Jorge, 244 Manutius, Aldo, 4 Manutius the Younger, 4 Marie Antoinette, I98 Marie de France, 2I4 Mark, Saint, lion of, 92, 104-5 Martello, Carlo, 205 Marx, Karl, 52 Mary Magdalene, 92 Masih ad-Dajjal, 283 Matthew, Gospel of, 44

Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 6

Medici, Lorenzo de', 174

Meier, Melchior, Apollo and Marsyas, 112

Melville, Herman, 140

memory, 298-99

Mericourt, Theroigne de, 198

Messiah, coming of the, 97, 339n25

Meung, Jean de, 226

Michelet, Jules, 197

Millais, John Everett, 250

Milton, John, 151

Mishima, Yukio, 280

Mishnah, 89

misogyny, 186

money, 235-38; Aristotle on, 247; as

symbol, 235, 246-47 Montaigne, Michel de, 63; on Dante, 8;

Essays, 2-3 Montesquieu, 78

Montfaucon de Villars, Abbot, 76 Moses, 94-95, 303, 309 Mouisset, Anne-Olympe, 195 Mundaneum, 270, 271

Nabokov, Vladimir, 263 Nahman of Bratslav, Rabbi, 41, 168 names: as identity, 131-33; Socrates on, 13²

Napier, John, 287 Narcissus, 133, 143-44 Nardi, Bruno, 24, 313 Nathan of Gaza, 313 natural rights: limitations on, 195; as manifested during the French Revo­lution, 193-95 nature: Aristotelian attitude towards, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163; as described in the Commedia, 151-57, 161-62; humans' relationship with, 148-50, 156-63; nostalgia for, 149-50; violence to, 154-56. See also forests

Nazis, 271, 295; resistance to, 301-2

Needham, Joseph, 228

Nephilim, 113

Neruda, Pablo, 202-3

Newton, Isaac, 25

Nimrod, 113-14, 116-17, 175-76

nominalists, 71

Nyayas, 123-24

Odysseus. See Ulysses Odyssey. See Homer; Ulysses Office international de Bibliographie, 267

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 230-33;

compared to Manfred, 230, 231 order, human inclination towards, 259-63, 271. See also categorical systems, meaning imposed upon; collections and collectors Ossola, Carlo, 44 Otlet, Paul, as collector, 266-71 Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, 100 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 16, 20

Pandora: Eve as, 39-40; jar of 39-40

Panini, 122, 124

Paolo, 190-91

Paolo, Giovanni di, 69

Paper Museum, 265-66

Paracelsus, 77

Patanjali, 122

pathetic fallacy, 161

patriarchal authority, 187-89

Paul, Saint, 19, 215, 317-18

Pauli, Johannes, 211

Pericles, 60, 63

Peron, Juan, 238

Persico, Nicola, 76

Persky, Stan, 273, 277

Petain, Marshall, 270

Peter, Saint, 52, 224, 318 Peter the Venerable, 304 Petrarch, 18, 277 Pezard, Andre, 345Ш4 phantasia, 108-9 Philip VI, King, 235 Philo of Alexandria, 38, 93 Philostratus, 57, 59

photography and photograph of gold­mine workers, 251-53 Phrygian, as primordial language, 115 Piccarda, 191-92, 259 Pietro Alighieri (Dante's son), 8, 131 pilpul, 41 Pinocchio, 324

place, and human identity, 165-67, 176-81

planets and stars, as influence on human

behavior, 205-6 Plato, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60; Cratylus, 131-32; on language, 72; The Republic, 185-86, 199 Pliny the Elder, 158 Plutarch, 57 Pluto, 114 Plutus, 242 Poe, Edgar Allan, 289 poetry, power of, 308-9 politics: art of, 60-61; Stendhal's view

of, 220 Polydorus, 153

Pompignan, marquis Le Franc de, 195, 196

Porphyry, 158

Portinari, Beatrice, 212. See also Beatrice printing presses, early, 76. See also Jewish

books, published in Venice Protagoras, 60-61

Proust, Marcel, Du cote de chez Swann, 230, 232

Psalms and Psalmists, 105, 274, 282 Psammetichus, 114-15

Ptolemy (astronomer), the universe as

depicted by, 173 Pythagoras, 21, 158

Quechua language. See quipu Questio de aqua et terra (Dante), 20-21 questioning, 4-5, 31-32; in Alice's Adven­tures in Wonderland, 140-45; books as facilitators of, 83-84; as instrument of curiosity, 14, 33, 45-47; language as tool for, 86-87, 111-12 question mark, 4

quipu: interpretation of, 74-76, 80-81;

Sansevero's study of, 77-80 Qur'an, 35, 283. See also Islam, and death

Rabelais, Francois, 55-56 Ramelli, Agostino, 42 Rashi, 98, 100

reading: art of, 9; challenges inherent in, 7; as infinite enterprise, 92-94. See also literature realists, 71

reasoning, approaches to, 51, 52-62 Reeves, James, 130

Revelation, book of, 280, 285, 316. See

also Apocalypse Richard of Saint-Victor, 303 Rifkind, Sir Malcolm, 321-22 rights. See natural rights Rilke, Rainer Maria, 97; "The Panther," 115-16

Rimbaud, Arthur, 135, 297 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 193 Rojas, Fernando de, 204. See also La

Celestina Roland, Madame, 197 Roma, Immanuel de, 96 Romano, Yehuda, 96

Roosevelt, Franklin, 270 Roszak, Theodore, i60—6i Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 32, i93 Ruggiero, Cardinal, 279 Ruskin, John, 151—52, 156, 161

Sacchetti, Franco, 2i0 Sacks, Oliver, 115

Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul Rabaut, i94 Salgado, Sebastiao, photography of,

25i—53

Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the

North, 166 Salutati, Coluccio, i9 Sansevero, Raimondo di Sangro, 75—80, 94; Apologetic Letter of, 77—80; inven­tions of, 76—77; and the quipu of the Incas, 77—80 Sanskrit texts, 121—24 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, i50 Scholasticism, 53—55, 85—86 Scholem, Gershom, 3i3 Schwebel, Leah, 36 Scottish Reformation, 287 Sedakova, Olga, 6, 154 semantic signs, other than writing, 73.

See also language; quipu; words Seneca, 29, 45, 277, 29i Senefelder, Alois, 76

Shakespeare, William. See All's Well That Ends Well; Hamlet; Julius Caesar; Troilus and Cressida Shass Pollak, 103 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 67, 324 she-wolf, sins of, 239, 240, 241 Siemes, Father, 232—33 Sieyes, abbe, 194 Silesius, Angelus, 302 Sinon, 28—29

sins, 258—59. See also avarice, sin of; covetousness, sin of; usury, sin of