​Dante, Lecture Five: Return to Innocence
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​Garden of Eden
Virgil now must leave Dante behind, because reason can get you through Hell and Purgatory , but only Love (Beatrice) can guide you to Heaven.
Beatrice’s rebuke (tough love, not sentimentality) and Dante’s contrition
Matilda: Rivers of Forgetting (one’s failings) and Remembrance (good deeds)- but only after   there has been an honest accounting and facing up to the past
 
 
Questions:
Whom would you choose to be the guide of your heart?
Has anyone exhibited "tough love" to you, calling you to  remembrance of  your better self?
Have you ever had to "leave behind" a guide or mentor because they could take you no farther?
Who have been the people in your life who have helped you become more truly yourself?


Questo muro
by Anita Barrows

Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro
turbato un poco disse: "Or vedi figlio:
tra Beatrice e te è questo muro."
(When he [Virgil] saw me standing there unmoving,
he was a bit disturbed and said, "Now look, son,
between Beatrice and you there is this wall.")
       -Dante, Purgatorio XXVII
You will come at a turning of the trail
to a wall of flame
After the hard climb & the exhausted dreaming
you will come to a place where he
with whom you have walked this far
will stop, will stand
beside you on the treacherous steep path
& stare as you shiver at the moving wall, the flame
that blocks your vision of what
comes after. And that one
who you thought would accompany you always,
who held your face
tenderly a little while in his hands--
who pressed the palms of his hands into drenched grass
& washed from your cheeks the soot, the tear-tracks--
he is telling you now
that all that stands between you
& everything you have known since the beginning
is this: this wall. Between yourself
& the beloved, between yourself & your joy,
the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft
of sunlight on the rock, the song.
Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume
whatever solidness this is
you call your life, & send
you out, a tremor of heat,
a radiance, a changed
flickering thing?