I write in the spirit of one who offers to compare notes with other readers. This is therefore a personal essay. If you have ever been rejected or misunderstood (and who hasn't?), you may find as I did that certain lines resonate with a comfort that comes from afar and approaches near; lines that weren't written specifically for your condition but for a man who died excommunicate for unjust political reasons; a man wandering the lower slopes of the Mount of Purgatory, longing to be let in to where he can begin his ascent towards blessedness; a man who hopes and believes that the rejection will not last forever.
Per lor maladizion si non si perde
che non possa tornar l'etterno amore
mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.
[By their curse none is so lost
that the eternal love cannot return
while hope is yet green.]
Purgatorio, III, 133-5
Or if you have tried to tell a truth and found that people won't listen, or that they listen but blame you for telling it; if you have made yourself unpopular or got yourself a name for being "extremist" - this can actually happen in my country to anyone who advocates self-government for the United Kingdom - then you can console yourself that some things need to be said for the sake of one's self-respect, for the sake of the record if nothing else.
e s'io al vero son timido amico,
temo di perder viver tra coloro
che questo tempo chiameranno antico.
[and if to truth I am a timid friend,
I fear to lose life among those
who will call these times ancient.]
Paradiso, XVII, 118-20
Good enough when taken in isolation, the lines gain immeasurably from being read in their context. You will find gem after gem that you can hug to your own heart as you voyage through the Divine Comedy. In a larger sense, apart from the treasures of specific lines, you will encounter a rare phenomenon in literature - what one might call 'spooky goodness': the sense of the Numinous, the haunting of the divine. The shiver of awe that is much easier to achieve with sinister effect, in tales of horror and the supernatural, or in the immensities and the conceptual breakthroughs of science fiction, is achieved in Dante perhaps most of all in his Purgatorio - and perhaps most of all on the Mount of Purgatory's lower slopes, where souls roam who for some reason (delay in repentance, neglect of their duties, excommunications that were unjust but still have some effect) are not yet allowed to begin their proper ascent of the mountain.
They are saved souls, but they must wait their time. Future blessedness awaits them and one can feel it seeping towards them, immanent in the landscape. The mood-effect is extraordinary. Perhaps the only other author I know to have achieved anything like it is C S Lewis in some parts of Perelandra.
