A00250 - Must See TV for the Month of March 2024: PBS: "Dante" and Book of the Year for 2024: Dante's "The Divine Comedy": The Descent Into Hell
It is now Good Friday of 2024, and I am on page 118 of my 895-page journey to read Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy begins with Dante's descent into Hell on Good Friday of 1300.
As depicted in the PBS documentary, Dante has placed himself into his grand work ostensibly as a way to ultimately reunite with the love of his life Beatrice Portinari.
a woman that Dante only met twice before she died in 1290.
After spending 100 pages accompanying Dante on his descent into Hell, I found myself wondering why someone would spend so much effort on such a dark work. I watched the PBS documentary and I read the Wikipedia article on Dante
and I came away with the thought that something may have been lost in the translation from Italian to English causing the beauty of this masterpiece to be lost. It may also be that my concept of the afterlife is so fundamentally different than that of Dante. Fundamentally, I find the notion of an eternal Hell where people are confined without any recourse to salvation to be contrary to my own theology. I suppose that colors my perception of The Divine Comedy so far. However, we shall see what happens during the journey through Purgatory and Paradise.
Stay tuned.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
March 29, 2024
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
To:
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 04:21:23 AM PDT
Subject: Must See TV for the Month of March 2024: PBS: Dante and Book of the Year for 2024: Dante's "The Divine Comedy": The Inferno
By some "divine" coincidence, the following was the quote from the Monday, March 18, 2024, page of "A Year of Zen" calendar;
"The mountain of release is such that the
ascent's most painful at the start, below;
the more you rise, the milder it will be.
"And when the slope feels gentle to the point that
climbing up sheer rock is effortless
as though you were gliding downstream in a boat,
"then you will have arrived where this path ends."
Dante
*****
I do not know where this Dante quote comes from, but what I do know is that the Monday, March 18, 2024, episode of PBS's "Dante" covered the life of Dante through the year 1306 and covered Dante's Divine Comedy through The Inferno. The program has been insightful and profound.
I highly recommend that everyone watch the program and ponder on Dante's motivation for writing this monumental work.
Both the watching and the pondering could prove to be life changing in and of themselves.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>
To:
Sent: Friday, March 1, 2024 at 04:14:06 AM PST
Subject: Must See TV for the Month of March 2024: PBS: Dante and Book of the Year for 2024: Dante's "The Divine Comedy"
On March 18 and 19, PBS airs the four-hour documentary by Ric Burns entitled "Dante"
Dante (March 2024) | Steeplechase Films (ricburns.com)
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As my Program Listings guide explains: "Explore the stunning power and drama of Dante Alighieri's great masterwork, "The Divine Comedy" -- inarguably one of the greatest artistic masterpieces in the history of literature. This documentary by Ric Burns dives into the riveting life and times of the poem's maker, the politics and culture of the late Middle Ages, the birth of the Italian language, and the birth of humanism itself."
Based on this intriguing description, I have made Ric Burns' "Dante" documentary my Must See TV for the Month of March 2024.
Also, in anticipation of actually having some background on the actual text of "The Divine Comedy" masterpiece, I recently purchased a copy of "The Divine Comedy" from Amazon. The book I received is 895 pages long and is divided into three parts: The Inferno, The Purgatorio and The Paradiso. The Inferno -- The Hell -- is some 270 pages long. If I am diligent, I think I can finish The Inferno by the time the documentary airs but I cannot read the entire book by the time. Accordingly, just as I did with "The Autobiography of a Yogi" and "The Song of Bernadette" in 2023, I am making Dante's "The Divine Comedy" my Book of the Year for 2024.
It should be a very interesting March.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
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