varieties of hellish experience
the waste land and the divine comedy
“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.” (Simone Weil)
The first lines of Inferno which kick off the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy (by now over 700 years old) go:
“Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off the straight path How hard it is to tell wh…