Dante
Article
Dante is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between August 26, 2022 and April 04, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy”; “quoting Dante’s “All hope abandon, ye who enter here””; “go from the Iliad through the great Greek tragedies through Dante”. It most often appears alongside Astral Codex Ten, France, Germany.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: August 26, 2022
- Last seen: April 04, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: Kora In Hell
- Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
- Book Review: The Alexander Romance
- Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
- Links For April 2024
Related Pages
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- Astral Codex Ten (2 shared issues)
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- France (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Jerusalem (2 shared issues)
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- Less Wrong (2 shared issues)
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- London (2 shared issues)
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- New York (2 shared issues)
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- Russia (2 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
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- Switzerland (2 shared issues)
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- World War I (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
As its name implies, the Improvisations is not a meticulously planned book. It’s not a high concept type of thing where you literally move the Eleusinian Myth to New Jersey. William Carlos Williams simply went to work in the morning and when he returned home at night, no matter how late it was, before going to bed, he wrote something, anything, and at the end of the year he had a pile of texts in front of him which were now the rough precursor of a book. Those texts were loosely based on what had happened to him throughout that day, or on something he had seen or thought about. Williams wrote the book during 1917, when he was around 34 years old. That’s the age Dante had when he began the Divine Comedy:
In the beginning of this review, I wrote that the attempt to publish this book was literally suicidal. I don’t know this for a fact. But Jünger appreciated suicide as “part of the capital of humanity” and the callous disregard for his own safety that he demonstrated many times is at least parasuicidal. He appears to see fear of death as a mechanical problem to which he is proud to have found a solution. Because somewhere in that first World War that traumatized him into the author he became, sometime between his many close brushes with death, perhaps when he saw the frontline ahead of him at night as a glowing line of continual explosions and quoting Dante’s “All hope abandon, ye who enter here” went in anyway, Jünger discovered the saving power of beauty. I believe he went to the publishing house with this manuscript much like he’d go over the top in the war, acutely aware of the mortal danger, but so fortified with his duty to beauty that he’d do it anyway.
We divide “high culture” from “mass culture”. High culture, those books that plumb the depths of the human spirit, go from the Iliad through the great Greek tragedies through Dante and Shakespeare and so on to Tolstoy, Proust, and Knausgaard. Mass culture - those books that the average person finds entertaining - might also start with the Iliad, but ends up at Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, and Batman comics.
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, USA Contact: Dante and Britt Contact Info: danteac94[at]gmail[dot]com; miamiacx[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 20th, 11:00 AM Location: At the beach, on the Hollywood beach boulevard. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RX2V6M+CM Group Link: https://discord.gg/k2pzWUb9ss Notes: I might be there earlier to watch the sunrise and then having the morning at the beach
Inline links: https://plus.codes/76RX2V6M+CM, https://discord.gg/k2pzWUb9ss
26: Good New Yorker article on the “classical education” trend [may be paywalled for some people], historically-inspired charter schools that teach classics, poetry, Latin, etc. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity . . . in classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.” My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person, and there’s no way to make all of this happen without the Aristotle and Dante as rallying flags.