Eugene’s Inferno
Posted in General on January 28th, 2014 by Eugene Finerman – 3 CommentsDangerous Cold in Chicago
According to Dante, Hell frequently freezes over. He imagined much of Hell to be cold. Of course, a Florentine’s vision of a glacial perdition would be any Midwesterner’s idea of a brisk November.
When reading L’Inferno I remember thinking “I could come up with better eternal torments than that. ” Dante’s notions would not qualify him an intern in Human Resources. Let’s tour the Adultery Section: Circle Two. Tempestous lovers are trapped forever in a whirlwind. It is a good metaphor but not much of a punishment. No, their extra-curricular activities should be videotaped and eternally shown on late night cable television, to the standard accompaniment of appallingly bad jazz. The embarrassment would be much worse than windburn.
(Don’t quibble that a 14th century Italian couldn’t have envisioned television and video recorders. Dante concocted an entire cosmological system. And if Dante needed a little tech advice, he could have asked Marco Polo what the Chinese and Japanese were working on.).
Let’s drop by another sin: gluttony. According to Dante’s itinerary, in the Third Circle those who have succumbed to their debauched appetites lie in the garbage and waste they created. However, I think that describes the typical college dorm room. That may be Dante’s idea of Hell, but for most of us it was one of the happiest times of our lives. No, the appropriate eternal punishment for gluttons would be to look at themselves in bathing suits and realize why they’re not in the Second Circle of Hell.
I really don’t have the time to worsen all of Hell, but I’d like to do one more neighborhood. In the First Circle are those souls who had every virtue but the right religion. The virtuous pagans (and according to Dante, that includes chivalrous Moslems) are only tortured by the thought of their inferiority. Now, in my Hell I would really rub in Christian perfection. Everyone in the First Circle would be reincarnated as Jerry and Millie Helper, living next door to Rob and Laura Petrie.