Yesterday, our reading group did the last canto of Dante’s Inferno. We reached the center, climbed the hairy haunch of Satan, and emerged to a place where above could be seen stars. I’m told each volume of the Commedia ends with stars.
There is in this final fabrication a very science-fictional scenario which can easily be read as a depiction of a singularity. All motion has ceased except for the flapping of Satan’s wings and the gnawing of his three mouths on the bodies of the ultimate betrayers, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. (As in most other places in the Inferno, Dante mixed post Christian Era figures with Classical forms. …