As I previously noted, the reading group (study group, really) to which we belong just completed Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. After seven years of more or less twice-monthly sessions, canto by canto, poring over etymologies, dictionaries, lexicons, and tossing ideas around in a whirlwind of interpretation, we came to the end, with more stars, and one may hope a better understanding of a text that has been at the center of Western Literature for centuries.
Hope, I think, is the key. Which is to say, the meaning of that word in the famous line everyone seems to know even if they don’t always know from where it comes. …