Got home to day from four day’s stay with Barfield. We
had promised ourselves some solid reading together, and in spite of the
temptations of conversation and walking, we stuck to it: Aristotle’s Ethics all morning, walk after
lunch, and then Dante’s Paradiso for
the rest of the day.
The latter has really opened a new world to me. I don’t
know whether it is really very different from the Inferno (B. says its as different as chalk from
cheese — heaven from hell, would be more appropriate!) or whether I was
specially receptive, but it certainly seemed to me that I had never seen at all
what Dante was like before. Unfortunately the impression is so unlike anything
else that I can hardly describe it for your benefit — a sort of mixture of
intense, even crabbed, complexity in language and thought with (what seems
impossible) at the very same time a
feeling of spacious gliding movement, like a slow dance, or like flying. It is
like the stars — endless mathematical subtility of orb, cycle, epicycle and
ecliptic, unthinkable & unpicturable, & yet at the same time the
freedom and liquidity of empty space and the triumphant certainty of movement.
I should describe it as feeling more important than any poetry I have ever read. Whether it has the things you
specially like is another question. It is seldom homely: perhaps not holy in our sense — it is too Catholic for that:
and of course its blend of complexity and beauty is very like Catholic theology
— wheel within wheel, but wheels of glory, and the One radiated through the
Many.
From
a letter to Arthur Greeves, 13? January 1930.
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