This week is the second cornice or the level of Envy. Once again, the punishment is relevant to the crime. It goes from dress to behavior to attitude. When in this level, souls are wearing brownish, grayish cloaks that blend into the surroundings. The point of that is that it is opposite of envy. While something catches your eye that you want, in this case the souls cannot be seen.

Once they cannot be seen, then they cannot see. The souls eyes are sewn shut so that they are not able to look, the nature or conduit of their sin. There isn’t a lot to do there except pray and sing. A lot of the vitriol that proceeded the previous stops were absent here.

I have been thinking about this for several weeks now. There have been very few mentions of women to date. We of course have the pursuit to Beatrice and there have been a few spirits or furies, but no real characters. It makes me wonder exactly what the colloquial feeling on women and the afterworld was at the time.

For sure, this was a patriarchy but does that mean that women were considered sinless? I highly doubt that but they probably didn’t have the same opportunity to commit all the politically motivated sins. It is also likely that because this piece is making fun of all of Dante’s enemies, he may not have had quarrel with women. I will be curious to see if the proportion of women pick-up through the remainder of the book.

This is another week that had a long diatribe of people and events, specifically Canto XIV. I happened to by trying to read in the hospital. It was really difficult flipping back and forth between the footnotes and text as well as paying half attention to what I was doing.

I suppose that I should be grateful that there is more notes than actual text. Without them, I would be lost in the mythology references. And, I could probably ignore them and just read the text straight through. But, it is really hard to maintain continuity of the story flipping back and forth every couple of minutes. In general, an average Canto takes me about thirty minutes to read.

End Your Programming Routine: This is going to be a short one. Next week, Cornice 3 is going to be Canto XVI only. Truth be told, the farther I go along, the more confused I am between the separation of Hell and Purgatory. Notes give me a small backstory with each interaction but there are still characters that were murdered, committed suicide and killed others. Maybe it was a matter of asking forgiveness? Otherwise, I just don’t know.