LIES

***Cavalcanti's father hopes to see his son with Dante. He utters words that recall God's words to Cain: "My son, where is my son?": "Where is your brother?" God asks Adam's murderous son. Cavalcanti infers from Dante that Guido -whose love of life on earth, whose belief in individual greatness, led him to achieve his own greatness- no longer feasts "on the sweet light." Devastated, the elder Cavalcanti collapses back into his crypt, among those Dante brands heretics because they believed that pleasure is the highest human good, which meant one needed no gods.
Dante will give Farinata, Guido's father-in-law who raises himself from the same tomb, this message: tell the old man that his son still lives. But it is not true.
Is Dante lying because in Guido's death he suffered the loss of a friend and the loss of innocence? The heresy of the sixth circle is a sin that resides in the mind. Insofar as Dante is concerned, heresy and pleasure are one and the same: an intellectual obfuscation. Guido's father asks a question; he believes by Dante's silence that he hears the answer. Dante tries to speak, but only a partial confession comes from him. In the language he has learned, in the poet he is at this point in his journey, he cannot make himself understood. A new language is needed, one that will carry the truth in all its clarity. No natural philosopher would have said that the mind could sin. Aristotle would not have acknowledged heresy or hypocrisy. These are Dante's demons.
But he is not Dante anymore. He is Dante and Cavalcanti, Dante and Moses in the desert. Experience extends beyond the boundaries of autobiography to become a larger element: Dante discovers the forcefulness of allegory, where his wanderings become a new "exodus". He is all men who have sought freedom and the full expression of the feelings that lie within.
There is a new teacher waiting for him -Beatrice, no longer alive, no longer dead, but in some other state.***

(Del libro de Harriet Rubin: "Dante In Love")

En la pizarra escribí "LIER", la sonrisa angelical corrigió como "LIAR".