Antiquitopia

I am in the middle of teaching Dante's Divine Comedy (the "Divine" purportedly added by Boccaccio), and lines that catch my attention at every reading is in Purgatorio , which, by the way, is my favorite of the three cantica. Of fantasy, you that at times would snatch us so from outward things--we notice nothing although a thousand trumpets sound around us-- who moves you when the senses do not spur you? A light that finds its form in Heaven moves you-- directly or led downward by God's will. Within my fantasy I saw impressed the savagery of one who then, transformed, became the bird that most delights in song; at this, my mind withdrew to the within, to what imagining might bring: no thing that came from the without could enter in. Then into my deep fantasy there rained one who was crucified; and as he died, he showed his savagery and his disdain. (Dante, Purgatorio 17:13-27) In this ode to fantasy, Dante is describing his dreams, but there is something else about...

On Narnia and Christmas: two things created out of a conglomeration of elements...but how old are they? An article from the NYTimes claims that MOST of our ideas of Christmas are...Victorian! December 18, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor It’s a Narnia Christmas By LAURA MILLER EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season. I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed ...