Quote of the Day: Umberto Eco on Dante's "Paradiso"
So, I have been continuing to read Umberto Eco's On Literature, and he has a nice, very short, essay on Dante Alighieri's Paradiso , called "A Reading of the Paridiso ." He argues that it has been misread and underestimated, in fact devalued, in the nineteenth century and this devaluation continued throughout the twentieth, with the Inferno and, to some extent, the Purgatorio gaining the most attention. In contrast, Eco argues that the Paradiso is the finest of all three canticas. He primarily sets it in the context of the medieval preference for bold, bright color to express themselves in daily life, refined by Dante in the Paradiso . But, what caught my attention is the Paradiso as amazingly modern, and, in fact, futuristic: "Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can ...