Dante, Heaven and Hell

One needs either a heaven or a hell in which to flourish --- until one arrives at that Paradise of his own creation, that middle realm which is not a bread-and-butter Utopia of which the masses dream but an interstellar realm in which one rolls along his orbit with sublime indifference. Dante was the best cartographer of the soul which Europe ever produced, everything clear as a whistle and etched in black and white...

...but since his time not only Europe, but the whole universe, has moved into new spiritual dimensions. Man is still the center of the cosmos, but having stretched the cosmos almost to the bursting point --- the scientists actually predict that the universe will explode! --- man himself is practically invisible. Artificial wings won't help, nor artificial eyes, nor escalators ... The whole damned universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed. Every atom has to be rearranged.

--- Henry Miller, from
The Cosmological Eye
as quoted in The Sun
February 2013