The Gan Perrol Affair

I thought that only italian students had to study Dante at school. We actually had to read the whole thing over five years and most of us of course hate doing that. But in reality it is fantastic and it is pure fantasy!I imagined you as a young person, because of your enthusiasm but maybe you are as prehistoric as me :-)

IMho Shlee and Parrol journey si really reminiscent of Beatrix and Dante acsent into the heavens. In both cases it si a process of atonement that makes possibile a final revelation; the difference is that in Dante the latter si an insight into an objective reality-the core of being- while in yiur story it si a kind of Self mirroring. Which tells a lot, I think, about modernity and its psicologism. It probably got to you through Moore' but still...

I'm not sure that's right, firstly because the Divine Comedy seems to be heavily influenced by gnosticism through the Cathars, and their whole deal was that 'objective reality' was a lie and the only true experience (gnosis) was to be found within, so it isn't exactly Modernity that finds Truth mirrored in the Self. It's a very, very old idea. Even for the Cathars it was a revival: the original Gnostics had formed in the 2nd Century, and they probably took their cue from the Neo-Platonists, and so on. It's not really fair to blame modernity and psychologism in a tradition that more or less started with Pythagoras!

If there's a modern twist to it it's that for Dante and the Cathars the 'One' was Truth, and therefore Good, and this reality was False, and therefore Bad, which is weirdly Socratic for 13th Century hippies. For S'hlee the question of 'what is real' is a meaningless one, as it depends on what your frame of reference is and who's in charge of it. The idea of an 'objective reality' is absurd, because how can you experience any reality except subjectively, and what kind of reality can't be experienced? The important question is not 'what is real' but 'what is beautiful'.

Hi Agatha, thanks for your reply. I don't think there is much platonic or gnostic influence in Dante, mainly because he had not direct access to Plato (or Plotinus) writings. Those were translated later frome the arabic, and caused the Italian Renaissence, which is in fact mainly a platonic revival. He was really deeply rooted in tomism, so his philosophical frame of reference was a fusion of Aristotelic philosophy and biblical and patristic wisdom. I'm not saying that he knew nothing of platonism but he saw that through Aristotelic eyes. If you are interested in discussing these things, maybe we should move into the direct mailing, because we are going way outside 40K.
By the by, from what I can see from this forum the 40k environment in Uk and US must be quite different than here, where it is....well, dishartening. A couple of years ago I tried to return to the game after A LONG absence, but it was shocking....it's just kids or teenagers. Not that I don't like them but I felt like the mummy of Tooth Moses. Maybe I should build a Necron army to fit in

For Dante and the likes there is no difference at all between what is true and what is beautifull, because, well before Keats, they thought that beauty, truth and good are different names for the same thing: being. Their opposite do not exist per se, but are simply lack of good-or want of being. I understand what you are saying about objective reality, but I think that it's a line of thinking that became common only after Descartes; that's why I was saying that your novel is marked by subjectivism. Actually it was ment as a praise....well, sort of