“Who asks my name, knows
I am Leah, so those beautiful hands
Walking around, circled the wreath. “
“Know what my name requires
ch’i’I am Lia, I walk around
My beautiful hands make me a wreath. “
(Purgatorio XXVII, 100-102, translated by Philalethes)
In purgatory—the fire has passed, and the encounter with Beatrice is inevitable—Dante had a wonderful dream. It has only fifteen lines, but individual words and things are pondered over and over in it. Here, it is obviously important for Dante and his companions to be at the limit-everything on earth will soon fall behind the river, and this dream is the last glimpse of human life that has not yet been transformed by heaven. The beautiful virgin Leah strolling on the grass there, she picks flowers for the wreath, and sings about her sister Lahel who does not want to decorate her, enough to make her look at herself endlessly in the mirror. The old choice between vita activa and vita contemplativa is invalid here. One way is not better than the other. Activity and contemplation are two aspects of the same mirror.
The sisters are as different as the future and the past: although Rachel did not take a step away from her mirror, there is a time interval between Leah and her mirror—he waited until she appeared in front of him.Because Lia’s greatest joy is doing (just like Rachel’s happiness; people have beautiful eyes, Another Beautiful hands), your mirror is always an empty waiting room. Rahel is the witness today and Leah is the one who will still be almost invisible tomorrow.
“It’s unthinkable to read Dante’s chants without guiding them to the present. That is their purpose. They are devices to capture the future. They need to comment in the future tense.” In the same year he wrote these verses, Ossip Mandelstam was invited to Anna Akhmatova’s house; plans to conduct a private reading of new poems. The night did not materialize-the invited audience was arrested the day before. Akhmatova apologized: she had tea and bread there, but unfortunately only the guests were in prison. Life in historical times has questioned our prepared position: Vita activa and Vita contemplativa have entered a strange connection, and they reflect each other like Leah and Rahel. In the face of catastrophe, the differences between them seem to be blurred, leaving only the similarities. Even today, it is difficult to separate contemplation from action.
The endless winters of the second year of the pandemic, severe cold and blizzards, even spinning where they seem to have lost nothing—between the pillars of the Parthenon, in the Roman Forum, in the streets of Jerusalem— Alternately reminiscent of in the land of Narnia in CS Lewis, the evil spell stopped time, spring would never come, and then Andersen Xiaokai sits by the frozen lake, trying to spell out a meaningful word from the ice cube-an “intelligence game” that he absolutely does not want to succeed. But low temperature as a metaphor of despair has existed in literature as early as.
There is a second mirror in the Divine Comedy, but no one looks at it: the ice surface of Cosettes, the deepest part of hell, where sin and despair have reached their greatest concentration—a place where the future is abolished and is now intolerable. Contrary to all common ideas about the structure of hell, Dante turned the ninth and last circle into an extremely cold place. The most important feature of this non-location is a negative stability: permanent cold, permanent danger, and the permanent impossibility of any dialogue or understanding.
