Gustave Doré, Inferno, Canto XIII: The Forest of Suicides, 1866.Wood engraving for Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (public domain image). When I first looked at Doré’s Forest of Suicides, I thought of winter trees after a storm - those half-living skeletons that creak when the wind passes through, as if remembering they were once alive. … Continue reading The Forest That Feels: On Doré’s Inferno and the Suicide of the Soul
Tag: misery
No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
No Exit is Sartre’s vision of the afterlife and contains no fire, no pitchforks, and no sulphuric pits; it is, instead, a perfectly reasonable room - which is precisely what makes it horrifying. He replaces Dante’s inferno with a waiting room furnished by IKEA and irony. This isn’t the Hell of theology but of psychology … Continue reading No Exit – Hell, Mirrors, and the Modern Soul
Notes from Underground
There are books that make me think, and there are books that make me squirm. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground manages both - a confessional so raw it feels like eavesdropping on a man’s nervous breakdown, with philosophy as his chosen weapon. It’s not so much a novel as an exorcism, written in ink and bile. … Continue reading Notes from Underground
Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
Leonora Carrington didn’t so much write a memoir as vomit out an apocalypse. Down Below isn’t autobiography in the polite sense, with polite sentences arranged like cutlery for an afternoon tea. It is, rather, the table turned over, the crockery smashed, and the cutlery embedded in the wallpaper. This slim, feverish account of her psychotic … Continue reading Down Below: Leonora Carrington’s Descent into the Furnace of the Mind
‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
There are phrases that ring through history like bells tolling in fog: ‘Et tu, Brute?’, ‘I have a dream,’ ‘Father, forgive them.’ Yesterday another such phrase was spoken - not in marble halls nor on the steps of Washington, but from a widow’s lips at her husband’s memorial service. Erika Kirk stood before the world, … Continue reading ‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
Wording 