Will Dante's Pilgrim work up the courage to continue his journey?

Will he make it to the jaws of hell unscathed?

Will I ever make it through Conto 1 of Dante's Inferno?

Find out on today's episode of Young Heretics.

Okay, these are the deep questions that you've come to this show to get answered.

You guys, this series on Dante's Divine Comedy, I am realizing, is going to be painful.

I did not understand how hard it would be to go through this poem without spending an hour on every line.

I've read it before, of course, but coming back again at just, there's so much in here.

It's so jam-packed, so filled with rich symbolism and so intricately arrayed that I feel like I just, I'm never

going to get through it. I just want to like spend an entire episode for every conto or even

every like interset. I can't do that. We've got lots of other wonderful texts to read together,

lots of cool things to explore and experience.

And so I'm going to try to get us into a place where we're doing about one circle of hell per

episode. So I'll be increasing our pace from what we'll be doing in these first few episodes.

But in these first few episodes, I really want to stew. I

really want to luxuriate in everything that is packed in here. First of all, because these

first conti, sort of conto one and two, the first books of the poem, are particularly

full, I think. Dante means for them to be. He's giving us this condensed picture of everything

he intends to do. And so it'll profit us to spend time really getting into it and laying out a

lot of the themes that will come back again and again. And that'll be a good introduction to the

poem because Dante is a very skilled craftsman and he knows to give you an introduction

that will set you up for the rest. And as we discussed last time, the medieval philosophy of

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