https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=p-Rfj8AEycg
You once mentioned for 10 year olds, sorry, you once mentioned that Dante’s Divine Comedy was an arc. Can you expand on this definition? Are there other works of literature, art, or music that are also arcs? Well, I think that the scripture itself in a way is a kind of arc. The idea that, let’s say Dante’s Comedy, because the thing about the arc, especially the arc of Noah, is we tend to think of the arc of Noah as like a pure thing, but the arc of Noah is not really a pure thing. It’s more like it contains everything in one frame. And so in the arc are the animals at the bottom of the arc, and then there’s the head or man at the top of the arc. And you can kind of imagine, you see it sometimes in images where the birds are kind of above or at the top, very, very top of the arc. And so it’s a little microcosm. And so in that sense, I think that Dante was able to create a microcosm in which people could actually live. And that’s really something. Like people could actually, Dante’s Comedy ended up creating tropes that people actually live in. And so his images of heaven and purgatory and hell are images that entered into the consciousness of people, not just in their desire to be entertained, but in the way that they engage with their own lives, their own sins, their own values, and it stretches from the cosmic. So there’s an aspect of his work which is talking about God and how God reveals himself in the world and some of the characters that he meets are at that level. Like he even brings in like the old gods. He even brings in the old Greek gods and Roman gods and they’re all there. Like the whole antiquity is kind of brought into the story, right? Everything is brought in. Like that’s why what I mean, it’s an arc. Like everything of value is brought into this one big structure, all the old at a cosmic level. So the angels, the gods, the demons, all of this is there. Then at all the political level. So all these historical figures are there, but then also at the personal level. So he encounters all the people in his life that he had to deal with at the different levels of the hierarchy. So at every step of the hierarchy, he encounters the different levels. So it’s like it is an amazing fractal structure. And so that’s what I mean. Like that’s an arc because it’s an amazing microcosm, but not just like Lord of the Rings of the microcosm because you can’t live in Lord of the Rings, but you can live in Dante’s comedy. It’s a structure of the ascent of an actual person through this kind of mythological structure of being. So it’s pretty amazing. I mean Dante’s comedy is an amazing thing.