Compare and Contrast

 On Saturday evening, driving home from London, I listened to the moving account of  the children of Nuremberg defendants talking about the legacy in their lives of that famous trial.  The following day I listened to a radio play entitled Dante's Inferno.  It struck me straightaway that here was connecting theory with 20th century practice.

Inferno I begins....

"When half way through the journey of our life

• I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
• because the path which led aright was lost."

Inferno III

• "These wretched souls, who never were alive,
• were naked, and were sorely spurred to action
• by means of wasps and hornets that were there.
• The latter streaked their faces with their blood,
• which, after it had mingled with their tears,
• was at their feet sucked up by loathsome worms."
• I recall the picture painted on the walls of St Thomas church in Salisbury.  Hideous pictures of hell.  And surely we all, as Terence the Roman Playwright comments, 
•  "I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me"  
• It's a terrible thought that we are made of the same fallible material.    
• 
  

  

  Hell Incarnate- St Thomas Church- Salisbury
  
  

  
  
  Next I recall a discussion on the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins, writing about what we now call depression, what his friend Robert Bridges noted as 'The terrible Poems'.  They were far from terrible, but his friend described them as 'awful', 'terrible', 'fearful'. 

• "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall 
• Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. 
• Hold them cheap 
• May who ne'er hung there. 
• Nor does long our small 
• Durance deal with that steep or deep. 
• Here! creep, 
• Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all 
• Life death does end and each day dies with sleep." 
• Gerard Manley Hopkins  (With thanks also to 'In Our Time'.)