12-06-2017, 12:05 AM
That happens. Little children dream all kinds of archetypal stories, knights in white armor saving princesses from dragons, that kind of thing. Carl Jung studied it.
The conventional story is that in Dante the bottom of hell is cold because it's as far away from God as possible. The idea is supposed to be that sin is separation from God, and separation from God is the worst kind of suffering. But the Beatrice-is-Heaven angle turns it all upside down. He's making tragic adolescent Romeo and Juliet style romance, and I'm talking angsty teenage break up songs AND cheap paperback romance novels here, into something IMPORTANT. Like some random girl he thought was pretty once was the mystic key to everything, above all the Heavens and below all the Hells.
The conventional story is that in Dante the bottom of hell is cold because it's as far away from God as possible. The idea is supposed to be that sin is separation from God, and separation from God is the worst kind of suffering. But the Beatrice-is-Heaven angle turns it all upside down. He's making tragic adolescent Romeo and Juliet style romance, and I'm talking angsty teenage break up songs AND cheap paperback romance novels here, into something IMPORTANT. Like some random girl he thought was pretty once was the mystic key to everything, above all the Heavens and below all the Hells.