@accidental-spice And I Are Repotting Green Beans And I Accidentally Beheaded One Of The Smallest Plants,

Hii!! I feel like I haven't seen you in ages, I hope you're doing great!! If it's not too late, could I request a Dousy lockscreen? Thank you, and have a nice day!!

Awww, thanks!!! I am doing great, I have delicious chocolate 😂 back at you, I how you're doing well, too!! Oh GREAT request

Gosh I love these two. Thanks for the ask!!

Faramir and Eowyn <3

I’ve been wanting for a while to do a comparison of Dante’s Divine Comedy with CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, since the latter is very much modelled after the former (with George MacDonald in the place of Virgil) and they deal with very similar concepts.

My first inpression of the difference between them is that Dante develops a very specific and granular categorization and hierarchy on sins throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio, whereas to me all of the ones that Lewis showed were variations on a commonn theme of pride, the choice of one’s own opinions and preconceptions and self-image over heaven. In Lewis’ words, “There is always something they prefer to joy.” But as I think about it more closely, I think there are more specific correspondences between the two.

As Dorothy L. Sayers discusses in the introduction to her translation of the Commedia, there are two types of allegories: ones where all the characters are representations of specific concepts (such as in Spencer’s The Fairie Queen or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), or one where characters with their own names and identities can stand in for specific concepts: Virgil is Virgil, but he also represents Human Reason, Ciacco is an actual Florentine who existed, but he also represents gluttony, and so forth. This makes the characters more real and alive than the first type of allegories usually feel, and also allows the work to show nuances in its concepts by having multiple characters representing the same concept and so showing different nuances of it. Both the Commedia and The Last Divorce are the latter types, but they differ in how they design their characters: in the Commedia they are specific, named characters from Dante’s time, or from history, mythology, or the Bible. Lewis doesn’t do this (probably wisely; in an age of mass media, if he was sending MPs to Hell, any conversation about the books would be about that, and not about the book’s themes); instead he gives them epithets like the Big Ghost, and Hard-bitten Ghost, and Ghost in a Bowler; I will sometimes give them other names in this post. One of the thinfs this lets Lewis do is to deliberately subvert the prominence of famous religious and historical figures in the Comedy by having his celebrated and beloved ‘great saint’ in Heaven be not a figure from the Bible or later Christian history, but an ordinary woman named Sarah Smith with an ordinary life who was good, kind, and loving to everyone she met.

As an example of how Dante and Lewis work similarly and yet differently: the concept of Avarice. Dante shows it in both Hell and Purgatory, in different forms - people who ‘getting and spending, laid waste their powers’ (the Ciardi translation actually puts it similarly to that’. Lewis has no one who rejects Heaven based on desire for personal possessions; what he has instead is the character I’ll call the Economist, who says that the reason everyone in Hell spreads out (because they quarrel all the time) is because there are no commodities to drive them to live closer together, and tries futilely to bring back one of the - extraordinarily heavy, to him - apples of Heaven as such as commodity. (Is Lewis deliberately recalling the heavy rocks rolled by the Avaricious? Probably a stretch.) His problem is not a personal desire for riches, but the need to see the world in exclusively material terms and the only solution to problems as material ones.

Another example. Lewis, like Dante, has an example of heresy, and the connection between them came to me because of Sayers’ line in her commentary, quoting Charles Williams, that “the heretic accepted the Church, but preferred his own judgement to that of the church…an obduracy of mind, an intellectual obstinacy.” All of those traits are seen in one of Lewis’ ghosts, a self-identified Christian who denies the Resurrection and insists that one cannot know any spiritual truths for certain and that he wouldn’t want to, because it would prevent free inquiry and intellectual broadness. (In opposition to the heavenly spirit he is speaking to, who insists that the point of intellectual inquiry is to learn what is true.) This ghost has another particular trait that recurs in different forms a few times in The Great Divorce: he expresses the, on the surface laudable, sentiment that he’s not of any use in heaven whereas in hell he can help people. The recurrent sentiment - from him, from the Tragedian, from the Economist, from an artist (sort of), from a variety of planners and improvers who are mentioned in passing - is the need to be needed, and the two former of these are explicitly told that they are not needed, though they are certainly wanted and welcomed. The very gratuitousness of heaven leads some to reject it.

As a further example: the Sullen, in Dante, are one of the more problematic aspects of Hell, as their fate seems rather excessively harsh just for being grumpy (or melancholy, in you like). Lewis takes a bit of a different tack that sheds some light on it. There’s an elderly ghost in Heaven who we only see complaining to heavenly friend about how dreadful her life was. George MacDonald explains to Lewis that if she’s simply an old lady with a bad habit of grumbling, she’ll accept heaven and be well in the end; but if there’s nothing left of her but grumbling, there’s nothing to be done. The sullenness that Dante depicts is here shown as a person who is looking joy in the face, who is standing in the midst of joy, but is unable to see it in their focus in dwelling on past wrongs.

Curiously, Lewis - unlike Dante in the eighth and ninth circles - spends very little time on those who are deeply evil, beyond saying “Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer it than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.” Rather than Malice, the characteristic of the lowest levels of Dante’s hell, Lewis focuses on a range of forms of distorted love that, I think, we do not see equivalents to in the Commedia. The Commedia’s characterization of the roots of evil in forms of distorted or ill-governed love (or desire) is very helpful to this concept. Virgil (via Aristotle?) characterizes it in three classes: love of thy neighbour’s ill (Pride, Envy, and Wrath: desire to put someone down for your own aggradizement, resentment of someone’s rise because it dininishes you in comparison, and immoderate anger in response to wrongs), insufficient love (Sloth - which in Lewis would likely be represented by those who don’t get on the bus at all) and excessive love of earthly things (Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust).

Lewis takes his critique well beyond that to various forms of non-sexual love for people that are nonetheless harmful to them or others. (This gets into his idea, expressed in Till We Have Faces, that in the absence of grace all human loves are ultimately selfish.) There’s a woman, who in a determination to “improve” her husband socioeconomically and culturally, drove away all his friends and pushed him into a career that made him miserable until he ultimately died of sheer unhappiness, and on her visit to Heaven can speak of nothing but all the thankless work she did on his behalf, and futilely demand to be allowed to ‘manage’ him again. There’s a woman who loved her son so all-consumingly that she neglected everyone else in her life, and made them miserable after his death by reorienting her life and theirs entirely around mourning him.

Driving lessons with the SHIELD family.

Yet another rendition of this scene, which I never tire of.

ao3 comments will be like “i like this line of your fic” and my reply will be like “fantastic thank you here’s my entire thought process about how i ended up with that particular line and also an outline for another fic i have and fifteen resources i used to research 1980s politics” and nobody asked for that chill

jet lag s13e2 “we’re about to go absolutely thurbo mode”

I feel like I need to share my favourite Jet Lag outake, that, afaik, was only uploaded on Scotty's twitter. It's so fucking funny. Adam looks like he's having an actual brain aneurism while Ben is just like 😕 I don't like it

The Annux Attolis Eugenides, lounging languidly where his wife might notice.

Shared on this blog at the request of the creator, a Queen's Thief fan without a tumblr account, who wanted to make it available for public enjoyment.

Special bonus lineart (Color your own Annux Edition)