TV Quote of the Day (‘The Sopranos,’ With Paulie and Christopher on the Afterlife)

[After being shot, Christopher Moltisanti goes into a coma, from which he emerges convinced that he went to Hell. But he’s not sure if it was hot there.]

Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri [played by Tony Sirico]: “Hell is hot! That's never been disputed by anybody. You didn't go to Hell. You went to Purgatory, my friend.”

Christopher Moltisanti [played by Michael Imperioli]: “I forgot about Purgatory.”

Paulie: “Purgatory—a little detour on the way to Paradise.”

Christopher: “How long do you think we've got to stay there?”

Paulie: “That's different for everybody. You add up all your mortal sins and multiply that number by 50. Then you add up all your venial sins and multiply that by 25. You add that together and that's your sentence. I figure I'm gonna have to do 6,000 years before I get accepted into Heaven and 6,000 years is nothin' in eternity terms. I can do that standing on my head. It's like a couple of days here.”— The Sopranos, Season 2, Episode 9, “From Where to Eternity,” teleplay by David Chase and Michael Imperioli, directed by Henry Bronchtein

As I’ve written before here, The Sopranos had some of the most laugh-out-loud moments on television during its seven seasons on the air. This is one of them.

At the same time, of course, this darkly comic dialogue helps the viewer accept the most agonizing moral and theological debates. No matter what form Hell takes (Paulie is all too optimistic about his chances of making Purgatory, let alone Heaven), Tony Soprano and his crew will be there.

In all their cynicism, fear and paranoia, they’re arguably in Hell even as they speak.

Quote of the Day (Janeane Garofalo, on Stairmaster, Her Idea of Hell)

“When you die, apparently, some people believe that your hell is whatever your mind’s-eye idea of hell is. Unfortunately, I’ve come face to face with what mine is, all right? I’m going to be sentenced to the Stairmaster ring of Dante’s Inferno, where I have to get on a Stairmaster and they’re going to tape my feet to the pedals. And the only music I get is Michael Bolton, karaoke-style from a drunken secretary on Margarita Night.”—Stand-up comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo, from Comedy Central, 1993 appearance

The image accompanying this post shows Ms. Garofalo at the world premiere of Bad Parents at the Montclair Film Festival, taken Oct. 3, 2012, by Edwin Torres.

Quote of the Day (Dante, on Opportunists in Hell)

“Here sighs and cries and wails coiled and recoiled
On the starless air, spilling my soul to tears.
A confusion of tongues and monstrous accents toiled
 
In pain and anger, voices hoarse and shrill
And sounds of blows, all intermingled, raised
Tumult and pandemonium that still
 
Whirls on the air forever dirty with it
As if a whirlwind sucked at sand. And I,
Holding my head in horror, cried: ‘Sweet Spirit,
 
What souls are these who run through this black haze?’
And he to me: ‘These are the nearly soulless
Whose lives concluded neither blame nor praise.
 
They are mixed here with that despicable corps
Of angels who were neither for God nor Satan,
But only for themselves. The High Creator
 
Scourged them from Heaven for its perfect beauty,
And Hell will not receive them since the wicked
Might feel some glory over them.’”—Italian poet Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321), “The Inferno” (Part I of The Divine Comedy), Canto 3, translated by American poet John Ciardi (1977)
 
This week marks the 700^th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. I almost forgot to mark the event on this blog until I found a link on the Website for BBC Radio mentioning it.
 
As I wrote this post, I listened to Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony to put me in the appropriate mood. But so extraordinary was the poet’s imagination and style that I had little need to call to mind favorite passages of his Divine Comedy, which English biographer, translator and literary critic Ian Thomson, in a 2018 article for The Irish Times, termed “the most original and audacious treatment of the afterlife in Western literature.”
 
Many translators have tackled this epic (notably, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and—more surprisingly, to fans of her detective fiction—Dorothy L. Sayers). 

But John Ciardi’s appeals to me the most. It’s the one I first encountered as a high school senior, then used again while in college, and its use of terza rima stanzas (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme) gives the best sense of how Dante could compress so much into so few words.
 
Canto 3 became a particular favorite of three of the most charismatic 20^th-century Presidents:
 
*Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1911 a well-received essay for The Outlook on “Dante and the Bowery,” and used much of the imagery from the canto in his 1910 address, “The Man in the Arena”;
 
*Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic Party renomination for President in 1936 in his “Rendezvous With Destiny” address, which defended his administration by warning of indifference in the field of the Depression’s suffering: “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales”; and
 
*John F. Kennedy misattributed these words to the poet while being correct about the message that Dante wished to impart: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
 
The neutrality that Dante is criticizing (those “whose lives concluded neither praise nor blame”) springs not from a plague-on-both-your houses disgust with two opponents, but rather from a cold calculation of advantage amid tumult. Its great fictional epitome is Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, who tells the careful, secretive counselor Varys that “Chaos is a ladder.”
 
Here in Hell, Dante warns, such men have all the chaos and tumult they can want, but they reap no advantage from it.
 
Contemporary cynics can’t be faulted for thinking that countless current officeholders are unwittingly clamoring for a chance to join this suffering infernal throng. It just goes to show that technology may change human culture, but not human nature.
 
The image accompanying this post, by the way, is Mappa dell' Inferno (“The Abyss of Hell”), by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (ca. 1445-1510).

Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Hell and the ‘Managerial Age’)

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."— British man of letters C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Preface to The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Seventy-five years ago his month, as the free world confronted the gigantic evil of Fascism. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis was published in Britain. The point of its satire was lost on at least one reader, a country clergyman who, during its serialization the prior autumn in the British church paper The Guardian, had canceled his subscription, telling the editor that "much of the advice given in these letters seemed to him not only erroneous but positively diabolical."

Well…yes. Screwtape, a veteran demon in the service of "Our Father Below" (do I have to explain who that is?), writes a series of letters to his nephew and protégé Wormwood on how to tempt a “patient” (a suddenly vulnerable human being) over to their side. As time goes on, however, Screwtape becomes increasingly frustrated because “The Enemy” (i.e., God) continually demonstrates that “His love for man…is not mere propaganda, but an appalling truth.”

This hellish comedy exhibits its cleverness both in the literal way it imagines its setting (as hinted in the above quote, the underworld is seen as a bureaucratic “lowerarchy”) and its voice. (Screwtape, chastising his far too optimistic nephew: “So you ‘have great hopes that the patient's religious phase is dying away,’ have you? I always thought the Tempters' Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure.”) Altogether, it demonstrated what A.N. Wilson's 1990 biography called Lewis’ “ability to see through human failings, his capacity to analyse other people's annoyingness, [and] his rich sense of comedy and satire.”

The Screwtape Letters found a ready audience for its clever mix of theology and mirth, selling out its 2,000-copy first printing immediately, then another two printings in March, and at least one million copies in print by the turn of the century. It has also been adapted for audio, with John Cleese as the sputtering older demon, and for the stage, in a production mounted by the Fellowship for Performing Arts.

All of this represented a triumph for Lewis, who found writing the book tough going—not because he had writer’s block, but because he felt that trying to understand Satan and his minions was dangerous to his own spiritual health. It solidified his growing reputation as a master of Christian apologetics (Mere Christianity) and Christian-influenced fiction (The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe).

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoevsky, on Hell and Love)

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Death came for the Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) 135 years ago today in St. Petersburg. He had expected it at least for a while—not just in the years 1864 and 1865, when his brother and first wife died, but even as far back as December 1849, when his imprisonment for involvement in revolutionary activities resulted in a terrifyingly realistic mock execution. (I recounted this incident in this post.)

Even if the “New Atheism” preached by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett passes from vogue to overwhelming approval, I doubt if Dostoevsky’s brand of Christian fiction will lose its power over readers. His faith derived not from logical Thomistic axioms but from a mind in torment. Losses, personal and financial (resulting from a longtime gambling addiction), assured that.

Henry James griped that the Russian’s works were “baggy monsters” of literary construction, but both men brought to the 19^th century novel unprecedented levels of psychological realism. Moreover, both featured manias and altered states of consciousness.

It might be said that, by Dostoevsky’s definition, the American and the Russian alike dealt with hell. James’ novella “The Beast in the Jungle” examines a man who, through his belief that he is marked for a special fate, closes himself off from the love that could save him. Dostoevsky’s work—especially his two most famous novels, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—focus on the isolating impact of despair and the hard-won redemption achieved through Christian love.

Quote of the Day (Dante, Back From Hell to ‘The Shining World’)

"To get back up to the shining world from there

My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;

...Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars." — Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky (1997)

Quote of the Day (Fyodor Dostoevsky, Defining Hell)

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)