Lucy Bamboo · August 14, 2026
Out of a storm full of the anonymous dead, Dante picks two who are travelling together and calls them over — and what comes back is the most persuasive speech in Hell: a woman who never once says she chose anything, who assigns the blame in turn to Love, to a book, to the man … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · July 11, 2026
I have read Dante’s Canto V perhaps forty times. Each time, I weep. Not because I don’t understand it—I do—but because understanding it feels impossible. This is the paradox of the Francesca da Rimini episode. It moves us most when we’re uncertain what we should feel. The text itself doesn’t change. But the translation does. … Read more
Lucy Bamboo · June 28, 2026We’ve been taught to ask whether God is loving. The ruder question — the one Dante actually stages, in granular architectural detail, for every reader who has ever cracked open the Inferno — is whether a God who designed Hell could possibly be. Not Hell as vague backdrop to a morality tale, but Hell as … Read more
