Cognitive Collapse - Canto I-III

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.

How shall I say what wood that was! I never saw so drear, so rank, so arduous a wilderness! Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! But since it came to good, I will recount all that I found revealed there by God's grace.

How I came to it I cannot rightly say, so drugged and loose with sleep had I become when I first wandered there from the true way.

But at the far end of that valley of evil whose maze had sapped my very heart with fear! I found myself before a little hill and lifted up my eyes.

It's shoulder's glowed already with the sweet rays of that planet whose virtue leads men straight on every road, and the shining strengthened me against the fright whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart through all the terrors of that piteous night.

Just as a swimmer, who with his last breath flounders ashore from perilous seas, might turn to memorize the wide water of his death-

so did I turn, my soul still fugitive from death's surviving image, to stare down that pass that none ever left alive.

The light was departing. The brown air drew down all the earth's creatures, calling them to rest from their day-roving, as I, one man alone, prepared myself to face the double war of the journey and the pity, which memory shall here set down, nor hesitate, nor err.

O Muses! O High Genius! Be my aid! O Memory, recorder of the vision, here shall your true nobility be displayed!

Thus I began: "Poet, you who must guide me, before you trust me to that arduous passage, look to me and look though me-can I be worthy?

You sang how the father of Sylvius, while still in corruptible flesh won to that other world, crossing with mortal sense the immortal sill.

But if the Adversary of all Evil weighing his consequence and who and what should issue from him, treated him so well-

That cannot seem unfitting to thinking men...

Through me you pass into the city of woe: Through me you pass into eternal pain: Through me among the people lost for aye. Justice the founder of my fabric moved: To rear me was the task of power divine, supremest wisdom, and primeval love. Before me things create were none, save things eternal, and eternal I shall endure.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Written by:
Logan Majchrowicz

Publisher:
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