A few months ago, after a particularly lengthy phone conversation with a sexually frustrated friend, I decided her exploits would be the perfect ice breaker while driving with my brother on the way to lunch. I knew he'd listen because, well, I was driving, and everyone realizes my driving is a delicate state deserving of the utmost respect and fear.
""You know,"" I said, ""lust is a completely underrated emotion. It's way more dangerous than it gets credit for.""
My brother shrugged. ""Well,"" he said, ""it's better than fat people.""
He told me that he had just read ""Inferno,"" the first part of Dante's ""The Divine Comedy"" for high school English. The Inferno depicts the different circles of hell—as you move inward, the crimes of the sinners inhabiting them worsen and the punishments become harsher.
The circle reserved for gluttons is deeper in hell than the circle for adulterers. In other words, Dante advises you to participate in a massive orgy before you dare indulge yourself in a bowl of ice cream.
The punishments Dante chose for the two groups of offenders reinforce his screwed up sinning hierarchy. Dante sentenced the adulterers to flutter about aimlessly for eternity to the whims of the wind, and the gluttons must lie motionless in the mud and feces beneath constant rain and hail.
Does anyone else see a serious problem with this? The disparity is alarming. They're not even close. Dante must have been one skinny sonovabitch to so confidently condemn all who enjoy food to an eternity of eating their own crap.
Or maybe they just didn't have cake back then. Otherwise, I'm out of explanations.
Hell gets even more complicated, however, when you account for contemporary lifestyles that Dante obviously didn't consider. Today, there are very few people who don't commit both lust and gluttony in their lifetime. And, when examining such devices as edible underwear, flavored condoms and the overarching use of whipped cream, it becomes obvious that it is also quite common to engage in both at once.
Consequently, Dante must be turning over in his grave wondering what to do with such bi-sinners. He could combine the two punishments to the effect of floating around, caked in mud and, well, other bodily secretions. But, aside from the bodily secretions, it sort of sounds like one eternal, gravity-defying mud wrestling match, which doesn't seem so bad.
Or maybe he would've just put the two together, with the floating sluts soaring above the hungry mud people. Modern Dante might've elected the reality TV route, like ""Survivor: Hell,"" or VH1's ""I Love Money"" turned ""I Wish I Hadn't Loved Hot Ass and Dessert.""
And what about Dante himself? I think he should somehow be punished for obsessing for so long over lust and gluttony and the like. Obviously he put a lot of time into studying and analyzing gluttons and adulterers to come up with such elaborate punishments for them. Isn't over-indulgence in pondering sin, in some sense, a form of gluttony itself? And if you look at it that way, are gluttony and lust really that different? They're both just a form of yielding to temptation.
Dante's just as guilty as the rest of us—he consumed and lusted for ways to punish us horny, hungry people. But on the bright side, he's probably rolling in the floating mud in hell and eating whatever comes out of your body in the underworld, wondering what he was thinking in his living years. At any rate, we can ask him when we get there after a few good orgies and a lot of dessert.
If you'd like to bake Kiera a cheesecake, e-mail her at wiatrak@wisc.edu.
