![]() For, he continues, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven." The Apostles are startled they wonder, "who then shall be saved?" Jesus replies, "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Peter then asks: we who have followed you, what reward will we have? Jesus answers, "he shall receive an hundredfold and possess life everlasting. 7 Cruna was in fact the word duecento translators chose to render "foramen acus." 8 In Matthew, Jesus had just told a young man who has kept the commandments that if he would have treasure in heaven ("thesaurum in caelo"), he should sell all he has, give the proceeds to the poor, and follow him (Matt. ![]() In and of itself, " cruna," I believe, would have prompted Dante's readers to recall one of Jesus's most memorable teachings: "facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire, quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum" (Matt. We catch him instead in the act that underpins all the others: guiding the thread through the eye of the needle. We do not watch him hem, or baste, or stitch-we are far from the world of the chansons de toile. 6 More immediately consequential than either the craft or the craftsman, though, is the work Dante pictures him doing. 5 To say, however, that a tailor shaping textiles in his shop resembles a pedagogue shaping students in the " aula" does not seem entirely lunatic the notion that this particular sartor might have something to do with Brunetto, whose texts shaped Dante's, gains persuasive momentum from the repeated mention of clothing in the canto. A group approaches the bank Dante and Virgil are on they have to squint to make out the two figures they see there, as people do on nights when the moon is new and the sky is lit only by the stars:Īlthough the image is famous, few commentators, ancient or modern, have gone beyond praising its artisanal realism. The lesson begins when we align the impediments that limited his sight with those that limit the sodomites'. Bodies and events in the canto, that is to say, are continuous and disjunctive to make sense of the company that cohesiveness keeps with incoherence, Dante teaches us to look twice at once. 11.48) we simultaneously see the person each was created to be and the deformed thing each has become. In keeping with the unnaturalness of a place where a river of blood boils and flakes of fire fall downward as if they were snow, Dante makes visible the warping of the souls who walk there because they sinned against "natura e sua bontade" ( Inf. ![]() ![]() The tug of war Dante stages in this tercet of transition between things once visible but now not possible to see, spaces once measurable but now indeterminate, steps not taken but which, under certain conditions, could have been, establishes the perceptual environment of his encounter with Ser Brunetto. Though clearly anchored in the conditional, Dante's "perch' io" pushes it toward facticity despite having pivoted about in order to face the selva straight on, he would not have seen it, though it remains exactly where it was and always will be. Indeed, the volte-face itself seems pulled by counteracting energies. 2 Even if he had, he would not have been able to tell how much ground they had covered, because he can no longer see the point from which they left. Dante, unlike Lot's wife, does not stop and look back. Spurred by tanto and reinforced by già, the poet all but challenges us to calculate how far he and Virgil had walked, notwithstanding the fact that the best geometer could not compute the distance, since the action that would enable him to number their paces doesn't take place.
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