The Paradiso (John Ciardi Translation) Book

The journey with Dante and his spiritual guides through the afterlife concludes appropriately with Paradiso. Written around 1319 to just before he died in 1321, it is his ultimate vision of God and Heaven and a wild ride. The pace is much faster - or at least it seemed to me - than Inferno and Purgatorio and he and Beatrice fly through the Heavenly Sphere (yes, you need a lot of suspension of disbelief and lots of Scholastic philosophy - even Aquinas himself is a tourguide at one point), so it is almost like a science fiction/space travel book. At times, it reminded me of the incomprehensible end of 2001: A Space Odyssey with colors and light and memories flooding by. It requires perhaps the least use of footnotes (see my lamentations in my Purgatorio review) and was fun to read. I felt like I was really surfing sometimes and enjoyed the conclusion with - as in the other two canticles - stars in the sky. It gave me pause to think that as Dante was writing this, the Pope was in Avignon, Giotto was working on his frescoes in Padua, and Copernicus had not yet talked about the sun being the center of the solar system. Quite a time warp...

To describe this with a painting, no less than Mathias Grünewald's Isenheim mantlepiece could do - particularly the inner panel with Christ shown in a blinding glow of light. I went to Colmar this year to finally see this piece in person and it gave me the same giddy, light-headed feeling as Paradiso did.