Quote 49
O reader, do not ask of me how I
grew faint and frozen then – I cannot write it:
all words would fall far short of what it was.
I did not die, and I was not alive;
think for yourself, if you have any wit,
what I became, deprived of life and death.
The emperor of the despondent kingdom
so towered from the ice, up from midchest,
that I match better with a giant’s breadth
than giants match the measure of his arms…(Inf. XXXIV, 22-31)
Language fails Dante in the last circle of Hell; the experience of witnessing Lucifer suffering is so indescribable that Dante simply cannot articulate it. Indeed, his words illustrate their inadequacy by losing their coherence and by becoming contradictory: "I did not die, and I was not alive." All of this incoherence works to create an aura of alienation and the impression that Lucifer is something so far beyond human comprehension that language cannot hope to capture his condition. He is utterly alien.
Quote 50
O Muses, o high genius, help me now;
o memory that set down what I saw,
here shall your excellence reveal itself! (Inf. II, 7-9)
Dante’s invocation of the muses suggests that he considers his poem a serious intellectual pursuit, much like Homer’s Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid. Like these ancient poets, he entrusts his memory and resulting words to a higher, divine power – much as his prayers to the Christian God will do later.
Quote 51
And I to him: "Master, among this kind
I certainly might hope to recognize
some who have been bespattered by these crimes."
And he to me: "That thought of yours is empty:
the undiscerning life that made them filthy
now renders them unrecognizable." (Inf. VII. 49-54)
Having denied "the good of the intellect" by abusing their relationship to money, the avaricious and prodigal have not only forfeited their places in Heaven, but have also lost their identities, since their faces have been "render[ed]…unrecognizable." An intellectual sin can thus lead to compromising one’s identity, appropriate since – in Dante’s eyes – one’s mind and the way one uses it are the only things that distinguish man from animals.