the second circle
In the Second Circle of Dante’s concentric Hell, the punishment for lust is to enter an endless whirlwind of human souls. My insolent objective is to suggest an emendation.
Let us imagine three men. The first man is led up a flight of stairs by a naked woman. Watching her from behind, watching the tendons in her perfectly formed legs flex and unflex as she climbs, the man becomes giddy with a desire that can never be satisfied because the flight of stairs is infinite and they never arrive at her bedchamber. In a more interior region, we find that a second man has made it to the bedchamber, with a woman standing ready and waiting before him. But this man’s desire can never be satisfied either because he is condemned to sit on the end of a bed staring down at his flaccidity in the profoundest mortification forever. But the third, the last and the most terrible punishment, the punishment for satyriasis, I reserve for the centre of the Circle. Here a third man actually copulates with the woman but is trapped for Eternity on the threshold of an unattainable orgasm—groaning, spitting and writhing on the four-poster bed as upon a rack. The three female tormentors (two inaccessible, one inescapable) are succubi. Souls of women I leave in the whirlwind, which probably suffices for them. |
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