Dante Alighieri: “Poets are chosen by God”

There were his ideas, which of course had to change as the days went by, at the slow pace of those thirteenth-century days, and there were the sheets on thick parchment paper on which he was writing down the which was edited in the mind of what was happening to him, of what he saw or read. They were Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. It was he, Dante Alighieri, as tormented as hopeful, as disappointed by love as excited with him, by him, and there was Beatriz, as real as fictional, as raw as platonic, as painful as dreamed, an ideal of a girl -adolescent- woman who represented love for Dante: “A burning love that moves the sun and the other stars”, whom he met at the age of nine as Beatrice Portinari, then he saw her again nine years later and not anymore.

There was exile, bitterness, cruelty, and a desire to understand, and there were the questions, which fortunately, never had or would have no answer. There were the letters and words of a language that was just beginning to be created, or strengthened, and there were the thousands upon thousands of concepts that floated beyond words, and that therefore had no words yet that the defined. There were the feathers of goose, swan, or crow, with which those few who knew how to write expressed their thoughts and deeds always unconfirmed of a time when a written sheet, a single sheet, was an event, and even a miracle in the eyes of the inhabitants of a world in which more than certainties had faith, and more than faith, illiterates who are not left with a different way out of life than to believe.