DANTE SEES GOD

The importance of Dante Alighieri goes beyond the literature and his ability to reunite all the dialects and various languages that were spoken across Italy in the XIV century under the current Italian language. His divine comedy suggested to the Catholics the structure and organization of what happens after our death and in the very last “canto” of the Paradise he described that God is ourselves which to me is beyond literary genius. I can’t believe that someone who lived 700 years ago could write something like this:

And for what I saw

My words are not enough to call them meager.

O everlasting Light, you dwell alone

In yourself, know yourself alone, and known

And knowing, love and smile upon yourself!

That middle circle which appeared in you

To be conceived as a reflected light,

After my eyes had studied it a while,

Within itself and in its coloring
Seemed to be painted with our human likeness
So that my eyes were wholly focused on it.As the geometer who sets himself

To square the circle and who cannot find,

For all his thought, the principle he needs,

Just so was I on seeing this new vision

I wanted to see how our image fuses

Into the circle and finds its place in it,

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —

Except that then my mind was struck by lightning

Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

.

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Dante’s description of God having “our human likeness” has not had the impact that the rest of his comedy has been having for hundreds of years and this makes me believe that human kind prefers to believe that something superior and not human can control our lives because it’s much easier hoping in this to solve our problems rather than working very hard to figure out what to do about them by ourselves.
The existence of a God and having a soul are themes that have generated some of the best thoughts and pieces of literature since the invention of print and thinkers like Leibnitz and Averroè have produced parts of literature that still today in this second millennium are magnificent, I like very much their distinction between soul and intellect where the first is mortal unlike the second one. There exist very much to read and learn on the subjects that I just mentioned but only having an open intellect and mind is worth going further than what I’m writing here.

MY OWN GENETICS

I just watched for the second time in few days the movie with Benigni titled "life is wonderful" so I had plenty time to think about what I was seeing since I already knew what was going to happen and here's what I realized.
Sixty years ago the Germans under Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews to get rid of them from the earth so many in that period got involved and saw the brutality/perversity of what was being done to people that had nothing different than a last name or descendants that were Jew.
My grandfather was an engineer like my dad is and was in the Fascist army as a colonel sent between Rome and Napoli to reclaim the huge swamps that had been there for many centuries.
After he had done this he was sent to a Greek island to oversee a small battalion of soldiers who were in charge of protecting the population from German attacks, this was when he was captured by the German army and sent by train to Auschwitz where he stayed few months enough to see several thousands of Jews burnt alive or "gasified" in showers where they were told that could wash themselves.
My grandfather Umberto (his name) somehow escaped and returned to Brescia - 900 miles away with the alps in-between - by walking and when he knocked at the door of his home in Brescia his wife - Carolina - didn't recognize him and thought he was a beggar, he was 190 pounds at the beginning of the war and by the time he knocked on the door he was barely 110 pounds, he had suffered multiple strokes (heart attacks) and lived little longer, my father can't remember very much about his own father and once told me that he prefers this because his memories are all happy and good, he says that if he could remember more he probably would have painful and sad memories, when Umberto died my dad had just turned 20 and was living in Milan with his brother Dino to attend the university there.
My own complete inability and refusal to accept how disabled I've gotten is then something part of my genes, it's in my heart and blood in other words and nothing can possibly change this, Umberto walked through wonderful areas of northern Italy and I bet he went through Como and its lake and I'm sure that having a very weak heart he could have stayed in many of the places he walked through but he didn't, something was more important for him to accomplish no matter the pain in his chest and how tired he was.
I can say the same about another Lingiardi ancestor, I don't know the name, just that he lived in Pavia and had an organ making company, the Lingiardi organs were in most of the churches of a specific bandwidth of the north of Italy and were renowned for having the "human voice" and my ancestor was sure that it was him giving this "voice" to his organs because he was the one tuning the organ canes by blowing in them with his own lungs but by putting lead in his mouth he developed mouth cancer that became such a bad metastathasis that while tuning the canes he was bleeding.
Even when the doctors at his time told him to stop to tune canes because even if they didn't know of cancer it was obvious that the injury was provoked by tuning the organ canes he never stopped until he died because in his mind he was doing the most important thing to make his organs appreciated by both players and listeners. Once again one of my ancestors didn't accept his disability developed doing his own job and kept on going till death.
All of these stories and examples of ancestors in my family illustrate medically, genetically and scientifically my inability to accept the way I am now and are my reasons to ask forgiveness and support in my long battle against my conditions now that I know for sure that I can return to be a normal man.