The Library

I came to "The Divine Comed" through William Blake’s illustrations, which is an unconventional path but a surprisingly effective one. Blake’s images hinted at the scale and strangeness of Dante’s vision, and they pushed me to finally read the poem itself. It’s an incredible work — vast, intricate, humane, and unafraid to confront the full range of human experience. That it still commands such attention after seven centuries says everything about its power.
Reading it, I was struck by how fully imagined Dante’s universe is: the moral architecture, the encounters with historical figures, the blend of theology, philosophy, and personal reckoning. It stands on the same level as "Paradise Lost," and that is the highest praise I can give. Both works create worlds that feel complete, not just in their storytelling but in their understanding of what it means to be human. Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is not just a narrative; it’s a meditation on justice, mercy, memory, and the possibility of transformation.
Coming to the poem after seeing Blake’s visual interpretations made the experience richer. The images prepared me for the emotional and symbolic intensity of the text, and reading the poem in full revealed just how much Blake had absorbed — and how much he had reimagined. "The Divine Comedy" deserves every bit of the reading it still receives, and it rewards the effort with a depth that few works can match.

This is the book that sits closest to the spirit of my website. Montaigne has been an inspiration from the beginning, and a line from the Essays appears in the footer of every page. It’s remarkable that a man writing in rural France in the late 16th century can speak so directly to a reader in the 21st, but Montaigne does. His voice is curious, humane, skeptical, and endlessly self examining — a mind thinking aloud, and inviting you to think with him.
I first knew Montaigne in fragments, but reading the complete works is something else entirely. It’s a long journey — I’m more than 950 pages in and still going — but the experience is consistently enjoyable, thanks in no small part to the translation I’m reading. It captures his tone beautifully: conversational, digressive, intimate, and surprisingly modern. Montaigne writes as if he were sitting across the table, telling you what he has learned about fear, friendship, aging, books, travel, and the strange business of being human.
What astonishes me is how relevant he remains. His world was filled with wars, plagues, political upheaval, and personal loss, yet he responded not with dogma but with reflection. He trusted experience over theory, observation over ideology, and the individual mind over the noise of the crowd. That sensibility — modest, probing, and deeply personal — is exactly what I hope to echo in my own writing. Montaigne didn’t write to impress; he wrote to understand himself. In my own way, that’s what I’m doing in Words as well.

I first came to Blake through his illustrations for The Divine Comedy, which already hinted at the strangeness and intensity of his imagination. But reading his complete poetry and prose is something else entirely — a plunge into a world view that feels both ancient and radically personal. Blake wasn’t just a poet or an artist; he was a system builder, creating his own mythology, his own symbols, his own universe of meaning. The illuminated books, the prophetic poems, the aphorisms, even the fragments — they all point toward a mind that refused to accept the limits of the ordinary world.
Going all in with this volume was demanding, but worth it. Blake’s language can be cryptic, but the energy behind it is unmistakable: a fierce belief in imagination, a suspicion of institutions, and a conviction that the divine is something we participate in, not something handed down. Reading him after seeing his artwork made the experience richer; the images and the words illuminate each other, and together they reveal the scale of his ambition.
In a way, pairing my own Library entries with AI generated images feels like a distant echo of Blake’s illuminated books — not in style, but in spirit. He used the tools of his time to fuse text and image into a single act of meaning/making. I’m not shying away from using the tools of mine. It’s a reminder that imagination adapts to whatever instruments are available, and that the boundary between words and images is porous.