Inferno

After a week of freedom, a week dedicated exclusively to pretending that I never heard the word "B-School" in my life, being back on campus is rather like descending, one by one, through the circles of Hell. The countdown, which touched zero just seven days ago, is now excrutiatingly close to the three-digit-number. The last page of the previous term's schedule just went the way of the dodo, but tomorrow there's going to be a brand new schedule for a brand new term full of working Saturdays.

I don't want to say lasciate ogne speranza, I really don't. It would not be very optimistic; furthermore, it would not be strictly true. There is some hope, and not just that the six days in December will ultimately come. If rumour is to be believed - and nobody ever accused the Hydra of lying, after all - the circle of ice is behind us, from the Caina to the Judecca. One could say Malebolge is behind us as well.

For that matter, one could say all the circles are behind us; the next two terms are Purgatorio more than Inferno. And once we have suffered for all the pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony and lust of our lives... Well, what comes next ought to be worth all the trouble.

Sometimes Dante's logic is slightly bewildering. Poor Virgil is left in Limbo because he did not follow a religion that did not even exist during his lifetime, but Dante himself, having set his allegorical stage with such pagan props as the Styx, and populated it with Minos, Cerberus and Antaeus, among others, is raised not just to the highest sphere of Paradiso, but to the Empyrean beyond.

I suppose he knew what he was about. And I will be satisfied if even the Sphere of the Moon is at the end of the terraces.