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A scholar's confession: Sometimes, people who know my academic background ask me about Dante. They assume I know, given where I went and what I studied. The truth is, that I've studied the Inferno. Not recently, but I have read it and put effort into thinking about the contents. I remember enough of it that I can say intelligent things in response to most questions, but I have to look up things like what was where. My memory of it is more episodic, than continuous after all this time. I know i read at least half of Purgatory, which was interesting, but not nearly as historically or politically as exciting as Hell. I carried away some big ideas and a little imagery, but hardly anything else. Heaven was so deadly dull, that I mostly faked the reading. (Skimming bits here and there to use after I kept falling asleep trying to read it properly. This is the only reading I remember doing this for at st. Johns, though I may not have quite finished second Calvin. Yes, I read all my Aquinas readings). The Inferno comes up often enough in medieval/Renaissance studies that I've restudied and reread chunks of it, but frankly, in history classes no one much cares about the other two unless they are Dante scholars specifically. I wasn't and neither were any of my profs, so really, I haven't looked at Purgatory or Paradisio since I came west, though the actual physical books are still with me. Embarrassing, but honestly, not embarrassing enough to make force my Buddhist a** to wade through all those snores just to say I've actually done it.