BookFeed If The Divine Comedy stayed with you, these share its feel: awe, faith and morality. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.
About The Divine Comedy · Dante Alighieri
John Bunyan, 1678
Also faith and hope. A tinker in a Bedford jail dreams a man running from his own conscience, through a monster, a fair and a river — the strangest, most gripping allegory in English.
So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no more. Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1868
Also dread and faith. A Christlike innocent lands in a Petersburg of money, vanity and feverish talk, and every room he enters begins to tilt.
“He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions—one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying goodbye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Jack London, 1906
Also awe and dread. A wolf cub born into a hungry Yukon learns, one hard lesson at a time, what men are for. Cold, fierce, plain sentences.
As the days went by, the evolution of like into love was accelerated. White Fang himself began to grow aware of it, though in his consciousness he knew not what love was. It manifested itself to him as a void in his being—a hungry, aching, yearning void that clamoured to be filled. It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen-thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly. Sophocles, -429
Also dread and time. A plague-stricken city, a king who promises to find a murderer, and an investigation that keeps turning back on the investigator.
My lot be still to leadThe life of innocence and flyIrreverence in word or deed,To follow still those laws ordained on highWhose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky.No mortal birth they own,Olympus their progenitor alone:Ne’er shall they slumber in oblivion cold,The god in them is strong and grows not old. Ernest Shackleton, 1919
Also awe and dread. A first-hand account of a ship crushed in Antarctic ice and a crew that must improvise its way home, told in the plain, dry voice of the man responsible for them.
We made our way through the lanes till at noon we were suddenly spewed out of the pack into the open ocean. Dark blue and sapphire green ran the seas. Our sails were soon up, and with a fair wind we moved over the waves like three Viking ships on the quest of a lost Atlantis. With the sheet well out and the sun shining bright above, we enjoyed for a few hours a sense of the freedom and magic of the sea, compensating us for pain and trouble in the days that had passed. At last we were free from the ice, in water that our boats could navigate. Thoughts of home, stifled by the deadening weight of anxious days and nights, came to birth once more, and the difficulties that had still to be overcome dwindled in fancy almost to nothing. Stephen Vincent Benét, 1928
Also dread and hope. A Pulitzer-winning verse novel of the Civil War that moves from John Brown's raid to Appomattox, mixing real voices, soldiers' dread, and the strange intimacy of a country at war with itself.
Sally Dupré, from the high porch of her houseStared at the road. They would be here soon enough.She had waved a flag the last time they went away.This time she would wave her hand or her handkerchief.That was what women did. The column passed byAnd the women waved, and it came back and they waved,And, in between, if you loved, you lived by a dullClock of long minutes that passed like sunbonneted womenEach with the same dry face and the same set hands.I have read, they have told me that love is a pretty godWith light wings stuck to his shoulders. They did not tell meThat love is nursing a hawk with yellow eyes,That love is feeding your heart to the beak of the hawkBecause an old woman, gossiping, uttered a name. Charles Dickens, 1859
Also dread and hope. London and Paris on the edge of revolution: a man released from eighteen years in prison, a woman who knits a register of enemies, and a crowd nothing will stop.
Henry van Dyke Jr., 1894
Also faith and time. A minister who loved birds, ships and the sea writes plain, musical poems about time, strangers and the guest-right of God — quieter and stranger than its era suggests.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1902
Also morality and hope. A Black family's fall from grace in a small Southern town becomes a harrowing, darkly comic education in New York's promises and cruelties.
John Donne, 1633
Also faith and awe. The poet who argued with God, mapped the body, and made a flea a seduction speech—read him for wit that still draws blood.
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883
Also awe and faith. A prophet comes down from the mountain to tell you your values were borrowed, your comfort is a cage, and you could become something else.
Homer, -800
Also dread. The first great story about a journey home — and every stop along the way is a good reason to give up.
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