These are my confess--impressions.

After adventuring through the depths of hell, I've left with some new impressions of the whole institution of HELL. When I first started reading, I was talking to Sam Macon about the existence of hell, and if it can really exist. Before I read, I was pretty confident that hell only existed for believers, and that it didn't apply to people who chose not to believe in it. (You know, imposing beliefs on other people...) ...I wasn't so sure in the midst of the first ten Cantos or so.

"As each of these was laboring to rake
His nails all over himself – scratching and digging
For the great fury of the itch they tried to slake,
Which has no other relief: their nails were snagging
Scabs from the skin as a knifeblade might remove
Scales from a carp, or as if the knife were dragging..."
Canto XXIX. lines 85-90

I had a dream last night about scabs and muck (and haybales...hmm). Dante's description of the punishments eat at me, particularly the punishment in Canto XXIX. 

...but onto Impressions. In class, we were talking about how it seems ridiculous that you'd get punished for ETERNITY, FOREVER, for just one lifetime's worth of sins. One lifetime! That doesn't even scratch the surface of forever. Reading The Inferno, I've been thinking a lot about space and time and things too big to actually grasp and wrap up tight in a box. Like forever, for instance. FOREVER. Aagh, I can't imagine having to live FOREVER. And by live, I mean have your soul exist, whether in heaven or hell. Either one. Lawd. I would much rather just zip into space, and then BAM be gone. Disappear. Not exist. Like Anne Sexton:

"...This is how / I want to die: / into that rushing beast of the night / sucked up by that great dragon, to split / from my life..." I'd just like to Not Exist in death; let it be done.

Is not existing after you've lived different than not existing before you're born?

Obviously, Dante's Inferno affects us, as readers, much differently than it affected readers in the 14th century. For me, it's been a thought-provoking story-in-a-story-in-a-story, etc. that's made me consider Always and Forever. It scares me, though, too, and I think that emotion is (was?) probably shared throughout centuries. I'm genuinely scared in the deep parts of me, in the crevices of my heart, the back of my head. I'm scared!