Personal Narrative: Paideia

While I was at boarding school, my grandmother (Nana) had a heart attack. Although she is recovering gradually, her condition worried our entire family and urged me to apply to Paideia to be able to visit her more frequently. During my summer vacation, I got the opportunity to visit her for the first time in a year, but upon entering the room, I realized that she did not seem to be my Nana anymore. Her chubby body was now gone and replaced with skin and bones that horrified me because I respected her so much. I could not even recognize her after her heart attack because of the dramatic weight loss that followed. I had to relive all of our memories together in order to feel anything toward her other than shock. It horrified me how much had changed
It would usually take us hunting him down and carrying him in order to him indoors once he was out. The winter of the year we adopted him, it snowed hard and he slipped out of a hole in our screen door while my sister and I were staring out the front door at the snow. Our dog, instead of routinely staying on the lawn, ran and hid in our neighbor’s yard while the storm whipped around him. My mother shooed my sister and I away from the door, claiming that he would be back in a few minutes. When the storm had settled six hours later without his return, my sister and I bundled up and ventured out, searching for our dog. We came upon the frozen dog that was curled up in our neighbor’s driveway. He almost looked like a sculpture in a museum, so lifelike that it scared us. After he did not respond to our prodding and calling of his name, my sister pulled me away from the unnaturally still sculpture of our dog. It did not look like our dog anymore… It did not act like our dog… It was less of a dog and more of a beautiful inanimate piece of
“The banks were crusted with a slime and mould […] violated eye and nose,” (18.106-108). This description does exactly what Dante means for it to do, it completely disturbs the reader as they try to imagine the scene that is laid out in front of Dante. Dante’s odd imagery continues with his descriptions of of the sinners Thais (18.130) and Alessio (18.116). Both of these sinners are so filthy from the diarrhea, it is difficult for Dante to recognize them unless by memory or by guidance from Virgil. Even then, Dante feels no remorse for the sinners, just as I did not feel remorse toward the homeless man that could have exited the bus at any moment to find a bathroom. Dante’s images of excrement reminded me of my own personal experience with it and how traumatizing it was for me to see it. Dante also shares this traumatical agony, as he goes from pitying sinners to eventually being disgusted and angry at them in later parts of the poem. The human body, while fascinating in a scientific sense, is down right horrible when taken apart and disfigured as it is throughout the Inferno. The way excrement and disfiguration can be used as a punishment is a horrifying idea that Dante uses and executes well. I can relate to Dante’s admiration of the human body so closely that the images scare me as much as they must have scared Dante as he wrote