Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

The Nine Circles of a Frequent Traveler’s Hell

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“As St Francis and Kurt Vonnegut reminded us, we must accept the things that we cannot change, change the things we can, and have the wisdom to know the difference between the two.

“When things are ‘off’ from my regular routine, I get a bit anxious. I’d like to say I get cranky as well, but my form of cranky usually involves me harrumphing into a ball and blasting my Spotify playlists while devouring a new book on Kindle.

“That’s my particular manifestation of ‘wisdom to know the difference between the two,’ because books are good and public meltdowns are not.

“We’re all in this travel situation together, for whatever amount of time is left to unfold. How we treat each other and apply our wisdom to know the difference between controllable and uncontrollable change is what makes traveling with others a delight and also a burden.

“As I spent my thousandth train ride on the Amtrak Acela from Boston to New York City this past week with a seat back in my lap, I considered the various predicaments that traveling with other humans can create.

“Which, of course, brought me to Dante’s Inferno, and the nine circles of hell that a person can be sent to for their various sins in the living world.

“Obviously, your previous slights and misjudgments do not necessarily earn you the circle of traveling hell you may find yourself in. But if you travel frequently enough, you will at some point accidentally find yourself in each one.” [. . .]    –Elisa Doucette, Forbes, October 12, 2015.

Read Doucette’s full list of traveler’s hell here.

The Tenth Circle: Unique Selling Propositions

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“Developing a unique selling proposition (USP) can be one of the most difficult brand messaging challenges you’ll ever tackle. In fact, it can be downright hellish.

That’s because your USP needs to accomplish an enormous task with incredible economy: it has to clearly articulate why buyers should choose your product or service over every other option they have—and it has to do so in the fewest words possible. Writing a USP is so difficult, in fact, that American companies are largely ambivalent about their USPs. They rate their confidence in the strength of their own USPs just 6.2 out of 10, on average, according to research from B2B International.

This raises an interesting question: If companies are generally lukewarm about their USPs, should you even go to the trouble of creating one for your company?” [. . .]    –Michael Civiello, LinkedIn, December 1, 2015.

To read more about USPs and Hell, check out Civiello’s full article on LinkedIn.

Enrico Cerni, “Dante per i manager” (2010)

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enrico-cerni-dante-per-i-manager-2010     dante-per-i-manager-inferno

This how-to book, published in 2010, was written as a guide for managers and entrepreneurs to navigating the business world. Through the sections Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, Enrico Cerni creates a book-long metaphor using the famous characters and sites from Dante’s Divine Comedy. 

See Dante for Life for more information.

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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