The Cosmology of the Wider World by Jeffrey Ford

Author:Jeffrey Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

On this particular morning near the end of the winter season, Belius finally traveled the ninth and last horrendous circle of Hell, making his way up and then down the hairy length of Satan to emerge beneath the stars. With the last word read, he gave a great sigh and closed the book as not to further torment the already pitiful souls trapped between its covers.

He stood up and stretched his arms. Through the parlor window, he could see that a light snow was falling. Moving over to that window, he stood and stared blankly for a time, considering how much he had learned in so few months. In the beginning it seemed that he would never even memorize the alphabet, but his mother’s patience and encouragement gave him the confidence to conquer his initial fear. On the day that he read and understood his first paragraph by himself, he knew that there was nothing to stop him from completing the Inferno by winter’s end.

The Dictionary that had been his Bible for those cold weeks, now lay on the table next to the leather bound epic, its pages hoof worn, torn and scribbled and separated from the binding. Instead of being stymied by each new word he had never before known existed, he would take it as a challenge and dive headlong into that kingdom of words. Every meaning, like a compound of matter, he found to be made up of smaller atoms of meaning that each in their turn had to be looked up. He adopted his mother’s patience and laboriously searched out the smaller definitions and then gathered them together in his mind to create the conglomerate that was the word he had originally sought. In a notebook with the design of a black swan stitched into the cover, he would copy down all of his discoveries.

From the very start, Belius was enchanted by the story that Dante told. Although he was most interested in following the action of the tale, merely trying to see it in his mind’s eye and recreate the various torments of Hell as best he could, he knew, through an anxiety located between his heart and his head, that the poor lost poet had much in common with himself. It was as if he were reading about his own future or more his present situation, but seen by a Belius that stood somewhere outside the Belius that was himself.

He read on with intense concentration, struggling to catch up with the words that slowed as he gained, but which refused to relinquish the lead. The exotic Italian place names and surnames that had not been translated were like ruts that twisted the ankle of his concentration and tore him from the dream that their more familiar, domestic counterparts had created.

“I think you would do better to go on by yourself now,” his mother had told him after they finished wading through the first few cantos. “I don’t think I have ever heard of or seen someone learn to read quite as fast as you have.

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