Looking Down to Move Forward — Divine Comedy

Growth on this terrace starts when the guide stops carrying you. Virgil tells Dante that from here each soul must push on with sail and oars as best they can, then orders him to bend his eyesight down and ruminate the bed beneath his feet before the climb gets easier. Independence is not abandonment: the instruction is to study what is carved underfoot. That bed is a gallery of pride's falls, cut with tomb-memorial realism. Dante sees Lucifer lightning-struck from heaven, Briareus pierced, Nimrod bewildered at Babel's ruins, Niobe with her fourteen dead, Saul dying on his own sword at Gilboa, Arachne half-spider on her unfinished web, Rehoboam fear-smote in his chariot, Alcmaeon forced to rate his mother's cursed gift, Sennacherib's sons dying in the temple, Tomyris crying for Cyrus's blood, Holofernes slain, Troy in ashes. The dead look dead; the living seem alive. Other penitents pass with stiff necks, warned not to veil their looks lest they miss the evil in their own path. At noon the sixth angel returns; Dante climbs the carved stairs above Rubaconte while voices sing Blessed are the poor in spirit. He feels lighter than on the plain below. Virgil says one broad character on the forehead has been effaced; Dante finds six letters still traced there and Virgil smiles. One mark of sin is gone; the work continues.