September 9, 2003: &Omega. HELL AND REMORSE.

It's not that I'm having a bad time (in fact, my class is going very well indeed), but I happened to be listening to Don Giovanni in the car and thought about how many chances Don Giovanni is given to repent before the statue carries him down to Hell at the end of the opera. What other literary and religious stories do we have on sinners facing punishment and their willingness or unwillingness to repent? This will have to be a later day's web-log in detail, but the list would include:

  1. Mozart: Don Giovanni
  2. Goethe Faust, Part II
  3. Marlowe, Doktor Faustus
  4. Lewis, The Great Divorce
  5. ??, The Day of Doom (an awesome American Colonial poem)
  6. Milton, Paradise Lost
  7. Dante, Inferno
  8. Some Gospel-- the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man
Not the book of Revelation-- it has a little on Hell (not much, really) but not on remorse, that I remember. And I certainly don't include Shaw's Don Juan. He doesn't really have Hell.

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