ATDDTA(11) Souls Flutter Like Fireflies [323:36-40/324:1-2]

[Keith]

[323:36-40/324:1-2] "As his relations with Scarsdale Vibe had  
dwindled to yearly tycoonical head-insertions into Sloane Lab and  
eventually, blessedly, to none at all, Heino Vanderjuice began to  
think that once or twice he'd detected, out at the far edges of his  
visual field, a glimmering winged object among the rusticated  
stonework and rippling elms, and there grew upon him the curious  
notion that this might actually be his soul, whose exact whereabouts  
since 1893 had been in some doubt."

A connection between firefly/glow-worm and lost soul is also found in  
Canto XXVI of Dante's Inferno, in which the soul-containing flames in  
the eighth pocket seen by Dante, et al. are compared to fireflies  
glittering in a valley watched by a hillside peasant.

As many fireflies as the peasant — who
Rests on a hillside in the season when
The one that lights the world hides his face least

And when the flies make way for the mosquitos —
Sees glittering below him in the valley
Where perhaps he harvests grapes and plows,

So many flames everywhere enkindled
The eighth pocket, as I myself perceived
As soon as I was there where one sees bottom.

And just as he who avenged himself with bears
Beheld Elijah’s chariot departing
With the rearing horses rising up to heaven,

But never could have followed it with his eyes
Except for the one flame that he kept watching
Just like a little cloud sailing skyward:

In this way each flame moved through the throat
Of that deep ditch, none showing what it stole,
Though every flame secreted its own sinner.

I stood straight, then leaned out on the bridge
To look — had I not grabbed a jutting rock
I would have toppled off without a push!

And my guide, seeing me so attentive,
Said, "Within those fires there are souls,
Each one swathed in its self-scorching torment."

           (Inferno, Canto 26:25-48)

Having lost my aether oar, I'll drift even further by suggesting that  
the "once or twice" detection of said fireflies fits well with the  
'one flame for two souls' situation involving the shared burning of  
the souls of Ulysses and Diomede in large part for their deception of  
the Trojans [forebears of the creators of the contextual "apizza"  
just eaten by the professor (anachronistically as the first apizza  
establishment appeared in New Haven in 1925) http://tinyurl.com/8lx4j  
http://tinyurl.com/22pav4 ]. The response given by Ulysses to the  
etiological soul-loss question posed by Virgil is in keeping with the  
ponderings of Heino on [323] regarding the ways a soulless condition  
can sneak up on you unawares finding a way in like a Trojan Horse  
preying upon your ego:

"O you who here are two within one fire,
  If I merited from you while I was living,
  If I merited from you much praise or little

"When in the world I wrote my lofty lines,
  Do not leave, but let one of you tell where,
  By his own doing, he lost his way and died."

  The greater of the horns of ancient flame
  Started so to tremble, murmuring,
  That it seemed like a flame breasting the wind.

  And then, shaking the tip this way and that,
  As if it were a tongue about to talk,
  It launched outward a voice that uttered, "When

"I set sail from Circe who had ensnared me
  For more than a year there near Gaëta —
  Before Aeneas had given it that name —

"Not fondness for my son nor sense of duty
  To my aged father nor the love I owed
  Penelope to bring her happiness

"Could overmaster in me the deep longing
  Which I had to gain knowledge of the world
  And of the vices and virtues of mankind.

           (Inferno, Canto 26:79-99)

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** http://tinyurl.com/2xj9rh

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