List of agnostics

[Otto]

Takes us back to Dante and the "Divine Comedy" - "Belacqua":

"(...) As many commentators have pointed out, Belacqua Shuah, the hero
of More pricks than kicks, as well as of the unpublished first novel,
Dream of fair to middling women (written in 1932), takes his Christian
name and much besides from the fourth canto of the Purgatorio. The
original Belacqua, it bears repeating, was in real life a lute maker
of Florence whom Dante had known as notorious for his indolence and
apathy. In the poem, he is placed on the second terrace of
Ante-Purgatory, the dwelling of the late repentant who only just
escaped damnation. Because they delayed their reconcilation with God
until the last moment, they are obliged to wait at the foot of the
mountain through a time as long as their lives on earth, enduring the
indolence in which they used to indulge, before making the ascent that
will prepare them for Paradise. Dante’s portrait, which humorously
reveals how little this punishment disturbs Belacqua, contains much
that Beckett was to use in his later work. The persistent sloth of the
figure sitting with his head on his knees out of sight of the heavens
that reveal the passing of time; his surly humour; the contrast
between mental agility and physical lassitude; the need to live one’s
life over again; and the impossibility of moving from where one is
until certain preconditions have been fulfilled, are all motifs that
recur in the novels and plays, and their presence denotes at first an
essentially purgatorial context. (...)

http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num05/Num5robinson.htm

2012/7/2 Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>:
> Caught me that Beckett.....
>
> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> To: Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>
> Cc: Otto <ottosell at googlemail.com>; Pynchon Liste <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Monday, July 2, 2012 2:57 PM
>
> Subject: Re: List of agnostics
>
> We can't move on.  We MUST move on!
>
> On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Phillip Greenlief <pgsaxo at pacbell.net>
> wrote:
>> great [...] can we move on?
>
>