Dante's Hell, third circle, the sin of gluttony. It certainly makes you smile to think that for just having eaten too much you could be forced to roll in putrid and foul-smelling mud under a freezing rain, with Cerberus, a gigantic and frightening three-headed dog wildly tearing you apart....forever!!
Dante saw this as a sin that leads to the destruction of one's dignity, to being solely interested in gorging, placing food before the important principles of life and respect for others. The only goal is that of greed- a total inability to set limits, to control one's impulses.
Was this just different times? Well, without doubt, but nowadays too there seems to be a great celebration of gastronomy, particularly noticeable on television: all the channels show cooking programs one after the other, cake competitions, invitations to "dine with me", restaurants in comparison, recipes shared from your own kitchen, and so much more. People just love watching the shows aimed at eating,
they copy down the recipes, try them out themselves... It has become an actual way of Life: some for their obsession with cooking, others for the obsession with eating.
In Dante's time eating was a goal: not everyone had enough. Today we talk about waste and the pathology of bulimia. We are not so far from the poor sinners of gluttony of the Middle Ages!
We try to fill the void around us and the void within us. We swallow everything, from hamburgers to meaningless gossip, from facebook images to constant noise. Always online, incessantly on the phone, the television on all day, music playing constantly in our ears - with headphones, not even allowing our body to rejoice in the melodies!)... detached, passive, apathetic, regardless of the real people who surround us and isolated from the world.
Silence has become such a luxury!
Stuffing ourselves with anything and everything so as not to think. To not really exist. In Dante's day there were more points of reference, perhaps fewer temptations, less individualism for sure but definitely more security. Our society seems to me to float in a gray sea, aimlessly: images and sounds take away the ability (and desire) to imagine, to create. We no longer have desires because it seems to me, we don't even know what we really want.