And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.
What's left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out -- "But Dante Alighieri," you will say, "the future you've painted will take forever."
And I will answer: yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.
Ariel Dorfman, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Death and the Maiden . His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes in jail, and The Rabbits Rebellion, a story for adults and children. He lives with his wife Ange'lica in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
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Copyright 2020 Ariel Dorfman
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