The Initiation Power of Divine Comedy

Dante gets this from encounters, as you say, that's one of the brilliant things about divine comedy. A particular moment that I find very illuminating is that he encounters fairly early on in the inferno, a figure called Caccio. This is a living soul in hell that has never really been seen before. And just in an instant with this squint, he gets the faintest glimpse that there might be a moment of now as well as this preoccupation with the past. But he doesn't know what to make of it. He can't make anything of it and so in that moment, he just falls back down into the mud.