“More than anything, Dylan and Dante share an unbroken sense of pity for the ‘ill-begotten souls’ of hell. Both in the position of outsiders looking-in, this subversion of time, space, and reality is what makes hell so mystical, and this carnival of characters is what makes hell so unsettling.”
The perception of people with intellectual disabilities as “defective” is grounded in an intellectual superiority that finds its natural home among the academic elite.
In the bowels of Firestone Library, behind bombproof walls and inside climate-controlled rooms, lies the entire life’s work of Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa.
Last June, working at the Rare Books and Special Collections Department hidden within Firestone, I found myself tearing up as I sifted through pages just shy of 150 years old. I had been processing the Civil War Letters of Adam Badeau for nearly a month, my longest and most meticulous project to date.
