Dante: The Most Vivid Version by Robert Pogue Harrison | The New York Review of Books: The basic “plot” of The Divine Comedy has to do with the pilgrim’s efforts to complete a long, self-interrogating, and transformative journey at the end of which his inner being—which, like human history, suffers from the perversion of self-love—becomes harmonized with the love that moves the universe. Salvation means nothing more, and nothing less, than such harmonization. It is not until the very last lines of Paradiso that the Comedy’s story reaches its conclusion.