…Dante’s Commedia, too, begins

not in hell but on earth: that famous dark wood,

not a garden of delights, not at all, but a kind

of garden nevertheless, and that

an arrival in Paradise might well take

the form, as in that remarkable final

shot of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, of

a return to Earth, a real Earth or

a reconstructed Earth, an imagined

garden or a painted garden, or simply

the garden where you were born. The leafy

globe, perhaps, that we see when the triptych

is closed. It is the earth that is ours,

and Dante’s cosmic love, though it moves

the stars that track their paths through the skies,

is a leafy thing, a fleshly thing,

a thing of the soil, a thing that demands

to be lived out on this surface, on the face

of this terrestrial sphere, this local

unheavenly orb, this, our planet,

our neighborhood, if, that is

to say, it is to be lived at all.”

--from “The Garden of Earthly Delights”; Troy Jollimore