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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 9343333" data-attributes="member: 7025997">Nope, not religious. My point was more that older forms of reading texts aren't necessarily 'superseded', and with older texts (such as the Divine Comedy) might actually give a richer experience, since that was intended by the author.As for Elmore's painting...IMHO it's a very good piece of 80s fantasy art but obviously no Divine Comedy, and you can interpret it as you like. Yeah, I try to do that as well. Of course the original places may no longer exist, or may be irrevocably transformed (lots of Civil War battlefields are now paved over). It's not a uniquely Western thing, either; apparently Three Kingdoms tours are popular in China, for instance. As for Puff the Magic Dragon, the original authors have denied the drug interpretation, claiming it's about childhood innocence.[URL unfurl="true"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puff,_the_Magic_Dragon[/URL]There's even a later 2007 kids' book (with the involvement of the original songwriters) where Jackie Paper introduces Puff to his daughter, changing the original melancholy to more of a cyclical interpretation.</blockquote>