Occasionally few lines of a book can turn one back from leaping into a self annihilating abyss, i.e., words can be a sheild. Most recently (wasn't it last night?), he was saved from the suicidal fever bird singing harshly in his brain on reading Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno, which describes how in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, all suicides are transformed into gnarled thorny bushes and trees that are only able to speak when a branch is broken, and how they are torn at by the Harpies. Also since they are unique among the dead, the suicides will not be bodily resurrected after the final judgment. Instead they will maintain their bushy form, with their own corpses hanging from the limbs.

Since this terrible fate had been revealed to him, he made a choice to climb back to, and then make an attempt to enter the castle in the First Circle (Limbo) of Hell, the residence of the unbaptized and the virtuous pagans known for their wisdom and reason, including the poets Virgil, Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, as described in Canto IV.