Your life is breathed forth immediately/ by the Chief Good, who so enamors it/ of His own self that it desires Him always. - Dante Alighieri

My will and my desire were both revolved, as is a wheel in even motion driven, by Love, which moves the sun and other stars.

taught me that the great secret of Dante’s masterpiece lay in the handling of the verse, which always moved forward even in the most intensely compressed of episodes.

They had their faces twisted toward their haunches and found it necessary to walk backward, because they could not see ahead of them. ...And since he wanted so to see ahead, he looks behind and walks a backward path.