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“You shall know how salty is another’s bread and how hard the stairs are in another man’s house.”

Paradiso XVII: emotional heart of the Comedy. Dante finally learns the cost of his calling: exile, loneliness, and the certainty that telling the truth will make powerful people hate him. Sometimes the very thing that breaks your old life is what makes your life’s work possible.

Paradiso XVI surprised me. Dante spends an entire canto reminiscing about old Florence, but it isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. His argument is civilizations don’t necessarily collapse when they become poor—they often begin to unravel when they become prosperous enough to forget the virtues that made them flourish in the first place.

An aspect of Dante that I love is his choice of similes. They are so apt, and bear such scrutiny within the broader themes of the poem, as only the finest poets can achieve. Here, penitent souls are rebuked for lingering to hear an earthly song (requested by the hapless, blundering Pilgrim) rather than starting on their climb toward the gates of Purgatory:

The greatest revolution you can commit as an individual is to recognize the humanity, the divinity, of yourself.