Where Only the Hungry Can Follow You perceive the sky before you when you perceive me, my body, a wide breathless place of light. We don’t so much fly as shake off our skins and tumble up. We’ve always been ready to lift our feet from this earth, to bind ourselves with wind to the…

The early cantos of Purgatorio feel obsessed with haste and urgency as well as light and shadow, continuing the themes of right desires and purification I identified in the first two cantos. Stepping Partly in the Light The pilgrim often notices the sun and its path, and he and the many souls frequently notice and…