“Now you must cast aside your laziness,”
my master said, “for he who rests on down
or under covers cannot come to fame;
and he who spends his life without renown
leaves such a vestige of himself on earth
as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water.
Therefore, get up; defeat your breathlessness
with spirit that can win all battles if
the body’s heaviness does not deter it.
A longer ladder still is to be climbed …” (XXIV, 46-55)
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).