It may not seem like much printed on this page, but those lines changed my life. Everything we do, Dante is saying, the good things or the bad things, every virtue or vice, we do for love. We are lovers. We are creatures of desire. It’s simply a question of where that desire is directed. Dante was the one who showed me that sin was not the breaking of rules so much as my misdirected love. My desire was not the problem, but I desired the wrong things. For Dante, sin is loving the wrong things, or to be more precise, loving the right things in the wrong way. 15
