The inclination toward description is one that issues from injury that experience inevitably renders, the aggravation of the sensitive sensibility’s tender tissues that seeks to bury what provokes it in a padding balm of language. This same sensibility also seeks to drown itself in language, for it the infinite scroll is the ideal drug, &c.
Less can be said by, rather than nestling each awesome incident within its own accreted pearl of agony, instead seek a formula that might describe and prove out cause and effect into a hard shell of sorts, that one might slough off entirely and thereby be rid of the situation.
Once Dante’s Purgatorio begins in earnest around Canto 10, each terrace of Purgatory is structured by a sort of template (which never corresponds perfectly with the Canto structure and is rather staggered along through them so that one is compelled to progress and cannot predict where the sins will fall, an elegant poetic move). Each terrace corresponds to the purgation of a vice from the souls of those it contains, who progress, spiral-wise, upward in a cleansing wash. Each vice is paired with its equal yet opposite virtue— Pride with Humility, Sloth with Hope, roughly following the pattern laid out in Nicomachean Ethics on up through the first four vices corresponding to “bad love” (Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth), and the second four vices corresponding to “excessive love” (Greed, Gluttony, Lust)— Dante believes, in Augustinian fashion, “recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor,” and that all human behavior is rooted in love. Unlike the contrapassi of the Inferno that are the inevitable conclusions of sin, the formulae of each terrace are designed to break the soul’s habit found that terrace, that the soul might “feel free” to move ever-upward.
First, the travelers are presented with examples of the Virtue that counters that terrace’s Vice(s); then, encounters with souls, picturesque and pungent; then, demonstrations of the vice being purged; and each terrace ends with an encounter with an angel, a recitation of the beatitude, and removal of a P that was inscribed on Dante’s forehead upon entering the gate of Purgatory.
The terrace of Sloth falls in the middle, as in this reckoning, Sloth is insufficiency of love, even for oneself. This terrace trips Dante and Virgil into long disquisitions on love, poetry, and the process of falling in love, conceived as the soul’s inclination toward another being. As the souls in this terrace are compelled to whirl and race at top speed, there can be no conversation, no extended linguistic excrescence from their tormented lips, and so the poets are free to pass through the purifying injury safely wrapped in their own discourse.