In the previous chapter, I discussed Petrarch's attempt to overcome his sense of flux and exile in time through the writing of poetry of desire, an attempt intrinsically intertwined with his experience of desire. The act of writing such poetry, as we have seen, serves for Petrarch as the constant aspect of his existence, as well as a personal ritual and a meditative exercise that allow him to return over and over again to the moment of falling in love, his golden age, and thus to abolish the incessant passage of time. In addition, Petrarch also claims that by writing poetry about his noble object of desire, he is transformed into it, becoming virtuous and steadfast. Nonetheless, this attempt to overcome time through the writing of poetry, as the previous chapter demonstrated, could provide the poet with only limited and ambiguous results, making him both beyond time and subjected to time, both present and absent to himself at once. In his portrayal of this essential ambiguity governing the impact of writing and desire on the self, Petrarch was rejecting both Dante's assertion in the Commedia that desire and the writing of poetry of desire can lead to the complete transcendence of the flow of time and the Augustinian claim that the impact of desire and writing on the self is essentially negative and hence that the two must be discarded.