" To gather up enthusiasm for my work, I reminded myself how our recent sages, of blessed memory, devoted themselves to the Torah. For instance, there was the story of the author of the Face of Joshua, whose disciples once arrived late. "Why are you late?" he asked them when they came. "We were afraid to go out because of the cold," they replied. He raised his face from the book—and his beard was frozen hard to the table. "True," he said. "It is cold today." Or like the story of Rabbi Jacob Emden, who hired a servant to announce to him every hour, "Woe, another hour has gone," so that the illustrious scholar should give himself an account of what he had put right during that hour. "

― S.Y. Agnon , A Book that Was Lost: and Other Stories