Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. — Cormac McCarthy

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

The martyr who longs for the flames can be no right candidate for them.