He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached… — Marilynne Robinson

It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire. Another reason why you must be careful of your health.

I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.