Sublime

He prayed in his silence: O God, make me human, let me feel temptation. Save me from my indifference.

from the sequestered innocence of 1962,

‘There’s only one prayer we need say for anyone dead.’ ‘So you’d say it for Stalin?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘And for Hitler?’ ‘There are degrees of evil, Sancho – and of good. We can try to discriminate between the living, but with the dead we can’t discriminate. They all have the same need of our prayer.’

‘I have something to confess to you, father. Oh, not in the confessional. I’m not asking any forgiveness from that myth of yours or mine up there, only from you.’

“Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”

And who had need of his globes here?

‘Dear Thomas,’ he wrote, ‘I can’t begin to tell you how swell you were the other