But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse - Cormac McCarthy

"I will do what I promised." He whispered. "No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone."

He’d no photograph of her. He tried to see her face but he knew he was losing her. He thought that some stranger not yet born might come upon her photo in a school album in some dusty shop and be stopped in his place by her beauty. Turn back the page. Look again into those eyes. A world at once antique and never to be. After she left the quarry he sat alone until the small flames in their tins had guttered out one by one. Then just the dark of the countryside, the silence of it. The faint drone of a truck out on the highway.

: —Neither does anybody else. Sometimes you get a clear sense that doing math is largely just feeding data into the substation and waiting to see what comes out. I’m not even sure that it’s all that wise to commit things to memory.