When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you f… - Richard Ford

It's shocking to note how close we play to unwelcome realizations, and yet how our ongoing ignorance makes so much of life possible.

You hear stories about people who've committed bad crimes. Suddenly they decide to confess it all, turn themselves in to the authorities, get everything off their conscience-the burden, the harm, the shame, the self-hatred. They make a clean breast of things before going off to jail. As if guilt was the worst thing in the world to them. I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think. Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today. And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly-first fast, then hardly passing at all. Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed-caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present. Who wouldn't want to stop that-if he could? Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present? I would. Only a saint wouldn't.

And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests usually do not come first where other people are concerned — even the people who love you — and that is all right. It can be lived with.