A person can get used to just about anything if it happens slow enough. - Robert Olmstead

On nights like this he would stop the horse and lay back and look at the stars, the haunches moving under his back. It is so like humans to think there is more out there than there is here. They are greedy for the water to be more and for the land to be more and even greedy for the sky to be more.

Off in his head, he solved extraordinary problems of mathematics, science, medicine, the humanities. He wrote poetry, saw music. … People have told him, with your IQ you should be a genius. I was a genius and have long since abused myself into a state of average and like it better that way. Now there comes a momentary clearing, a moment of satorial splendor, and then it goes oblique. It fades away like blown dust.

He decided from that day forever after that there must live a heartless God to let such despair be visited on the earth, or as his father said, a God too tired and no longer capable of doing the work required of him.