I am a child, she tells him, Despite my years, I am an old child, a sinister old child full of stale juices. Someone should make a woman of me… , som… - J. M. Coetzee

He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help.

How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?

He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable.