Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. - Marilynne Robinson

I meant to leave you a reasonably candid testament to my better self, and it seems to me now that what you must see here is just an old man struggling with the difficulty of understanding what it is he's struggling with.

But prison was terrible. It reduced him to absolute Jack, no matter what anyone thought of him. His great problem, after all, was other people. Prison was full of them.

He had a way of anticipating memories he particularly did not want to have. That memory would be as unbearable as things are when there is nothing else to do but live with them.