'Andy had often proposed to himself that joy, the joy of love and beauty or of work, could so abound in this world that it would overflow all of this world's mortal vessels. But that night he was thinking of sorrow, filled suddenly with the apprehension of such hurt and sorrow as might overflow the capacity of the world, let alone of that mere life. That there had been an immeasurable joy in the story of Mary and Elton Penn he had long known. But now its suffering also had been made present to him in an amplitude beyond the reach of his mind. He would never know even the extent to which its suffering had been unnecessary.
It seemed to him almost a proof of immortality that nothing mortal could contain all its sorrow. He thought, as we all have been taught to think, of our half-lit world, a speck hardly visible, hardly noticeable, among scattered lights in the black well in which it spins. If all its sorrow could somehow be voiced, somehow heard, what an immensity would be the outcry!
In the silent, shadowy room in the great night he was thinking of heavenly pity, heavenly forgiveness, and his thought was a confession of need. It was a prayer.'
Wendell Berry,A Place in Time, p.236.
