'It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting. The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss - that is all. It will take the mind and memory months, and possibly years, to gather together the details and this learn the whole extent of the loss. A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts around for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential - there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. He did not realize that it was an essential when he had it; he only discovers it now when he finds himself half balked, hampered by its absence. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of the disaster.'
Mark Twain in Frederick Buechner, Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say): Four Who Wrote in Blood, p.78.
