He drove unsteadily down the road, his eyes blurred with nausea. O God, he thought, the decisions you force on people, suddenly, with no time to consider. I am too tired to think: this ought to be worked out on paper like a problem in mathematics, and the answer arrived at without pain. But the pain made him physically sick, so that he retched over the wheel. The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers—we Catholics are damned by our knowledge. There’s no need for me to work anything out—there is only one answer: to kneel down in the confessional and say, ‘Since my last confession I have
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