The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy – a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.

It was his one firm conviction – that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate.

Living on the edge of subsistence nothing much could ever change him. He had been old for years.