The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic.

The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. They cannot find for us the way again.

By the time I was sixteen I had read many books and I had become a freethinker.

Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

Where men can't live gods fare no better.