“From time to time, I’ve tried to be exhaustive, to follow the details of experience where they lead. … But it’s all too much to describe without launching into a scourge of debilitating minutia, clogging volumes without directions. So I prune this thicket into ‘stories,’ even the most sophisticated of which are, in the end, childish simplifications. We are not built to perceive, but to ignore, to filter, simplify and neglect. Try as I might to keep myself ‘open’ to the world—to see all of what is around me—I can’t even get from my bed to the bathroom without neglecting a universe of joy and horror and sorrow, life, death, pain and pleasure, triumph and failure—and that is just in my own hum-drum town. What must it have been like for Jesus to feel all this? To lack the luxury, really, of limitations?”

Jake Wilson Whitlow, 1999