Certainty

Prayer had been a part of life. First the Sh'mah, "Hear, O Israel. . . ," then the bedtime prayer I would say every night. My mother would wait until I had cleaned my teeth and put on my pajamas, and then she would come upstairs and sit on my bed while I recited in Hebrew, "Baruch atoh adonai. . . Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, king of the Universe, who makest the bands of sleep to fall upon mine eyes, and slumber upon mine eyelids. . .." It was beautiful in English, more beautiful still in Hebrew. (Hebrew, I was told, was God's actual language, though, of course, He understood every language, and even one's feelings, when one could not put them into words.) "May it be thy will, O Lord our God and God of my fathers, to suffer me to lie down in peace, and to let me rise up again. . . " But by this point the bands of sleep (whatever they were) would be pressing heavily upon my eyes, and I rarely got any further. My mother would bend over and kiss me, and I would instantly fall asleep.
Back at Braefield there was no kiss, and I gave up my bedtime prayer, for it was inseparably associated with my mother's kiss, and now it was an intolerable reminder of her absence. The very phrases that had so warmed and comforted me, conveying God's concern and power, were now so much verbiage, if not gross deceit.
. . . For me, the refuge at first was in numbers. My father was a whiz at mental arithmetic, and I, too, even at the age of six, was quick with figures-and, more, in love with them. I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

by Oliver Sacks