In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader's attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all "general ideas" (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

by Vladimir Nabokov, a quote to be found
on Joseph A. Gallian's Contemporary Abstract Algebra

Mathematics is a thing.

It has been a thing in my life for a long time.

My understanding of the thing is very unstable.

I like the thing; but time is finite, as opposed to the thing's nature.