"I often dream about failing. 

Such dreams are commonplace to the ambitious or those who climb mountains. 

Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock, but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. 

I grasped for a shrub, but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I fell into the abyss. 

Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative; there was no bottom and no end. 

A feeling of pleasure overcame me. 

I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed.

It is written into the cosmic code, the order of the universe. 

As I continued to fall in the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, 

I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness."

― Heinz Pagels, 

physicist and quantum mechanics researcher 

before his death in a 1988 climbing accident