Climbing is a heroic liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value, be it in the value of worldly power or of spirituality. To rise in an elevator, balloon, or airplane is to experience being liberated from weight, sublimated, invested with superhuman abilities. In addition, to rise from the earth is to approach the realm of light and overview. Therefore the negative overcoming of weight is at the same time the positive achievement of enlightenment and an unobstructed outlook.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

The least touchable object in the world is the eye.

The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.

As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon.

The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.

The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.