As I sit here, in early 2003, I have before me several pages of manuscript bearing majesticallyencouraging and tactful notes from Ian Tattersal of the American Museum of Natural Historypointing out, inter alia, that Perigueux is not a wineproducing region, that it is inventive but atouch unorthodox [...]

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute,surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’tidentify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t trulyunderstand.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part ofmillions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous andso vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms—up to a billion foreach of us, it has been suggested[...]

But buried among his arcane formulations were insightsof the loftiest brilliance.