When we stood thus on the crest of the Marble Cliffs, Brother Otho would often say that this was the meaning of life: reenacting creation in the ephemeral, the way a child at play imitates his father’s work. What gives meaning to sowing and procreation, to building and establishing order, to images and poetry, is that the masterwork is reflected in them as in a mirror of multicolored glass that soon shatters.

His principle was that each theory was a contribution to genesis because in every era human intelligence conceives creation anew — and that each interpretation contains no more truth than a leaf that unfolds and soon withers. That is the reason he called himself Phyllobius, he who lives among leaves, in his unusual characteristic mixture of modesty and pride.

A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.