Richard Feynman. A man so powerfully driven by the thrill and challenge of discovering that which escapes our most base, yet most relied upon senses. A man who in his later years learned to thrive on the mysteries more particular to the experience of mankind. A man I wish I had met. To have an hour long conversation with him would have set me ahead many lifetimes, in terms of what my perception of what this grand illusion of human life represents, than I have any right understanding. I wish that I could have a chance to meet him in the afterlife, but even as a 26 year old man raised catholic, I have discovered the nature of our lives and our essence more beautiful and awe-inspiring, despite its relative brevity a more and most rewarding experience.

“A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe’s age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”