When I went to do mathematics at Chicago I figured I was the smartest person alive. There I was, facing the gargoyles of my dreams; a poor kid aspiring to a bet

When I went to do mathematics at Chicago I figured I was the smartest person alive. There I was, facing the gargoyles of my dreams; a poor kid aspiring to a better life by shrugging off the accent I was born into and the mentality of defeat so common among the poor. But I had gone too far, became too confident and failed horribly. I was sure that the world had failed--I was too good--and that everything was bullshit. I left, walked away from a full scholarship because I had overcome the constrains of my life before and Mathematics and University were no different. I took a job at a small software shop in Portland, OR instead, enrolling part time at PSU doing computer science. I failed at both, as you might expect. The world wasn't wrong, I was. While I could program, I had no discipline. While I had intellect, I had no ability to learn. The world was not wrong, I was. All of my anger and suffering and frustration were my fault. From the defeat of my new University and my new job I learned that my romantic notions of most things were not reality. Enrico Fermi, on whose stairway I bounded up, did not simply decide to conjure nuclear fission under what is now a library. He worked for years, a thing which I had never done. The novice says to the master, "Coal is black." The master replies, "No, it is not." The intermediate says to the master, "Coal is not black." The master replies, "Of course it is." The masters say among themselves, "It is coal." I hold no romantic notions as I held when I were a boy; I have not become a cynical man. Life is suffering and pain. Life is joy and love. I have built a business from nothing and sold it for a profit. I am now very poor. Life is life and that is beautiful. What we learn, what we truly learn, we so incorporate into our being that we cannot perceive it as unknown to all. We are the streams into which a man steps: never the same, yet always the same. To gain mastery over the frontier of science is to gain mastery over nothing, over one's self. It is confusion and pain and truth and beauty.