A glimpse of the eternal inspires a lifetime of courage.

From Alfred’s journal

Clear cold morning, and I went up past the sycamore higher than I usually bother, until the town was a gray smudge and the river showed me the whole of its bend at once. I stayed maybe four seconds. For years I thought the point of height was the looking, that if I could only get up far enough and hold still long enough I would see something that settled matters. What I got instead was a shape I will never see again from the ground, and I have been living off it since; a glimpse of the eternal inspires a lifetime of courage, and the glimpse is always shorter than you want. Switch asked what was up there and I said the river, which was true and useless. He went back to the acorn.