I took this picture with my hand held out behind my head, and never expected it to turn out the way it did. It remains one of my favorite pictures to date, and this is what I think when I look at it ... An Open Universe "Observe the persistence, in man's mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense -- not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing -- that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek -- which is yours for the taking." (Excerpt from the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, C.1957, page 982)