Living in Paris for a winter and a spring, David Oates is led to revise his life story from one of trudging and occasional woe into one punctuated by nourishing and sometimes unsettling brilliance. In long years of mountaineering he fought the self-loathing that infused him as the gay kid in the Baptist pew. Here he invites readers to share a sense of awe—awakened by a Vermeer painting or echoing strains of music—lifting the curtain on a cosmos filled with a terrifying, beautiful rightness.