Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.

It is easy to go down into Hell night and day the gates of dark Death stand wide but to climb back again to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub the task.

I got stuck up a tree when I was about seven and my dad had to come and get the ladder to get me down. I loved to climb all the way up to the top. I must have been a koala in my past life.

So I go to my first book signing and these two girls came up and gave me a piece of paper: '10 reasons you should date our dad. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's a lawyer.' He didn't know what was going on. He didn't even know me. They called him and he came down and asked me out that day. Now I'm dating their dad!

I loved climbing because of the freedom and having time and space. I remember coming off Everest for the last time thinking of Dad and wishing that he could have seen what I saw. He would have loved it.

Spiderman can climb walls and he's got a cool outfit.

Sure climbing Mount Everest would be cool but that's something I would now like to do as a family. Big experiences like that I don't want to have on my own anymore. I want to share them.

When I climb into my car I enter my destination into a GPS device whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember books to store knowledge and now thanks to Google I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.

Like dogs in a wheel birds in a cage or squirrels in a chain ambitious men still climb and climb with great labor and incessant anxiety but never reach the top.

The ladder of success is best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity.