what they might
even mean to those who were as is called "nearest" them.

I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise. If it is true that
one forgets what one wishes to forget, then I have reason for not
remembering the major part of those days and hours that are supposed
to introduce one graciously into the world and offer one a clue to
the experience that is sure to follow. Not that my childhood was so
bitter, unless for childhood loneliness is bitterness, and without
doubt it is the worst thing that can happen to one's childhood. Mine
was merely a different childhood, and in this sense an original one. I
was left with myself to discover myself amid the multitudinous other
and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins
and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by
nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost
unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to
follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I
think, be distressing to follow anything one does not understand.

I used to go, in my earliest school days, into a little strip of
woodland not far from the great ominous red brick building in a small
manufacturing town, on the edge of a wonderful great river in Maine,
from which cool and quiet spot I could always hear the dominant clang
of the bell, and there I could listen with all my very boyish
simplicity to the running of the water over the stones, and watch--for
it was spring, of course--the new leaves pushing up out of the mould,
and see the light-hued blossoms swinging on the new breeze. I cared
more for these in themselves than I did for any legendary presences
sitting under them, shaking imperceptible fingers and waving invisible
wands with regality in a world made only for them and for children
who were taught mechanically to see them there.

I was constantly confronted with the magic of reality itself,
wondering why one thing was built of exquisite curves and another of
harmonic angles. It was not a scientific passion in me, it was merely
my sensing of the world of visible beauty around me, pressing in on me
with the vehemence of splendor, on every side.

I feel about the world now precisely as I did then, despite all the
reasons that exist to encourage the change of attitude. I care for the
magic of experience still, the magic that exists even in facts, though
little or nothing for the o