All my life, reading has made me feel on the verge of something, like a bird turning in the wind to lay itself bare before going higher — with feet stretched out behind — higher than the indifferent trees and noisy earth. I’m grateful to my teachers who nurtured this experience, education being our first need after food, for this created calm within the mutilated bower, where I lay — still a nascent thing — muttering language with its two beats speaking the music of my heart, and with three my mind. Many experience separateness as exhaustion, but I didn’t; instead, I felt so unified and whole, as when sunshine lights up the hut and all the ground about it is warm and dry again.