All I remember from childhood are the colors. Colors so vivid they appeared to be artificially induced, colors unimpeded by any intermediaries, pure color without form, pure sensation divorced from memory. A world saturated by colors, colors carried on the winds of autumn and spring, colors bleeding out of the trees and into the greenish summer air, colors blending all together on winter nights and shining forth in a single white radiance. No words, no shapes, no faces, only a blur of blind experience: grass smells, pencil smells, soap smells, sunset smells when the red orb of the sky sank into the horizon and set free the redolence buried deep within the dirt of our shrinking suburban woodlands. Life happened all at once, everything simultaneously beginning and ending, time both passing away forever and leaving an indelible residue upon the immaterial stuff of life. I wonder now, as I did not then, what this stuff of life might be. Back then it still seemed like a porous and living thing, a body pushing itself through the winds of time, one that bore, however faintly, the scent breathed upon it by the changing of the seasons from one to the next and the next.