T he prospect of memories, equivalent to the known world, lures me into dark territory I might otherwise ignore. If I am in perpetual relationship to something surely it ought to exist here with me. Yet there seemed nothing, past or present, but what I had encountered all of my life, other people, animals, plants and things.
There was no mystery about my interaction with other people. It happened all of the time. It occurred face-to-face and at a distance by merit of my inextricable and unavoidable situation in the human community. Whenever I thought about anything I used language and engaged images which were the common property of humanity. Nothing I thought or did could ever be mine alone. Yet that did not seem enough.
There was something thicker going on, something not so clear cut. Animals and plants, particularly trees, had always been a powerful influence on me. The Boy Scouts extended the engagement into the wilderness. However, there were no plants or trees inside my house, nor except for the occasional dog were there animals. Something was missing, something that could account for my occurrence even when I was alone, away from nature within the depths of my study.
I was musing on these thoughts one day as I absentmindedly sauntered about my house, when I carelessly stubbed my toes against the leg of my oak desk. There was the annoying feeling of having done something stupid followed immediately by the sense of delayed pain on its way, as the impulse travelled from my toe to my brain.
I was about to curse at the desk when I caught myself and laughed. Something my son said at three and a half nearly forty years before had suddenly come to mind. He had run across the living room without looking, collided with a chair and fell hard to the floor. At the time, I had explained to him how his carelessness and not the chair had caused his fall.
