The door, the room, the light, the bed, and what was on the bed: a "white, waxen thing." A small boy and a corpse: such encounters would not have been so rare in the Edinburgh of his time. How many internal retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally used? Doubtless it still seemed as clear as on the day itself. By the time he came to describe it publicly, sixty years had passed. A small boy, a room, a bed, closed curtains leaking afternoon light. What he saw there became his first memory.
There was nobody to observe him he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him. A door was there to be pushed he walked in, stopped, looked. He did this with nothing that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy.
He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle. It always begins like this, and it began like this then.
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