This is a memory of a period that lasted three or four years, or four or five, when I didn’t speak at all: my via romana. For me now that time seems like an old path, deeply buried—the first way through, foundational to all the rest, and whose existence is easy to overlook completely. The adults’ view of my case: my father’s parents had already dismissed me, deeming my future to be approximately that of a celery-root peel, and turned their attention to my cousins, who were enormously normal, and soon-to-be normal school graduates, a good breed of cattle who would go on to study medicine or engineering. Among them I was nothing but rotten fruit.

The thought followed—it was a thought, and I was thinking, albeit without the frame of words—leading to a reflection of another order, quite apart from the common order of ...