My grandmother used to tell me that people are sensitive to emotions such as rage, pride, or possession long before they become sensitive to nature, light, or colour. A sort of narrow anthropomorphism, if one were to consider the beliefs of the elders about how we are not born human, but rather progress into our humanity as life passes.
—Christina Tudor-Sideri (Under the Sign of the Labyrinth)
The thought that we are not born human but must move toward it — through error, through feeling — disturbs the easy fictions of beginning. In reading too, there is a slow, uncertain progress: not acquisition of knowledge, but a movement deeper into the common languages of loss, wonder, rage, bewilderment. Sensitivity to light and colour, to nature and silence, comes late. It is not given. It is not guaranteed. It must be entered, crossed toward, if crossed at all.