the bed and was watched with complete disinterest by the dry-eyed imbecile beside her. Two-year-old Timothy Wainwright Douglas, congenital idiot, couldn't care less. It was nothing to him that his mother had at last faced the ugly knowledge that her only child should have been born dead. It was less than nothing to him that she could almost find it in her heart to wish him dead. 

 Release from the crowded womb brought no immediate awakening from the long sleep of gestation, for a sense of identity comes only slowly to the very young, the new-born. He did not realize that his intellectual awakening, gradual as it seemed to him, was really extraordinarily rapid, a matter of only two or three weeks after birth. To him, with no frame of reference, it was a time of mystery that was not recognized as mystery. At first there was only Warmth and Hunger, for which he had no names but which he recognized by their presence or absence. There was the satisfying of Hunger, Sleep, and the return of Hunger. Had he been inclined to philosophy at that tender age, he would have considered the cycle a complete and satisfying one. In a few days, however, there were longer periods between the satisfying of Hunger and the coming of Sleep—a sort of comfortable, full-stomached reverie that was the beginning of the end. 

 With astounding precocity of which he was completely unaware,  [8]                                                                he began rapidly sorting and cataloguing noises that had previously conveyed no meaning. He now learned to associate certain sounds with certain sources and place others under tentative listings while awaiting further data. Smells received the same treatment as noises and often the two could be related. A certain smell and a certain gobbling sort of noise were often followed by a frightening swoop as he was lifted, but his eyes were not yet focused and could give him little information as to the manner or purpose of lifting. 

[8]

 In his fourth week of life he began to be troubled. His little handful of memories centered around a growing and not entirely subjective awareness of himself as an individual. Clearly, life could be divided into "me" and "not me." To have arrived at that conclusion twenty-odd days after birth was an incredible achievement. His mind was quick, but it could not reason further without a basis for logic, a system of reference, learned data from which further data could be inferred. There was uneasiness in him, but no warning of danger; only a stirring of memory that tried to rise to the conscious level. Wonderingly he prodded the memory a 

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