The Seventh Month

Abstract

Medical researchers say that memory begins during the seventh month, for now this baby’s brain is beginning to lose its apple-smoothness, and become rutted, capable of storing the impressions of its experience. I think of those memories like the first fragile tracks on a newly fallen snow—delicate bird-prints, perhaps, or maybe simply the preserved shape of the wind—where later will come larger, more definite patterns, where later trails will be worn, paths that connect and shape what was once a single expanse of whiteness.

Man is the only one that knows nothing, than can learn nothing without being taught. He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep.

Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79)