And here, on a windy wintry evening, I awoke to the consciousness of my Individuality.
I do not know how better to express the earliest memory I have of being—and thinking. It was a living demonstration of the great truth shallow thinkers never comprehend—“Cogito, ergo sum.”
I had fallen asleep, tired with play, and lulled into drowsiness by the falling rain outside. I lay among the pillows of the trundle-bed at the back of the room, and, awakening with a cry of fright at finding myself, as I thought, alone, was answered by my mother’s voice.
She sat by the fire in a low rocking-chair, and, guided by her reassuring tone, I tumbled out of bed and ran toward her. In the area lighted by the burning logs, I saw her, as in another sphere. To this hour I recall the impression that she was thinking of something besides myself. Baby as I was, I felt vaguely that she was not “all there,” even when she took me upon her lap. When she said, kindly and in her own sweet way, “Did my little girl think her mother had left her alone in the dark?” she did not withdraw her eyes from the ruddy fire.
Something warned me not to speak again. I leaned my head against her shoulder, and we studied the fire together. Did the intensity of her musing stir my dormant soul into life? I cannot say. Only that I date my conscious personal existence from that mystic hour. The picture is before me to-night, as I hear my daughter singing her boy to sleep in the next room, and the lake-wind rattles the vines about my window. The sough of the heated air over the brands and embers; the slow motion of the rocker as we swayed to and fro; my mother’s thoughtful silence, and my small self, awed into speechlessness by the new thing that had come to me; my pulpy brain interfused with the knowledge that I was a thinking entity, and unable to grapple with the revelation—all this is as distinct as things of yesternight.
I have heard but one experience that resembled this supreme moment of my infancy. My best-beloved tutor related to me when I was twelve years old that he “recollected when he began to think.” The sensation, he said, was as if he were talking to himself and could not stop. I had that day heard the epigrammatic “Cogito, ergo sum,” and I told of my awakening from a mere animal to spiritual and intellectual life.
I do not comprehend the mystery better now than on that never-to-be-forgotten evening. I but know that the miracle was!