"So I walked towards the subway to go home. I told myself I was dreaming, or else I was over-tired or something. It would have been quite a natural thing to happen to me if I had been over-tired, because I'm a commercial artist, and used to be always working with color. Sort of an occupational disease maybe. I told myself that if after a good night's sleep I still didn't see color, I'd go to a doctor. That way I calmed myself a bit, and I slept like a log all night. "Next morning I still didn't see any color, so I called up the agency and said I wouldn't be in that day because I was sick. Then I went to see a doctor. I just went to a man who had an office down the street, because I've never been sick since I got to New York, and hadn't any special doctor to go to. I had to wait a long time, and in the waiting room there was a copy of Holiday Magazine, a magazine that was always full of color pictures, and of course they were all black and white now. I got so worried glancing through it that I put it away, and closed my eyes till my name should be called. "The doctor listened to my whole story, and then he said, 'What do you mean by color?' He pronounced it as you did--like a foreign word. I tried to explain it to him. That was the first time I'd tried to explain color, and I saw how impossible it was. Then I caught myself and thought how obvious, this doctor is just trying to test me. Obviously he knows what color is, red and blue and all the rest, and here I'm trying to explain it to him, which is impossible. So I realized, or thought I realized, that the doctor was just trying to test me, to see if my mind was working logically. So I asked him for a dictionary. "He gave me a Standard College Dictionary and I looked up color, to show him the definition, but it wasn't there. The dictionary jumped from coloquintida to Colosseum. So I looked for spectrum and for rainbow and for all kinds of synonyms, and for the names of some of the colors themselves, and none of it was listed. When I looked up from the frantic search the doctor had a strange expression on his face. 'I'm afraid I'm not equipped to help you,' he said, and wrote down the name and address of a psychiatrist for me. "That's about all there is to the story, except that when I went home I looked through all my books, poetry and prose, which had been full of descriptions in terms of color. You know, red lips and blue sky and green trees and such, and it was all gone. No such words were in any of the books. I went to the library too, and looked in all kinds of books. And for a while I went around asking people the question I asked you earlier. I tried a few times more to describe color, before I gave up. I soon gave up asking people, because they thought me crazy or drunk, and I didn't want to end up in some institution.