The last indignity perhaps is that of being born unconscious, like a drugged girl who wakes up naked in a bed, not knowing how she got there. For by the time you do dimly begin to apprehend your relation to things and an intelligible world begins to clarify out of the buzz and the darting lights and dull sensations, you are lost, a prisoner of your surroundings inextricably tangled up with your mother’s soul and all the intimate things around you. Your affections have gotten away from your control and attached themselves to things that you in later life discover you never intended them to touch. You depend for comfort on attitudes of your mother or father or nurse or brothers and sisters, that may be taken away from you, leaving you shivering and forlorn. Your impulses have had no intuition of reality. They have leaped forth blindly and have recoiled against or been satisfied with things of which you did not have the choosing, and which only very partially seem to concern themselves with your desires. For a few years, with infinite tribulation, you have to dodge and butt and back your way through the little world of other people and things that surround you, until you are a little worn down to its shape and are able to predict its reactions. Everything about you is given, ready, constituted, rigid, set up when you arrive. You always think that some day you are going to catch up to this givenness, that you will dominate instead of falling in line. Fortunate you are if you ever come to dominate! Usually as your world broadens out more and more around you, you merely find a tougher resistance to your desires. Your world at home is simple, personal, appealed to by all sorts of personal manifestations. You can express intense resentment and affect it, or you can express intense joy and affect it. Mother and father have an invincible strength over your feebleness, but your very feebleness is a weapon to break their harsh domination. Their defenses melt against your scream or your chuckle. As you grow older you become stronger to manipulate the world. But just in proportion does the world become stronger to manipulate you. It is no longer susceptible to your scream or your smile. You must use less personal instruments. But that requires subtlety and knowledge. You have still painfully to ferret out the ways of this world, and learn how to use all sorts of unsuspected tools to gain your ends.