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I RECALL VERY little about myself before the age of six. I possess no photographs to jolt the hidden memories, and those few relatives I see at birthday and Christmas celebrations have only the faintest sense of what I was like as a boy. No baby mementos; nothing of the toddler; no kindergarten tokens or pre-school art works; no school portraits or athletics day medals; no locks of hair, first teeth, first boots; no record of first words or cherished toys; and few revealing anecdotes. As I sit to write these first lines, my inner archive is almost blank as well. There are only a handful of images left over: small, discontinuous fragments, which may or may not be authentic residual traces of an otherwise forgotten landscape.