I became alert only when he arrived at beauty and reclaimed from the book - ‘’the best part of beauty is that which a picture can not express.’ That’s Dr Johnson quoting Bacon, a notable philosopher and logician.’ I immediately recalled in all its minute details the painting in my past massa’s sitting room, of his father, mother and aunt in their opulent setting. I had searched the painting for my mother, as I had latterly searched the sky for utterance, but found nothing. Now Dr Gladstone was telling me that my mother’s very invisibility held meaning. That she was absent from memory and from record was a measure of her beauty. And there was another word which found my mother in the sightless spaces of a painting, at the very corners and sides where the frame covered over the canvas; or at the back, where the canvas was blank and therefore unexamined by human eyes. ‘Imagination: the power of forming ideal pictures; the power of representing things absent to one’s self,’ it said in the Dictionary. Before, I used to daydream my mother, then scold myself for being unreal, but the Dictionary was telling me that she was beyond presence, beyond ordinary sight and recollection and record. I did not believe it. I wanted to, but in the end my box of coins and bills of sale, and the newspapers tallying goods, were definite articles not demanding of faith.