A lesson on solidity from my childhood: Mr. 03-01 sits before me, and holds an egg near his ear. “How,” he asks me, “do you know it exists?”

“You’re holding it,” I answer.

“Because,” says he, “it has solidity and form. Matter extends in space, and within this coordinate space, it offers resistance.” He taps the shell with his ring.

“It will offer less resistance if served with bacon,” says my mother. “May we eat?” They all sit around the table, their plates before them.

Mr. 03-01 hurls the egg at me. Unsuspecting its abrupt motion, I do not catch it, but it hits upon my face and falls to my lap, cracked and oozing; my lip and cheek sting, and are wet.

I put my hand to my cheek and press.

Mr. 03-01 shows no sign of amusement or remorse. He asks, “Is it a chicken?”

I look down, confounded. I shake my head. I want to cry; indeed, I want greatly, very greatly, to cry, but I know I must not.

Mr. 03-01 explains, “It hath the substance of a chicken, but not the form.”

They told me of substance and form; they told me of matter, of its consistency as a fluxion of minute, swarming atomies, as Democritus had writ; they told me of shape and essence; they told me of the motion of light, that it was the constant expenditure of particles flying off the surfaces of things; they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver’s mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.

And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.