A week or so ago, I stood in a place that’s one of my favorites, looking out upon a view that I’ll always consider the best, and at a time of day that did the whole experience justice—though in truth, no time is a bad one to stand there.

I went to this place because it’s likely I won’t get to stand there much longer (another story for another time)—and so wanted to imprint on my memory its every dimension—sights, sounds, smells, the touch and taste of its air on my skin and tongue. I wanted to “flood the senses,” as we’re told we can do, and capture all of what’s best about it in the bottle of my brain.

So there I stood, attentive as a soldier called to order—every faculty, keen and whetted.

But I failed.

It should have been no surprise, as this can’t be the first time I’ve tried it. I’m prone to this kind of behavior; it sounds like something I’d do—attempt to record the essence of a place or event upon my memory—so I must have failed before, often. But this time, while standing in this place, trying to “take it all in,” I was aware of my inability to do so and grew reflective about it.

For regardless of what I saw—colors, depths, figures, dimensions of light—I found that I could not both see these things and hear their counterparts in the same moment. And then when I listened to the sounds of the day, the wild harmony of disconnected calls and counters, I found that I could not truly see what was before me. Of course, I retained my vision, but its power was dimmed, receding to that of my hearing, just as my hearing had receded to that of my sight only moments past.

And throughout this toggling of senses, one unfocusing to give place to the other, the other heightening to make way to the fore, the other faculties—smell and taste and touch—were as silent (to mix my metaphors) as if I’d been enclosed in a glass box. They made no impression, not until I “turned them on” by attending to their powers, making them my focus in an act of the will.

Reminiscences, for all our trying to enrich them, are often only fractured strobes and ragged snatches. That said, I feel luckier than most, in that I got what I came for. That is, I have the sight of the place; I have the sound; I could relate what it smells like at dusk and at dawn, and can estimate its heat and closeness. Its taste is like that of all July—of every July that ever was or will be.

But I could not have them all together. I could not be in that place but one sense at a time. I was like a man who can only fit some particular part of himself within a box, and must withdraw some other part to give it room.

Why is that so? I’m sure it’s the common experience, for those who bother to observe it. I’m sure scientists who deal with sensory perception could tell me, and sure that philosophers have taken note. I even wonder if this is a necessary mode, one that keeps us from overloading our cognitive motherboard. Is it in fact the way we must live? Perhaps to undergo the “flood” we long for would be too much for us—an overwhelming cataract; a holocaust of fire.

But still I wonder. Was it always so? Is there a part of our lives when we can give more of ourselves to the natural world than we are ultimately able to? Do small children enjoy this pleasure, and leave it behind as they mature, just as they do their limitless fancies? Is this a talent, or something that savants have mastered—like counting cards at a blackjack table or playing Chopin backwards, forwards, and upside down?

Or is it lost to us all, each and every one, this complete unity with the day, this melding with the ground we stand on and the air in which we swim? But why do we retain the metaphor then? Why do we have a concept for it—not of a partial melting, but of a complete emulsion?

Sometimes I wonder at what we lost in Eden, and guess at what regaining it can mean. So I gamble that this would be a nice amenity, for those who enjoy the eternal prerogatives: a capacity to have the beloved thing in every way—not a truncated experience—not one that is clipped, rationed, or glimpsed—not one that parcels itself out in this “taking turns” fashion, that spoon feeds our lives to us so stingily; but an encounter that gives us the beloved fully, and all at once, as though we had never been apart, so that we lose forever the meaning of such a word, and maybe even forget forever that it had one.