''Long ago, the day before my-then-fiancé, Kevin Andrews, drowned
before my eyes off the Greek island of Kythira, I was walking up a
cobbled path in the island's main town of Hora, when an immense passion
flower presented itself to me, in full bloom, its tendrils extended like
violet lashes and, Reader, like Ensifera ensifera, I plunged my tiny beak into its sweet core.
The scent was, and is still, beyond my powers of description.
The experience -- the scent -- imprinted somewhere deep in my
physical brain as an utterly distinct and separate-from-time event. An
entire gestalt. A universe. Something beyond the boundaries and limits
we usually impose upon experience. I was smitten, possessed, swooning.
As I drew back my face, and returned to my still-living partner, the man
I loved, a fellow writer, I had no words to describe it. Gently, I
pulled his face to the flower, and we spoke. Whatever we said at that
moment does not remain in memory, however. Compared to the scent itself,
words -- any words -- would have been the crudest of correlatives..''
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