WHAT DID YOU LEAVE BEHIND?

The suggestion here is that from any sensory experience--a day at the beach, a parade, a romp in the snow--we bring back not only souvenirs (a shell, a balloon, a ""cherry-red nose"") but also impressions. And that, of course, is inarguable: in book after book from White Snow, Bright Snow onward, Tresselt and Duvoisin gave us, implicitly, the impressions of just such experiences. But the vehicle was their word-and-picture art: the book was a creative simulation-cum-evocation of the experience as a tangible and intangible whole. Here, instead, we're fed dollops of imagery--""Did you leave the thunder-crash of great waves, stumbling and spilling on the smooth wet sand?""--and asked, after the fact, to embrace it as personal, lasting experience. The difference is that between lyric poetry that speaks to the reader and the teacher who drums in its meaning.