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My son is dead.

I can assure you that none of them are dead. Very much alive. I’ve seen their photograph. Would you like to see? I’ll bring it tomorrow.

DEAR DOCTOR Y,

Thank you for your letter.

I have decided to send you two letters I found in the jacket my husband was wearing just before he lost his memory. I don’t know if they will be of any help. One is by him, but he didn’t post it for some reason. I don’t think my husband ever had a breakdown. But I don’t really know what a breakdown is. I think he is the opposite of the kind of person who has a breakdown. He has always been very energetic and gets a lot of things done. He always sleeps much less than most people. When we were first married I used to worry but I got used to it. He sometimes sleeps four or five hours a night for weeks at a time, sometimes only two or three. But that is in summer. In winter he sleeps a bit more. He says it is because animals need to hibernate. I don’t think he has been working harder than usual this year. He always works hard. It is his nature. He was rather bad-tempered and crotchetty earlier this year but at the beginning of summer he always gets difficult, but it is because it is examination time. He was stammering quite badly in the spring, a new thing for him, but our family doctor gave him some sedatives and the stammering stopped, but it was bad enough for a time to make him cancel some lectures he was going to give.

Yours sincerely,

FELICITY WATKINS

DEAR PROFESSOR WATKINS,

It has been agreed that I should write to you. You won’t know me—or rather, won’t know my name. Yet, we did meet briefly after your lecture. I hope you will remember because it was what you said that started it off. Was a catalyst, touched a spring, something like that. What? Well, nothing common or obvious and that is my trouble in writing to you. It is all intangibles. If you don’t remember, then it will still be true that your saying what you did that night began a remarkable process in me and this coincided with a similar process in a close friend of mine—and as we are beginning to see, in more than one of the people closest to us. Yet it is hard indeed to define it. For me, it was definitely listening to you talk. We have wondered if it is possible for you not to remember? Can a yeast not know it is a yeast? I suppose so. Or perhaps it is not like that at all—it might be that a man talking on a platform in a particularly inspired frame of mind may match up to, or coincide with someone listening, and who has gone to listen with no particular expectation, in ways we know very little about. But in writing to you, this act of sitting down to put words together, in the hope that the words will be as strong as those used by you that night, it is like the spreading of a yeast or some sort of chemical that has started working in one place, and then moved out, feeding and inciting, then curved back again to where it began. This letter is like a snake swallowing its tail. By now you will see that it does not matter that you do not know me, because I am not important individually. Nor of course are you. I am writing because I have more time than my friends. I am retired. My children are grown up and I am a widow. Perhaps it had to be me because of my having been there that evening and coming back as if I’d been slapped out of a daydream. We have been wondering too, about the others who were there that night. Did some of them go away feeling as if they had been infused with a new sort of intelligence? Or was I the only one. You probably don’t know. But I find it hard to believe. I have heard very many lectures in my time—alas. And even given them. It is not a new thought for me that the quality of a lecture or lecturer need not have much to do with the actual words used. No, I do not mean that I admire the demagogue and the inspirational speaker, not at all. But there is another quality. It is one you had that night. It is possible to imagine what you said that night being heard quite dully. The words