What I Can Say

This is the last thing I can write about E. for now. I want to set down what I can say with confidence, what I suspect, and what I am still looking for, in that order.

What I can say with confidence

E. is real. She ran what she called an experiment on her own behaviour, over years, and kept a careful record of it. People who knew her saw her change. None of them knew why.

Her account is consistent with itself. In months of checking, I have not caught her in a single contradiction about anything I could verify.

And much of what she described lines up with what I have spent five years reading about: who carries a household, who is seen, who is desired, and what happens when one person quietly stops doing what everyone expects. I have written about all of it here, from He Helps If I Ask, the first of these notes, onwards.

I can also say that the work of these five years holds up without her. The research on who carries a household, who rests and who is desired was here before E. wrote to me, and it will be here whatever her notes turn out to mean. I set out its limits honestly in The Verdict Problem, and I stand by that.

What I suspect but can't prove

I suspect that what she did was simpler than it sounds and harder than it looks. Most of it was a matter of stopping: stopping certain kinds of work, certain kinds of explaining, certain kinds of waiting. The rest was a matter of attention.

I suspect the part she wouldn't describe was not a technique at all. I think it was a decision about herself, made early, that everything else followed from.

And I suspect she stopped talking to me because she had said what she meant to say, and the rest was hers.

None of that is proven. I want to be clear about that, as I tried to be in The Claims.

What these five years were for

When I started this record, I thought I was writing about housework. Then money, then rest, then desire. Looking back, I think I was writing about one question the whole time: what happens between two people when one of them carries what the other cannot see. E. asked that question from inside her own life, and answered it in a way I couldn't have.

I don't know yet whether her answer is right. I do know that it was hers, and that she paid for it.

What I am still looking for

I am still looking for the period of her life the last notes describe. There is a gap of several months, and I think it explains more than anything else.

I am still looking for one person who I believe was there for it.

And I am still looking for the first page of her notes, which she told me existed and never showed me. She said it was where the experiment began. She said it was only a few lines.

I have been told where it might be. I am going there next week. If it is what I think it is, then everything I have written here, five years of it, has been describing the same thing from the outside, and she was the one who