When I was very young, I believed my mother could read my state of mind. When she doubted my honesty, she would say, ‘May I look into your eyes?’ If I was innocent, I would gaze soberly into those maternal eyes. If I was guilty, I would squirm and resist the test. My mother obviously did not need to be a clairvoyant to gauge my truthfulness. All she had to do was look at me. But long after I had given up thinking of my mother as a supernatural being, I found it unbearable to look her directly in the eyes and tell an untruth. She was, I think, my conscience incarnate. My guilt was bound up with her gaze. Infants are not guilty. Like shame and pride, guilt is a social emotion born of our attachments to others, and that form of self-punishment only becomes active once a person is able to see himself as others see him. It is born of reflective self-consciousness. My child self could not bear to be seen as a bad person by my mother because as she looked at me I saw my sorry self through her eyes.

I have been living with the same person for thirty-six years. I cannot read this man’s mind. He has anterooms in his personality I strongly suspect I have never seen. Mysteries abound. And yet time has produced an uncanny mental mirroring between us. A friend tells a story, and it triggers an immediate, identical association in each of us. Before my husband opens his mouth, I know what he will say or before I speak, he knows what I will say. The link between the heard story and our spontaneous double response is rarely obvious and why our two heads have summoned the same material at the same instant strikes us as inexplicable. It happens again and again and more and more. It may be that two minds with years of talk and grumbling and fighting and laughing and all-around bumping into each other behind them have states of mind in common. The winds rise, and the clouds begin to move, and the sun comes out at just the same time in two heads rather than one.