When one relates to an individual, one confronts motifs, conscious and unconscious, existing concurrently in the society at large. Revenge, suspicion, paranoia come into play as weapons, whether in children or adults. Themes spoken or acted, telepathic communication—which is probably wish and desire echoing in the brain, touched off by a look or feeling and combined with the memory of a voice—all merge in the flux of experience (vide: Picasso's The Dream). I have encountered this phenomenon aurally; Picasso probably had a visual stimulus.

Since we are dealing with a system in which there is a rule against everything, there is no telling when such a hidden judgment will make its presence felt.

I myself, having waved to the daughter of a neighbor to whom I had given some music paper, was accosted by the irate mother several minutes later. She was carrying the sheaf of paper.

"My daughter said you grumbled something about paper," she said, "so I thought you might mean this."

"Thank you," I said, taking the paper and shutting the door. A few seconds later the bell rang again.

"You know," she said, "some friends of mine want to hurt you and I may let them."

"How banal!" I shouted, shutting the door at once.

I was able to draw only the following conclusions:

1) The child was lying.

2) She (the child) might have seen the paper, recognized it as mine, and heard my voice in her brain requesting its return.

3) The mother saw my paper on the desk, thought the words describing the object and the child sensed them.

4) The mother's libidinal frustrations, imagining sexual competition from her daughter—perhaps cued by a remark I had made earlier about the child's physical resemblance to my former wife—and the family's racial ties to me (we are Jewish), produced a situation which, at the very least, aged me, at least, by the quarter of an hour.

It is important, of course, to cede to the mother a moral judgment concerning the actions of any 40-year-old man waving to any 10-year-old girl or, rather, the steps necessary to prevent a deepening of that relationship past mere recognition. At the risk of interposing a plea for trust in a clinical work, I must emphasize at this point that I had said nothing at all to the child when I waved to her, the sheaf of music paper never even being registered in that all too perishable fount of memory. Paper is cheap, if you know what I mean.