May 26, 2026

I.

In the early summer of 1965, on the morning after Ali knocked out Liston with his phantom punch, a curious paper appeared in the pages of Volume Seven, Issue Five of Phenomenography Studies Quarterly, a leading academic journal of the time. The paper, entitled “The Three Negations,” was by Dr. Naomi Ehrlich: a forty-one-year-old psychoanalyst who had never before published outside of her field. It argued that the human race lacked the technological capacity to distinguish fact from fiction.

For years, Ehrlich explained, she had heard how the United States was passing through a time of chaos. Rock and roll and race riots, the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam: the world was spinning out of control and consensus reality was collapsing. But, Ehrlich argued, this much-ballyhooed “collapse” was an illusion. There was no new “epistemological crisis.” The citizens of the United States could not be losing their connection to reality because they had never had any such connection in the first place. Nobody knew what was going on because nobody ever had. No one, anywhere, at any time. Or, as Dr. Ehrlich famously began: “The history of all hitherto existing humanities is the history of our failure to invent nonfiction.”

“Since the earliest days of human consciousness, mankind has exhausted itself in the pursuit of Three Negations,” she went on:

Immortality. Untaintedness. Nonfiction. To live forever, to be truly good, and to know—to really know—the truth. Whole lives—whole generations!—have been wasted in the pursuit of these impossibilities. The maturing spirit of the modern age has seen the first two largely abandoned. The alchemists no longer tend their furnaces in search of the philosopher’s stone; we no longer hope to discover the old garden and find our prelapsarian redemption there. Such dreams have long been relegated to the fancies of the poets and the neurotics—the Bolsheviks have seen to that! And yet nonfiction—the “truth” without remainder or distortion—has never before obsessed us with such fervor. We are terrified to lose it, as if we ever had it! It is the lodestar of this so-called “scientific age,” the propositum cordis sed tumidus of this very journal, and others like it, dedicated to “philosophy,” “sociology,” “theory”—“truth,” ha ha. Our vaunted newspapers—adorned in Objectivity and Standards, staffed by humble “fact-checkers” and “reporters,” blot a million daily pages with our “nonfiction.” Yet people believe the papers less and less each day. In our petty efforts to express reality, we are nothing but another inert rock that fails to stop the greying hairs; another cult that promises perfect harmony but descends swiftly into rancor. We panic! Over what? Over nothing. Like madwomen weeping at the conclusion of a hysterical pregnancy, cooing at our empty arms, in mourning for the loss of what we never had. No: what others call chaos I call the beginning of understanding, the panic of eyes finally opened, seeing the nearby ledge. . .

Ehrlich confessed that, like many people, she had spent much of her life confident that nonfiction not only existed, but predated human life itself. “The bookstores of my youth contained ‘nonfiction sections’ larger than those set aside for the novels, purporting to describe the world,” she wrote. “With friends, I casually used the same phrases as other young people—‘Trust me,’ ‘Let me tell you the truth,’ ‘I feel as if you really understand me.’”

“I always supposed that we had never invented nonfiction because we had always possessed it,” she went on. “We were heirs to it. The world was simply there. I believed that it was fiction that had been consciously imposed by human will: all the myths and slants and lies we had layered on top of things as they were could be removed as easily as we had put them there in the first place. To create ‘nonfiction’ we simply had to ‘tell the truth,’ while resisting our impulse to make our own additions.”

“It was not until my time in university that I began to doubt myself,” she wrote. “I had occasion to revisit a favorite novel of my youth: the Meditations of René Descartes. It is in the third chapter, when the skeptical narrator turns to matters of religion, that he happens upon what he believes to be good cause to believe in his God. His argument is simple: we conceive of the finite, and we conceive of the infinite. The infinite must exist for the finite to follow—for what, after all, is the finite but infinity, bounded?—but we are finite things, so our notion of the infinite must come from somewhere else, from something infinite. From God and his superior reality! the skeptic cries.”

I had nodded along to this point, but when I reached the end of the meditation, I was convinced I must have missed some vital moment. Why, Descartes’ puckish narrator had it precisely backward! We do not arrive at the finite by bounding our conception of the infinite. We cannot conceive the infinite at all. We imagine the finite—a road, a row of beads, a human life—and imagine the gates going up, it going on forever, never quite realizing that we have never, not once, held the infinite within our heads. So much the same with nonfiction! We have always had fiction, always had our myths, delusions, misconceptions, our language games and fables for ordering reality—that is what we imagine. Then we imagine the gates going up: our words, our stories, our thoughts . . . but true! But not fiction.

Non-fiction! The name should have given it away from the start. We cannot even say what it is, only that it is not like anything we know, anything that we have ever written. We cannot express reality. We cannot even see it plain, free of the distortions, myths, simplifications, obfuscations, ambiguities, and “fictions” that have corrupted our millennia of efforts to “tell the truth.”

Ehrlich believed that despite hysterical insistence to the contrary, everybody was vaguely aware of these facts. They betrayed themselves every time they found themselves misunderstood, unable to understand somebody else, shocked when the plain facts of some person or situation revealed themselves in a horrifying instant. The world was perpetually engaged in an effort to create some device, some technology—some kind of book, some kind of utterance, some kind of photograph or film or gesture, some combination of potent hallucinogenic drugs—that would show us real nonfiction and allow us to share it with one another. That we kept looking proved that we had not yet found it. That we had not given up proved that we retained our delusional confidence about the possibility.

The world was not convinced. In the months that followed, “Three Negations” was treated as little more than a novelty: slightly silly, a bit provocative, inappropriately written for a scholarly journal. But Phenomenography Studies Quarterly was known for publishing cutting-edge work in the rapid poststructuralist takeover of philosophy, literary theory, political science, and sociology—a few cranks every issue was worth the price of discovering the occasional prophet. Ehrlich was one of the cranks. Her paper fell into official obscurity, occasionally reprinted in PoMo anthologies as an example of the more idiosyncratic excesses of academic publishing in the era of High Deconstruction. As the 1960s and ’70s gave way to the retrenchment of the ’80s and ’90s, the “collapse of consensus reality” was largely forgotten. We’d lost touch with nonfiction for a while. But now it was back, ready for the glorious new millennium.

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II.

A recent essay in a venerable old magazine, 2026: “Good authority,” the author writes, “tells us that we are living in an age of lies, hoaxes, frauds, scams, persistent myths, art forgeries, propaganda, ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘alternative facts.’ Memoirs turn out to be novels, newspapers are scandalized by fake sources and fake stories. The perpetual overturning of consensus reality—10 ‘Facts’ Your History Teacher Lied to You About—has given rise to the tendency, particularly acute in this country, of believing that one’s fellow citizens live in entirely different worlds.”

UNESCO warns of “the disinformation crisis that is sweeping the globe.” The WHO has proclaimed an “infodemic,” a deluge of “false or misleading information” causing “confusion” and “harm[ing] health.” The RAND Corporation, stately and cautious, warns of “truth decay.” A malaise is “eroding civil discourse, causing political paralysis, and leading to general uncertainty about what’s true and what isn’t.” In 2021, the Biden Administration declared that our inability to distinguish fact from fiction puts “American lives . . . at risk.” Remarkably, the Trump Administration agreed, only quibbling over the identities of the liars and the contents of their deceptions. In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security warned of “criminal organizations” beyond the southern border “putting lives at risk by spreading lies” on social media.

The 2020s are the age of “information silos.” Americans occupy readymade “epistemic bubbles.” The occupants of these enclosures are not rubes, nor even liars. They have access to reliable information. What they know and what they say would survive the scrutiny of the fact-checker. But the arrangement of their knowledge—the selective inclusions and exclusions, the conclusions drawn from the available data, the instructions, often implicit, regarding who to trust and who you should ignore—give rise to a closed discursive system as misleading in the aggregate as any lie. The latest estimates maintain that as many as several thousand of these discrete realities are in operation at any given time.

“What concerns me most,” the article went on, “is how we seem to go willingly to the slaughter. Despite incessant calls for a ‘return to sanity,’ we do not want a single, shared reality. Scratch a call for the end of “epistemic bubbles” and you will find a call for everyone to join the bubble where the author lives. We are victims to our own fantasies: ‘brainrot,’ the kids call it; we are not only the authors, but more and more the products of our fictions. What began in politics has crept into every part of modern life: As the boundary we imagined between fact and fiction, between mutually incomprehensible fictions, between incommensurable facts grows ever more porous, nothing remains stable, trustworthy, defined. We are living in a state of emergency—a political crisis, a cultural crisis, the cause of rising violence, a crisis of civilization; for all our efforts, we still scarcely know the people in our lives, know ourselves, know anything at all—and it has forced us to reconsider, both in superficial and deeper ways, whether or not we can sustain our sanity much longer. Or, more troubling still, whether we ever had it at all.”

“In this era where people will believe any old thing they read on the internet, who can say anymore?” the author asked. “I only know that we must go back. Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it OFF!” The essay was popular on Bluesky; on X, Elon Musk posted it with a shrugging emoji. A picture of an anime girl twerking on a statue of Marcus Aurelius replied: “sounds like a woman, lol.”

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III.

Rumors of the manuscript circulated for years. Despite its academic obscurity, “Three Negations” developed a cult following in the decades following its publication in PSQ. Unreconstructed theorists, dissident psychiatrists, oddballs, crank, eccentrics, and the occasional graduate student passed poorly xeroxed copies of the article around; by the 1990s, they began congregating on the internet, discussing higher-quality PDFs of Ehrlich’s jeremiad and, by the mid-2010s, becoming obsessed with the idea that Ehrlich was a prophet. They were convinced that there was more where their beloved paper had come from. Sifting through available public documents, tax records, mimeographed old personnel files, odd newspaper reports, and—egged on by their fellow posters on the Negationaniac discussion forums—occasionally ambushing a person connected to the late Dr. Ehrlich, they built a theory of what had been lost. And they began to realize, as a number of their inquiries came back obscured by what appeared to be official efforts to erase Dr. Ehrlich’s early life and work, that whatever had become of the lost book, it bore directly on the present condition of the United States.

The biographical facts were simple. Born on June 3, 1924, in Kierling, Austria, Naomi Ehrlich had emigrated to the United States with her parents in 1938, settling in Jewish Brooklyn. She studied Greek at Barnard and graduated in 1946. In 1950, she received her medical degree at Columbia. After completing her psychiatric residency at Bellevue, she’d begun training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, then transferred and completed her apprenticeship at the Long Island Psychoanalytic Institute, where she remained for the rest of her career. In 1960, she was promoted to training analyst. Within two years, she had become recognized as one of her field’s foremost experts on forgotten aspects of early Freudian practice, particularly unconventional hypnotic methods and nontraditional modes of regression. In February 1965, right as “Three Negations” was passing desk review at Phenomenography Studies Quarterly, Ehrlich was invited to deliver the keynote address at the annual congress of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Her talk, “Beyond Standard Regression: Archaeological-Hypnotic Approaches to Pre-Interpretive Consciousness,” was tremendously well-received, despite some grumbling from more conservative association members about her “derivations from orthodoxy.”

It was only after the appearance of “Three Negations” that matters became strange. Colleagues at the Institute noticed Ehrlich becoming increasingly preoccupied, distracted. In seminars, she would lose her train of thought mid-sentence. Her office hours grew irregular. In 1967, she closed her private practice in Manhattan and stepped back from most of her committee work. One colleague reported encountering her in the Institute library at 3 a.m., surrounded by books on medieval chronicle-writing and ancient Sumerian accounting practices. “I asked what she was working on,” he later told an interviewer, and “she looked at me like I’d woken her from a dream.” Then, in early 1968, Dr. Ehrlich abruptly discharged her remaining trainee-analysts and resigned from the Institute. Within weeks, rumors began circulating: colleagues who had visited her office during the move-out reported seeing boxes of typescript—what must have been thousands of pages. A secretary claimed to have been asked to type portions of a massive bibliography. A janitor mentioned finding the wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled paper covered in handwriting, margin notes in several languages, diagrams that looked half-mathematical and half-mystical. When pressed, Ehrlich would acknowledge only that she had “attempted something foolish” and that the attempt had “reached its natural conclusion.” The Institute conducted a search of her former office and found nothing. In 1969, her colleague Dr. Morris Brenner wrote, begging to see whatever she had written. Her reply was brief: “Dear Morris, There is no book. There was never any book. If anyone tells you otherwise, they are mistaken.” She had never mentioned a book before.

In 1977, a graduate student claimed to have glimpsed a portion of the manuscript in the Institute’s archives. In 1983, Ehrlich, who had not been seen by her colleagues for the better part of a decade, made a brief visit to the Institute, refusing conversation with old friends and spending hours searching for something in her old offices—much to the annoyance of the billing office that had since taken over the space. In 1991, an antiquarian book dealer reported that Ehrlich had inquired about “a large psychoanalytic manuscript of primarily historical interest” possibly acquired “when the pharmacists took over.” Several former patients recalled her mentioning “a history I once tried to write.” The manuscript became something of a legend—occasionally referenced in footnotes, the subject of speculation at conferences, but never verified.

Among the Ehrlichheads most active in online discussions—most of which had migrated from scattered message boards onto the contentiously and lightly moderated r/naomiehrlichTRUTH by 2017—was a woman in a particularly strong position to settle the mystery for good. Dr. Elena Marchetti was a psychologist specializing in psychodynamic memory recovery who had been obsessed with Ehrlich since her days as an undergraduate at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. In 2018, Marchetti secured a sizable research grant from the Fliess Foundation with a vague mandate to spend the money “in furtherance of preserving the history of the psychological sciences.” She sat on the money for years, unsure of what to do. But in 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Long Island Psychoanalytic Institute to declare bankruptcy and liquidate its remaining assets. In July of that year, in a desperate scramble to settle outstanding back taxes on the property, the remaining trustees held an auction of various Institute curios. Marchetti learned of the auction from an industry newsletter forwarded by an old colleague she typically ignored—“In retrospect, I cannot even tell you what possessed me to click through the email that day,” she later told a reporter. “It had been a year and a half in lockdown, I suppose”—and knew what she had to do. Forgoing her second vaccine dose, Marchetti boarded the next plane to John F. Kennedy airport, rented a car, and raced to the old Institute. Most of the other attendees bickered and bid each other up over the reference library, the midcentury modern furniture, and a handful of semi-pornographic letters between a former director and Jacques Lacan on the subject of jouissance. When Marchetti’s lot arrived, she didn’t even have to bid a second time. For only $147.50, barely one percent of her grant, she purchased what remained of Ehrlich’s files, sealed since 1968 in Institute storage. Opening them that evening in her suite at the Garden City LaQuinta, she hadn’t expected much and much of what she found was worthless: old staff memos, cancelled checks, trainee evaluations and dozens of takeout menus from long-defunct Suffolk County Chinese restaurants. But then, Marchetti struck gold. In a dusty banker’s box, sealed and erroneously labeled “Couch Upholstery—Samples and Swatches,” she found it: 994 typed pages, extensively annotated in Ehrlich’s own handwriting, accompanied by thousands of notes, citations, and clinical records. At the top of the box, just beneath what really did appear to be a few sample fabrics for a new couch, Marchetti saw the title page, still crisp, with enormous, fully serifed caps: THE REALITY DRIVE: A HISTORY IN CASE STUDIES.

With the remainder of her grant, Marchetti recruited over twenty colleagues from both her professional circles and the most active users on the Ehrlich subreddit and set to work. In late November 2025, they released the long-awaited book to the public. Published by the boutique psychiatric imprint Negative Transference Press, The Reality Drive contained the original manuscript, meticulously tidied up, set alongside over a dozen helpful essays and other supplementary materials prepared by the editors. Wide-ranging, assiduously detailed, and frequently quite funny, Ehrlich’s work surveyed the situation that “Three Negations” had only sketched: the complete failure of human civilization to actually invent nonfiction. And it contained, in the end, an answer to the question that had so long eluded Ehrlich’s colleagues, admirers, and friends: What happened?

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IV.

As its subtitle promised, The Reality Drive was a kind of history. After the introduction—a lightly revised version of her PSQ paper, now titled “The Last Negation,” wherein she linked each of her universal human pursuits (immortality, untaintedness, and nonfiction) to one of the fundamental Freudian drives. Thanatos, the death drive, was reimagined in terms of its mirror: the desire to live forever. Eros, traditionally “pleasure”, necessarily entailed a drive toward freedom from guilt. And to the two drives theorized by Freud, Ehrlich added a third: Pragmatikótis, the so-called “reality drive,” present, she said, if never explicitly articulated, in the Dynamics of Transference. From there, Ehrlich proceeded in three major sections: “Before Facts,” “Facts,” and “After Facts.” The sections themselves are subdivided into dozens of “case studies,” some as short as a paragraph, the longest spanning fully eighty pages. Each “case study” details a significant human effort to invent nonfiction, notes any progress it achieved, documents what trouble its authors encountered, and describes the ultimate cause of its failure. It begins in the beginning:

The Bean Counters (3,350-2,700 BC)

The earliest attempts were touchingly direct! Those Sumerian scribes, scratching away at their clay tablets, believing with such sweet confidence that Reality consisted of countable things. So many measures of barley, so many heads of cattle, so many years of the God-King’s reign. This was no idle effort! These were the first glimmers of recognition that truth-telling requires systemic attention to particulars, rather than mythic generalities. But how could they expand their method beyond the granary and the treasury? How could they measure the reality of events, of reasons, of one another? How to count a battle? How to measure the favor of the divine? How to systemize the longing of the soul?

The failure is obvious. Still: we should not balk. Behold, the first experiment. Behold, fruits of the first heroic stab at nonfiction:

18 jars of pig fat—Balli. 4 jars of pig fact—Nimgir-ab-lah. Fat dispensed (at?) the city of Zabala.

Behold its author:

Ab-kid-kid, the scribe. 4th year 10th month.

May his memory be a blessing!

From the bean counters, “Before Facts” traces nearly 5,000 years of human grasping: Thucydides, the Books of Moses, Xenophon, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Josephus, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (“the reader should not find me tedious for pointing out that there are no dragons”), the Twenty-Four Histories of China, the venerable Bede, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (“again—no dragons!”), and Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, among many others. Ehrlich’s focus is idiosyncratic, inconsistent; in one of the supplementary essays included in the release, Dr. David Kronberg attempts to make sense of what he called “the algorithm underlying Dr. Ehrlich’s attention” to little success. In a “case study” headlined “The Medieval Chroniclers, Misc. (Beneath Naming)”, Ehrlich writes only—

Tedious. Monks copying their yearly entries, adding “nothing noteworthy happened this year” or “great mortality among the cattle.” Not worth the ink to describe.

—while the entry on Al-Tabari and his Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk runs forty-seven pages and dedicates an inordinate amount of time to the question of the “reliable witnesses” as a problem of recursion (here Ehrlich includes several mathematical graphs). The entries aren’t limited to various flavors of “history.” Her definition of nonfiction is expansive, including not just events but the reality of the human heart, the truth of our relationships with one another. Her entries on Rumi, Mencius, Cicero, and Aristotle are often more sensitive and considered than the others in the section. She can be dismissive (of Marcus Aurelius she wrote, in-margin, “the hollow ring of truth—appeals to everyone, therefore contains nothing”), but also admiring: “Perhaps no person of this era came as close to discovering the reality drive,” she says of St. Augustine. “Our hearts are restless, and he nearly knew why.” Montaigne, one of the last entries of “Before Facts”, simply disappoints her: “So close—alas, he didn’t know himself after all.”

She reserves particular praise for Laozi, author of the Tao Te Ching:

Very close. So close! The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. But his solution was to do . . . nothing. Like a man who knew the true location of the Fountain then returned to his cold tea. If this is wisdom, I don’t possess it. A cure for the reality drive is a cure for human life. [In the margins: Still—the closest to my own conclusions. I do not think I am such a genius. But perhaps not such a coward either.]

Ehrlich knew that her contemporaries would have little trouble with “Before Facts.” For much of human history, the problem of nonfiction was obvious: we simply lacked a reliable way to gather “facts,” to assemble even the basic materials necessary for the effort. In a long digression during her account of the Alexandrian World Chronicle, Ehrlich describes the whole era as “the infantile stage” of the reality drive, a period in which our capacities were so limited that the solution appears simple and obvious. “Like a baby who cannot manipulate even the simplest object, the non-fictionist unable to secure real facts imagines that once he can get his hands around the world, he will effectively become God,” she writes. “The first step, not yet taken, conceals the many steps that come after.” She notes that many people, even in the twentieth century, were “still, effectively, in the infantile stage when it comes to their own reality drive.” But even in antiquity, some knew better. They could detect the deeper issues lurking beneath the mere problem of facts, the problems that would blossom once that first hurdle was overcome. From her entry on Herodotus:

I can almost see him in his study—scrolls scattered everywhere, pulling at his beard in frustration. The magnificent, maddening man! He had promised to write only ‘what I have seen and heard’. It was only then that he began to see how little a lifetime seeing and hearing profited his project. Even if every detail he had gathered was true, how to synthesize it? How to narrate it? How to express everything in language? How not to lose, to prioritize, to deceive through the inevitability of decisions? Poor Herodotus! He had discovered the first law of information theory two millennia before Shannon! [Crossed out and rewritten in the margin: “No—discovered something more fundamental: that Reality actively resists expression. It fights back.]

Ehrlich is quick to justify why she has spent so many pages on a period of her history few readers would dispute. First, she blames her own scrupulousness—”as a clinician, one can never know what will be valuable”—but second, she raises the matter of self-deception, a key feature of the reality drive. Her hope is to lead the reader gently from those failures of nonfiction they would gladly recognize into the more recent history she knew they would be inclined to resist. “As with a patient, one must be gentle,” she writes in one margin note, because “otherwise, the defenses snap shut and resistance sets in.”

The reality drive is like all the psychic drives: defined not only by a primal motive, but by a simultaneous contradiction in the psyche. People work relentlessly to attain knowledge of the Real, but, unable to live entirely in the aspiration, also tend to believe they already possess such knowledge. We may laugh at poor Bede and Monmouth now, but we should remember that they did not laugh at their own efforts, nor did their contemporaries. Like doctors before empirical medicine, or the old scientists who wrote cosmologies without the aid of telescopes, they could not see the extent of their own blindness. “It is always easiest to see the symptoms in other patients,” Ehrlich reminds the reader. “You no doubt make an exception for yourself. You are sane, you are objective, you are above the stupidities of others. But the first failure of non-fiction, the one that comes before every other error, is the failure to heed the inscription at Delphi: know thyself. Be mindful, in the coming pages, to consult a mirror.”

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V.

If “Before Facts” catalogues the collective struggle to overcome a single problem, “Facts” chronicles dozens of problems. Running just shy of 600 pages, it features 897 case studies, including, to quote Dr. Marchetti’s list of what she took to be the most significant 5 percent or so,

Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexis de Tocqueville, J. S. Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Herbert Spencer, Herman Melville, Joseph Pulitzer, all newspapers, periodical journals, and encyclopedias, Diderot, Matthew Arnold, Auguste Comte, Henry Adams, Émile Durkheim, H. G. Wells, John Dewey, William James, Oswald Spengler, Margaret Mead, José Ortega y Gasset, Thorstein Veblen, Walter Lippmann, Georg Simmel, Vilfredo Pareto, the Royal Society, a variety of colonial administrations, nineteenth-century medical colleges, philosophical societies, historical societies, anthropological societies, the entire field of statistics, geographical societies, National Geographic, phrenology, prisons, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Smiles, Orison Swett Marden, James Allen, William Walker Atkinson, Charles Fillmore, Émile Coué, Alfred Adler, Joshua Liebman, the Chautauqua Movement, the YMCA, correspondence schools, etiquette books, theosophical societies, Reader’s Digest, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, the Christian Science Monitor, Le Figaro, the Deutsche Lebensreform, the Nazi party, the Fabian Society, Svenska Slöjdföreningen, the Oxford Group, Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, the Scouts, BBC Women’s Hour, Wallace Wattles, Bruce Barton, Prentice Mulford, Aleister Crowley, Alice Bailey, Manly P. Hall, P. D. Ouspensky, Max Hinder, Papua (Gérard Encausse), the Lyceum movement, the Guild of St. Matthew, Samuel Johnson, Blaise Pascal, Oscar Wilde, William James, H. L. Mencken, George Santayana, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Proust, and Mann.

Unlike their predecessors, these modern claimants to nonfiction were in possession of industrial fact-gathering capabilities. Each of them could attempt history, biography, reporting, interpersonal psychology with resources that their predecessors could scarcely imagine. In an early entry, concerning Malinowski’s accounts of Trobriand society, Ehrlich comments on the enthusiasm—and the disappointment—of the field’s explosive growth:

How extraordinary it must have seemed! Here, not only true, factual accounts of peoples that Plutarch would have to rely upon a friend’s grandfather’s merchant-relations to learn anything about at all, but accounts that seemed to reveal more universal laws of human social organization, the real heart of nonfiction’s aspirations! The anthropologists were among the first to ram against how the problem of translation—of how to render concepts from one cultural system to something intelligible within another—proved intractable. The infantile phase was over—the baby finally grown enough to get his hands around his mother’s keys!—but it was only to discover that the problem of mere facts was the most superficial the field would ever master. Like scientists who, upon discovering the cell, were horrified to find how far they still remained from the true secrets of life, or like physicists, who cowered when Einstein revealed how little Newton’s Laws had to say about the broader cosmos, the authors of the age of facts reached the top of that long-too-daunting hill to find themselves at the foot of mighty mountains.

The problems encountered by Ehrlich’s subjects remain familiar. Some were simple: the possibility of gathering facts did not mean that alleged nonfiction did not frequently contain mistakes (“Fact-checkers!” Ehrlich scoffs in a section on the New York Times, “as if this did not simply reassign the fundamental problem to somebody easier to fire!”), hidden agendas, or outright fabrications. In a particularly vicious study, Ehrlich recounts the scandal caused by “Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language”, the eighteenth-century collection of “third-century poems” by the bard “Ossian,” actually composed by the fabulist James Macpherson. “And for what?” Ehrlich writes:

Pretending to have discovered a previously unpublished work of literature. Inventing a whole phony voice for this make-believe dead Scotsman. Including commentary and claiming credit for translation! Insisting that it would revolutionize our understanding of the history of letters! All for fun? For a laugh? To make some larger point? Yes, very funny to threaten to derail one of the most serious undertakings in the history of civilization.

Other problems were deeper: empirical science, with its rigorous controls and statistical methods, flounders when results fail to replicate (“Reality should not shift so readily underfoot”). Carnap’s logical positivism “was novel—instead of nonfiction made of facts, he attempted to create facts free of nonfiction!” Speeches, books, and whole movements dedicated to the revelation of deep psychological truths and promising to allow human beings to finally understand each other failed immediately in the field, often generating “even greater fictions” than those they sought to replace. Hume and Kant, both “heirs to Laozi,” disappointed her: “Gave up,” she wrote the great empiricist. Under the inventor of the categorical imperative: “Ibid, with slightly phenomenological variations.”  Under a nearly thousand-word entry in which she meticulously describes the secrets allegedly revealed by Hiroyuki Nishigaki’s How to Good-Bye Depression, Ehrlich writes only “What?”

Taken as a whole, “Facts” paints a terrifying picture of our alleged “scientific” ages. The ground kept shifting. Solutions to one problem invariably gave rise to another. Matters of perspective, bias, language, limitation, error—reality seemed to shift, adapt, escape over and over. Definitive histories were overturned. Great scientific theories were found lacking. Even psychological insight appeared to not so much reveal the secrets of the psyche but drive them ever deeper, turning millions of healthy people into neurotics. Of the invention of the photograph and film camera, Ehrlich concludes: “Almost useless. We are like cavemen. We are tricked into believing the lens is the eye of God. When we are reminded of the photographer, we forget what’s in the picture.” Of Erwin Schrödinger, she writes, “My forebear in this effort. He proved how fiction comes first, how everything is made of fiction. How if we want the last negation, we must bring it about through our vision.”

Ehrlich believed that we had not yet invented nonfiction. But she did not believe that its invention was impossible. In an entry on Herbert Spencer, she calls the epoch contained in “Facts” the “information era.” We really did have something, she argues, and being able to see the width and breadth of the challenges before us was preferable to being blind. “The reality drive is like any other psychic force: it can inhibit, it can become disordered, but its conflicts can be resolved.” It was only that, as with any patient, the closer one came to resolution, the more challenging the work became.

In the last forty or so pages of “Facts,” Ehrlich reveals that the “many problems” of the information era were actually variations on just three problems: those of language, ideology, and cognition. The trouble was not with the facts, it was with our capacity to apprehend them, order them, express them, even think about them. The mind inevitably worked in categories; expression inevitability had to linearize, narrativize. Fictions couldn’t help but sneak in. Our “very thoughts—our process of transforming the senses, the impulses, into even the vaguest expressions whispered in the quiet of our skulls are structured by the myths, the fictions, through which we encounter the world.” Of course every effort to transform facts into nonfictional reality failed. The fault was not in our alchemy, but in ourselves: “Like a surgeon with filthy instruments and unwashed hands, we leave the operating theater each evening, wondering how our patient—who only had a little inflammation of the spleen—perished from a sudden sepsis,” she writes. But the very recognition of these fundamental problems was progress, she continues. A sign of triumphs to come.

Ehrlich’s most optimistic entries in “Facts” cite the psychoanalysts (of course, for discovering the subconscious), the Hegelians (for discovering ideology), and the poststructuralists (for discovering the incommensurable limitations of discourse). These were the most promising advances in the development of nonfiction yet achieved. “Many have misunderstood these advances,” she writes,

The stodgy partisans of simple Facts mistake these theoretical revolutions for a rejection of nonfiction, of some godless effort to abolish the possibility of reality. How far from the case! Like those visionaries some five centuries ago who realized that we could not simply take the map’s word about the reality of dragons, nor the priest’s words about the structures of the soul, these pioneers have made a frank admission of our progress. Facts alone cannot be converted into true nonfiction. No amount of stuffing, checking, guessing, testing will ever get it done. We want to see things, to see ourselves and others as we really are. We are trapped behind an opaque wall. To move forward, these men realized, we must go over, go under, go around. We have abandoned the buggy, but not the need for speed. Now, to the car! To the airplane!”

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VI.

“After Facts” charts the flight. By far the shortest section of Ehrlich’s manuscript, its cases explore the ways we tried to make nonfiction after empiricism failed. While Ehrlich continues to track any effort that called itself “nonfiction” and several that did not, she considers most efforts after 1945 or so “duplicative” or “redundant,” repetitions of the same failed fact-assemblages that had failed to constitute true nonfiction for centuries.

Instead, the bulk of “After Facts” is focused on the less straightforward means of nonfiction writing that Ehrlich believed had learned the lessons of analysis, dialectics, and deconstruction. Literature remains prominent, with particular attention paid to those writers who attempted to access interior and interpersonal nonfiction—what Ehrlich calls “the most accessible, and most deceptive avenue.” These include Frank Conroy, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Simone de Beauvoir, and Allen Ginsberg (but not Jack Kerouac).

Despite the ample literary representation, a good deal of “After Facts” is dedicated to other ways Ehrlich’s contemporaries attempted to know the Real. Case studies include Zen Buddhism, tantric sex, lucid dreaming, sensory deprivation, LSD, mescaline, Hatha Yoga, the work of the Esalen Institute, existentialism, bioenergetics, Bob Dylan, Jackson Pollock, the Kennedy assassination, the teachings of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Hare Krishna, Alan Watts, abstract expressionism (“The first time I stood before a de Kooning, I thought I felt a glimmer of the Real,” Ehrlich writes, “But I was quite drunk.”), and—in the only case study involving an interview conducted by Naomi Ehrlich herself—the great Bohemian intellectual Joe Gould. “I wanted to know about his communion with sea gulls,” Ehrlich comments, but “he kept trying to tell me about some fucking book. He spoke to birds and still—facts, facts, facts!”

In the case study of G. I. Gurdjieff, Ehrlich justifies her reach, writing once again that the reality drive is, before anything, a matter of human relations:

The desire to see things as they really are begins, of course, as a desire to see people as they really are, without illusions, without transference. The child depends upon his mother, but cannot know her. Where does she go when she leaves? Why does she return? Does she really love him? Does she possess some other motive? These questions, which precede the Oedipal phase, form the basis of the reality drive. The desire to know the truth of things, to have a nonfictional account of history, society, the cosmos—these are merely the first desires turned into abstractions. For 10,000 years we have endeavored to know each other and to know ourselves. True nonfiction is a woman who looks across the table at her husband and, for the first time, understands him perfectly as he truly is. But after such knowledge, the reality of history as it actually unfolded would be a trivial elaboration.

While Ehrlich believed these new methods remained the most promising, the final hundred pages of her manuscript take a decidedly pessimistic turn. Far from satisfying their reality drives, she decides, her contemporaries have remained muddled in their fictions—confused, blinkered, frequently betrayed by one another, self-deluded. Their failure is evident in the state of the world, more deeply mystified by language, ideology, and neuroses than ever before. This pessimism broke through in her account of Alfred Janov and his primal scream. After attending to the history of that movement and her own experiments with it, Ehrlich breaks off into a prolonged, digressive essay, one that Dr. Marchetti and several other contributors identified as perhaps the most significant portion of the whole manuscript. “The neurotic,” Ehrlich writes, “is becoming the default psychological condition of modernity. Soon, only the psychotic will appear irregular. And in a generation—who knows? What is schizophrenia, in the end, but a particularly overstimulated reality drive, working with the materials it has on hand?” She continues:

What shocks me is the speed with which civilization, having so recently made such significant breakthroughs, have begun to find them stale. Analysis has scarcely been with us forty years! The so-called “post-structuralists” proposed their insights this very decade! And yet already, they are treated as trite, tired, exhausting. ‘Yes yes, there is a necessary ambiguity between language and the world it describes,’ ‘ah, yes, we are governed by all kinds of unconscious forces that make myths of all our thoughts, ho hum’, the world says. They are annoyed! And I understand it! For thirty years, my husband, my dearest Jacob, has complained to me: ‘Naomi, you are so distant; even when you are with me, you are with your work’—and it annoys me so! But—and I must remember this, but—a cliché may be tiring, but it is also often true. Repetition does not lessen its insight.

How to make sense of these developments, the ways in which the world—suddenly in possession of several revolutionary understandings of human life itself—hurry not just to reject them, but to treat them as so many tedious caricatures, the business of intellectuals (always expelled with a sneer)? We must remember that the reality drive consists of two elements: the drive itself, and its inversion; the desire for nonfiction, and the insistence that we have already obtained it. With my training, I should not be shocked that a patient—a world—so close to breakthrough would summon its defenses with renewed fury, to resist with an ardor equal to progress of the positive drive. We are nearing the fatal possibility of regression—we are already, I think, regressing to the era of facts, perhaps even to the infantile stage that comes before it. The evidence is all on television! The insistence, violent, primeval, that we know truths, ancient truths, that anything still beyond our reach is nonsense. We are embracing all the old superstitions again, from the holy priests of Newspaper Objectivity to the juvenile myths of providential history! “The return to normalcy”—the return to infantile stupidity! In an ordinary patient, such regressions are to be expected. They add months, sometimes years to the analysis. But for the world? We may be set back decades, centuries, millennia! All in the name of masking our terror in boredom, superiority, bluster, and disdain.

Still allegedly composing an entry on the primal scream, Ehrlich continues her digression by turning to a completely unabridged clinical case study she’d prepared for a recent conference. The patient, called “Constantia C.,” presented “perhaps the most disordered individual reality drive that I had ever seen.” While most such cases presented as paranoid schizophrenia, Constantia was instead ruled by the reality drive’s dark underbelly, “the hysterical insistence that she was already in full communion with reality.” There was no better study in what society as a whole risked in the twentieth century. “Constantia C. worked as a stenographer in Nassau County Family Court, transcribing divorce proceedings and custody battles.” Ehrlich begins,

She entered treatment in January 1962, after developing what I have termed a “transcription compulsion.” She is unable to engage in conversation without recording every word, complete with timestamps and speaker identification. For this purpose, she carries a small notebook everywhere, and reports that she has filled several rooms of her home with similar records over the course of the past eighteen months.

Constantia presented upon intake as highly intelligent and articulate. Almost at once, she rejected my suggestion that perfect documentation might not capture the fullness of human interaction. “The problem isn’t that we can’t know what really happened,” she insisted during our third session, “it’s only that other people are sloppy. Irrational. They misremember, they exaggerate, they lie. But if you record exactly what was said, when it was said, then no ambiguity remains.”

Over the course of our first year together, Constantia’s symptoms escalated. She began keeping what she called “relationship verification records”, transcribing phone conversations with friends, recording the exact wording of arguments with her fiancé, and maintaining detailed logs of who said what during social gatherings. When conflicts arose, she reported producing her transcripts as evidence, reading back people’s exact words to prove their inconsistency or contradiction. Most disturbingly, she developed a habit of confronting acquaintances with transcripts of their own statements of feeling or opinion from weeks or months earlier, as if catching them in a lie when their feelings had changed. She reported that several relationships had deteriorated as a result of this behavior, including the termination of her engagement. After the establishment of the transference relationship, Constantia began to include me in these habits. She began to bring typed summaries of our previous sessions, not for reflection, but to establish “the record.” She began to correct me: “On March 15, at 3:47 p.m., you said I appeared “frightened,’’ she informed me one afternoon, “not ‘anxious.’ The distinction matters.” I prompted her to explain its importance, but she lapsed into silence for the remainder of the session.

Over eighteen months of analysis, Constantia gradually disclosed the facts of her childhood: Her parents’ marriage, she said, was stable and loving until their sudden decision to divorce when Constantia was sixteen—a narrative she defended with characteristic precision, citing specific family photographs and various holiday greeting cards as documented evidence of her parents’ happiness. However, under the influence of hypnosis, Constantia began to recall lying in bed as a child, aware of the whispered arguments emanating from her parents’ bedroom, but unable to make out the words. She recalled training her focus on other sounds—the radiator’s rhythm, the neighbor’s television, the precise tick of her alarm clock. “I became very good at not hearing,” she confessed in a particularly lucid session in early 1963, “but I suppose I became very good at hearing everything else.”

In November 1963, Constantia approached a crucial insight, bridging the obvious connection between her childhood efforts to deny the reality of her parents’ marriage and her present obsessive disposition toward “documented” facts (the connections are always so obvious when they are someone else’s madness!). However, the session ended without a full breakthrough and, because it was a Friday, we did not see one another again for three days. During that time, Constantia descended into a spectacular defensive response. She arrived at our next session with a briefcase full of materials: multiple psychology textbooks, copies of Freud’s case studies, and a typescript of her own “counter-analysis” of my interpretations. She declared my methods “theoretically unsound,” “a deviation from orthodoxy,” and a “betrayal of the science of analysis.” For several weeks, Constantia began our sessions by reading her transcript of the previous day, demanding I acknowledge any “factual errors” in her recollections before she would proceed. She brought a small tape recorder to sessions, claiming she wanted to “maintain objectivity” about what was actually said versus what we each thought was being said.

Within six weeks, Constantia developed a secondary set of symptoms to go along with her “transcription compulsion”—a “citation neurosis.” Every statement I made had to be backed by published research. “Can you provide a peer-reviewed source for that claim about childhood defense mechanisms?” she would demand. “Where exactly did Herr Freud document the connection between auditory hypervigilance and parental conflict?” she asked. “Have you even attempted to quantify patient progress? My progress? The progress of anyone that you have ever seen? Where are the charts? The data, Dr. Ehrlich? Is this medicine even evidence-based?”

The process of recovery resumed only after a particularly fraught session in July 1964. In an effort to reach her on her own terms, I provided Constantia with some notes and early drafts of my book on the reality drive. The next week, she returned it in disgust. “I refuse to surrender to this intellectual pretension,” she declared. “This fashionable despair about not ever knowing anything! Your insistence that we’re forever trapped in our discourses, our ideologies, our biases, our fictions. No! No! No! We have biases, we have blind spots, but this is precisely why we develop methods—rigorous, systemic methods—to overcome them! That’s what the scientific revolution was about? That’s what democracy was about! That’s what justice is about! You are just like my mother! She chose to live in her private world of ‘feelings’ and ‘impressions,’ her ‘loneliness’ and ‘sadness.’ She had all the evidence she needed that my father was a good man—his actions, his consistency, his devotion, the dozens and dozens of photos where they are both smiling and you cannot deny it, but she preferred her completely unverifiable “truth!” At this point, Constantia descended into uncontrollable sobs. Beginning the following day, she abandoned “the record” and the insistence on citation, resuming more or less ordinary therapy until the satisfactory resolution of her symptoms in August 1965.

With the whole of civilization, it would not be so easy. As the possibility of true non-fiction approached, so too did the insistence that we already possessed the truth we needed. Ehrlich observed that as mankind became ever-more captured by its own fantasies, it became ever-more irritable about the suggestion that reality was not already plain to see. The world’s defense mechanisms had intensified, becoming almost manic: all around her, far outnumbering the seekers, were men and women who insisted that they knew the truth, the way, that they possessed common sense and reason. Their certainty had only grown, and now it seemed that everything—the newspapers, the authors, the filmmakers, the ritual banishment of this or that convenient plagiarist or fabulist from public life, the whole symbolic apparatus of Science and Philosophy—only conspired to shore up these defenses, to allow men to be told directly of their fictions and, like a man reminded of his inevitable death, to simply wave his hand and put it out of mind. “On the first line of the first paragraph of the first page of this study,” Ehrlich laments, “I wrote that the history of all hitherto existing humanities is the history of our failure to invent nonfiction. I forgot to add: we have succeeded, beyond all reasonable expectation, in inventing more and more sophisticated technology to persuade ourselves that we have.”

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VII.

After the Constantia C. case, Ehrlich proceeds through a half-dozen further case studies, another thirty or so pages, but it is evident her heart is no longer in the history. Her prose becomes preoccupied, impatient; the book hums with anticipation of a section she could not yet write. And then, on page 987, a new heading appears:

Dr. Naomi Ehrlich, Training Analyst, (1968 AD)

But the space beneath it is blank.

What happened to Ehrlich is the subject of a long afterword, bylined by all twenty-seven contributors to the edition. Based on interviews with her surviving colleagues, letters retrieved from old acquaintances, the story they tell is as close to the truth as we are ever likely to come.

In conversations with her fellow analysts at the Long Island Institute, Ehrlich made it clear as early as 1965 that she believed the reality drive could be fully resolved. Nonfiction—true nonfiction—could be invented, and moreover, she believed that she knew how. The Reality Drive was intended as a story with a happy ending: a chronicle of several thousand years of human effort, culminating in her triumph—the last case study. At least one colleague suspected, as he recounted in a 2023 interview with Dr. Marchetti, that this was the underlying motive in all of Dr. Ehrlich’s methods: the obsession with hypnosis, with minor, abandoned elements of early Freudian practice, with mysticism, whether of Laozi or the Sufi Al-Hallaj or the kabbalic rabbi Isaac Luria. Dr. Ehrlich had long argued that the invention of psychoanalysis should not be dated to the Viennese clinics of the early 20th century, but to the mists and desert storms of the ancient Levant and Orient, writing in a particularly aggressive 1962 paper that “Freud, like all great teachers, only adapted the immortal seeds of true insight to the spirit of his age: the scientific, secular, and clinical.” That same colleague told Marchetti that he did not know just how long Dr. Ehrlich had prepared for her great work. “Perhaps it is why she entered analytic training in the first place,” he said. “She saw things, you know, as a child. In Austria, before they fled. Motives inspired during early childhood often stick when one has a particularly troubling encounter with the unmasked elements of human social reality.”

In a letter to a friend from medical school dated August 1967, Dr. Ehrlich reiterated what her colleagues already knew, and, more significantly, what she couldn’t tell them:

It is clear that there has only ever been one way to nonfiction—through the unconscious, in the hidden places before language, thought, and self-defense can interfere. The old credo of the analysts: To make the unconscious conscious. What is that but to bring Reality before our eyes? My colleagues have begun developing theories of “subjectivity”—just some new flavor of their beloved ‘consensus reality’; they can do nothing but reinvent Freud in feebler and feebler form—but this has never been the point. There is reality beyond subjectivity. Subjectivity, objectivity—neither are reality.

We know this. We have seen it. The trouble is that even for all of our advances, patients find even the briefest encounters with reality unbearable. This was to be expected: the whole reality drive and its insisting double are, like all drives, the product of an ambivalence: we do not want what we want, we cannot stand what we need, & etc. You know. This presents itself every day in my practice. No doubt yours as well. After months and months, we reach the state of true free association, of what is buried finally bubbling over into light—and the patient freezes! They go for three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, and can go no more. The psyche reasserts itself, the immune system of the ego triumphs every time. By the time I may present my interpretation, they are fully shielded against it. They reject the reality of their own minds, or make only the most superficial progress.

I must tell you—although it would get me expelled by my colleagues, they are already so suspicious of my convictions and methods and the politics of the Institute are as petty and inscrutable as ever—that I find myself more and more persuaded that the interpretations are worthless in any case. Pure nonsense, groping metaphor at best. We should not be so arrogant as to think our own discipline is anything more than another fiction, another discourse, another ideology, taping together the little scraps of fact we gather into a system to reassure ourselves that we are the experts our patients desire. Psychoanalysis discovered where reality was hidden. But we’ve only invented another little story about what we’d see there.

No, my friend: the key is in the association itself. We do not need to “interpret” the signals of reality. Interpretation, stories, structure, narrative—these have always been the way nonfiction is corrupted. The challenge is to induce association for an indefinite period. To suppress the lymphatic system of the mind, and allow reality to leak out until it is exhausted.

Ehrlich was hardly the only nonfiction theorist to reach these conclusions. A decade later, in her seminal investigations into the psychoanalytic encounter, Janet Malcolm would observe how “patients in analysis sometimes say they feel they are being driven crazy by the treatment,” how their “glimpse into the abyss of unmediated individuality and idiosyncrasy that is the Freudian unconscious” provoked this violent reaction. “The unexamined life might not be worth living,” Malcolm writes, “but the examined life is impossible to live for more than a few moments at a time.” What we now know is that by the time she reached her own name in her manuscript, Dr. Naomi Ehrlich discovered that under the right conditions, with the right techniques, moments could become hours, days, perhaps even years.

Her precise method for inducing sustained free association in a patient remains unknown. Surviving colleagues claim that she never told them. If she ever committed her technique to writing, it has not yet been discovered. What we do know is that in or around January 1968, Dr. Ehrlich sought a volunteer to become the human race’s first true author of nonfiction. At first, she thought to bestow the honor on her husband, Jacob, but he had been gone for months: she failed to notice his letter on the dining room table for so long that it had begun accumulating dust. She contemplated bringing a colleague into her confidence—who better than a trained analyst to see psychoanalysis fulfilled?—but decided the political and professional risks were too great. Finally, she settled on a former patient: Constantia C. Who better to demonstrate how radically this operation could change the human psyche? Breaking the ordinary rules about contacting former patients, Dr. Ehrlich located Constantia at her home in rural Suffolk County, where, having retired from the courthouse, she now lived with her husband and young son, operating a transcendental meditation retreat on her family’s farmland. Constantia readily agreed to participate. Dr. Ehrlich had saved her life. She had already had several mystical experiences. “This,” she reportedly said, “sounds like a real trip.”

Several weeks later, near midnight on February 7, 1968, Constantia C. lay down on the couch in Dr. Ehrlich’s office and underwent the procedure. In a private journal entry written by a ninety-one-year-old Ehrlich shortly before her death and accidentally uploaded to Facebook (where it went unnoticed for several years by her fourteen friends), she recounted what happened next:

The method proved a success. Within moments, Constantia C. began to free associate with an eagerness and totality I had never before seen. I could hardly keep up, thankful that I had set a tape recorder to document the session for posterity and my own later study. What words emerged from her! What . . . sounds. What groans and exclamations! Constantia poured out the truth as I had never heard it: the reality of who she was, the reality of who I was, the reality of everything that she had ever seen, of things she could not have seen or known. It was like a chant, a song, the whole world laid bare, without illusion, without remainder, with language bursting as its seams were torn open and its necessary distortions laid to waste, I found it all . . . tremendously boring. Like a terrible drone that seemed to pick at my brain, like the squawking of the intercom on some infernal television show, like grey sludge choking my senses, my mind—I confess! I fled the room in terror after only a few moments. I slammed the door behind me. I would study the tape later, in tolerable doses. Constantia did not appear to notice my departure. As I retreated down the hall, it sounded as if she had begun to hum some stupefying truth about her children.

I waited the whole night in the dark hallway of the Institute, far enough to be unable to make out what Constantia was saying, but close enough to wait for silence. My hands shook. My eyes, seen in the dull reflection of the nameplate on a colleague’s door, looked ancient, grey, and lost. I crouched against the wall and waited. It was not until the first light of morning began to stream through the eastern-facing window at the hallway’s end—and I had begun to worry, even panic, about the possibility that my colleagues would arrive for work at any moment—that I noticed no sound coming from my office. Was it finally over? I waited several minutes longer. I walked tentatively down the hall, at one point having to brace myself against the wall, my legs weak from a night spent in nervous activation. I realized that I had not, in all those hours, allowed myself to wonder what I would find. I had thought about my colleagues arriving. I had thought about the dust on Jacob’s letter. I had thought about the bean counters of Sumer, scratching their clay tablets, so confident that if they could only count the barley, they would know something true.

The hallway was too bright. As I reached the door, I thought I heard the sound of Constantia’s voice beginning again behind the door, but after a moment, I realized it was only the sound of blood coursing in my ears, the terrible dull buzz of my terror and exhaustion. It must have been 7:00 a.m. exactly. Back at home, across town, I imagined my alarm ringing in the empty bedroom. I looked down. The hand on the doorknob was not mine—did not look like my hand, could it be my hand?–and when I looked up, the door was open. I did not remember opening it. The light in the hallway had become unbearable. I crossed the threshold quickly and closed the door behind me before turning around.

On my couch, Constantia C. was lying perfectly still, eyes open, mouth slightly agape, face frozen. Her skin was cold. She was not breathing. She looked terribly afraid. On the table beside the couch, she had left a page torn from the little notebook she still carried with her out of habit. Much of it was covered in Constantia’s manic scrawling, but amid them, as if suspended in a halo of pristine blank space between the blots and scratches that Constantia left, a message in a hand small and neat and light that I had never seen before or since. I recognized the letters at once as ancient Greek. They said: Thou cannot see my face, my child: for no man shall see me as I truly am and live.

The tapes of these sessions have never been found. It is widely believed that Dr. Ehrlich burned them. In a hastily written follow-up letter to the same friend, postmarked the very afternoon of the failed experiment, Ehrlich made her last entry into the history of nonfiction. She did not tell her friend of what had happened. She said only that it had been “a grave mistake.”

“I have spent my whole life pursuing the reality drive,” she wrote, “but never, in all that time, have I considered that our drives—our psyches, our defenses, our fictions—are not disordered in themselves. They protect us. They make our lives possible. Not every limit must be broken. Not every contradiction needs to be resolved. Laozi knew all along: silence. My task is not to write nonfiction, but to ensure, with whatever time remains, that no one ever does.”

The next day, Dr. Ehrlich resigned her position at the Long Island Institute. In the late spring of 1968, she moved to Washington, D.C. Recently declassified documents reveal that she began work that summer at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where she was instrumental in designing the algorithmic and information exchange protocols that gave birth to the internet.

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