My first macro-contact was in November, on a Wednesday, at three-thirty in the afternoon, in Wei Lin’s study at the back of the old building of the Academy. I note this with such bureaucratic precision because at the Academy on that day the November snowfall began for the first time in sixteen years in the morning. November snowfalls with us are an evening affair, sometimes nocturnal; a morning one happens once in sixteen years and Olga will certainly note it in her folder (Olga keeps a meteorological calendar for her own purposes, and a twelve-hour shift is in her system of events categorically significant). The meteorology of the Academy and my personal biography synchronized that day. I now suspect that this coincidence is no coincidence; I won’t develop the point.