On one of the last occasions that she was able to leave home, my mother decided to come to a lecture I was giving on the Irish Famine, a lecture that would become the first chapter of this book. Settled at the front of the lecture hall, she asked me once again:

1. ‘What are you lecturing on?’

2. ‘On the Famine,’ I responded.

3. ‘How’s that?’ she queried. ‘You weren’t there, were you?’

4. ‘No,’ I acknowledged, ‘but I’ve read a lot about it.’

5. ‘Is that right?’ she said. ‘But then, I wasn’t there either.’

6. She hesitated.

7. ‘Or was I?’

It would be easy to dismiss that query as the quirk of an ageing person’s failing memory. But then, it seems to me now to mark a proper uncertainty, an uncertainty as to the extent to which a past we did not live still marks us, marking us through stories heard and unheard, through – perhaps above all – apprehensions and reflexes that may not even be the matter of relation or record. Before anything we have read and thought, and even before anything we may wish to acknowledge, an inarticulate stratum of attitudes and responses shapes, like an unseen geological formation, the ways we are in the world.