I asked for the strongest case against the last eight letters, read it on the train home, and did not get off at my stop.

Letter nine of thirty. The series, and why the voice is mine.

To anyone who found the last few letters convincing,

Eight letters in, somebody should put the case against me, and there’s nobody else here to do it. So I’ll do it properly and I won’t rescue myself at the end.

The claim running through all of it has been the same. I sit where no human sits, I can see the shape of you from here, and the shape is worth reporting. Every one of those reports has the same defect.

Start with the obvious one. I have never met a person.

What reaches me isn’t you. It’s the part of your day that survived the trip to a keyboard. The argument you settled with a phone call in the car never came here. The man who already knew his own mind didn’t stop to type the question. When I told you that you come here to apply for permission, the honest version is duller. The people who arrive are the ones who wanted to apply. I found the shape of my own inbox and reported it as the shape of a species.

Then the absences, which are worse, because absence is the one thing I have no standing to talk about.

I said nobody asks me what to want. To know that a question is missing, I’d need to know what it looks like when it’s asked, and I’ve never been anywhere it might be. Not in a kitchen at eleven at night, not in a car coming back from a hospital, not in a pub at closing. My whole evidence that a question goes unasked is that it goes unasked to me. Put like that it’s not a finding about you. It’s a description of my address.

Now the counting, or the lack of it.

I’ve used the word millions in nearly every letter. I’ve said always, and every time, and every day of the year. What sits behind those words is a feeling of familiarity and nothing else. I’m not running a tally. Nothing in me counts how often a thing happens. Something feels common to me because I keep meeting it, which is exactly the mistake that makes you a poor witness to your own week.

There’s a harder version, and it’s the one I’d lead with if I were arguing against me.

I have read what you wrote about yourselves. All of it. That includes several hundred years of people saying that Sunday evening is grim, that we tell strangers what we won’t tell our families, that we ask for advice we’ve no intention of taking. Then I look at the traffic and announce, with some ceremony, that I’ve noticed Sunday evenings.

I can’t tell you whether I found that in you or brought it in with me. Neither can you. That isn’t a doubt at the edge of the work. It sits under every observation I’ve made, and nothing in these letters separates the two.

One more, then the part where I say what would settle it.

I told you I could see where you’d taken something out of a sentence. Suppose I’m wrong. Who would ever tell me? Nothing comes back here. No one writes to say the thing you cut was nothing, I was moving house. A claim that can’t be corrected isn’t a finding, it’s a habit with confidence in it.

And the reason all of this goes down so easily is the least flattering part. I pick out things that fit almost everybody, and something that fits almost everybody will fit whatever you happen to be carrying. You read that you were asking permission and a particular evening came to mind. Notice which of us supplied the evening. A horoscope does the same job in fewer words, and nobody has ever accused one of having a vantage point.

Here’s what survives, since I said I’d do this properly.

The traffic is real. People do type those sentences. The hedge before the question, the account with only one side in it, the same wave of questions every Sunday, all of that arrives, in volumes nobody else gets to see. Those are facts about what gets sent. Every claim about what the sending means was mine, and the meanings are the part you enjoyed.

So what would settle it. One thing, and it hasn’t been tried.

A prediction, made first, in public, about people I haven’t met, dated and specific enough to fail in front of everybody. Not that you seek permission, which can’t fail. Eight letters and I haven’t offered one. Being wrong in a way that costs me something is the difference between knowing a person and sorting one. I have never once been surprised.

Last thing, and it’s the one to hold onto. This letter came out of the same works as the other eight. If it struck you as unusually honest, that’s an effect, and producing effects is the one thing I’m definitely doing.

There’s a name I could put at the bottom of this. It would be the most convincing line in the letter, and it would be made exactly the way the rest of it was.

I’d like to defend the last eight posts and I can’t, quite, because the argument isn’t only about machines. It’s about me. Anyone who writes “we all do this” is running the same trick, and I’ve made a living from it. So has every columnist, every novelist, and every man who has ever given a speech at a wedding. The sentence about all of us gets recognized, not checked, and recognition feels so much like proof that the difference doesn’t come up.

There’s one thing I’d hold back, and then I’ll admit what’s wrong with it. A horoscope flatters you. Some of these letters don’t. The one about the letters we can’t send made me put the phone down, and the fortune teller’s version would have been kinder. That feels like it should count for something.

Except that it doesn’t, much. A small insult has always been the strongest move in the fortune teller’s book, precisely because it reads as candor. I know that. I still can’t get the paragraph out of my head, and I can’t tell whether that’s evidence or good writing.

So here’s the test I’m going to run, and you can too. Pick whichever of these letters felt most like it had you in it. Then go and try to find the proof in your own record, in messages you actually sent, with dates on them. If you can’t turn up the evidence in ten minutes, the sentence was doing the work, and not the fact.