How Many Javas
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A faithful counter of QSD’s coffee consumption since Feb 2, 2021.
I. The Drift
What we call the self is but a scattering of moments, most of which dissolve quietly across time.
The mind does not retrieve the past. It reassembles it. Every act of remembering is a construction shaped by the recollector. That self has already moved on from the moment it attempts to recall.
Consider what the self consists of: there is the experiential self, immediate consciousness, the present moment as it is lived. There is the narrative self, the story we tell about who we are, stitched from selective memory into something that resembles coherence. And there is the historical self, what actually occurred, independent of how it has since been interpreted. Of these three, only the last is beyond direct recovery — by memory, or by anything kept in its name. Memory sustains the narrative self. In doing so, it distorts the historical one.
: Times change, and we change with them.
The witness and the testimony are the same entity, and both are in motion.
The self grounded solely in its own recollections is continuously re-authored by the very instrument supposed to preserve it. The narrative self tells its story and calls that story an identity. But the story is revised at every retelling, bent toward the shape that fits what we have since become. What would resist this has to predate the self that does the revising. If the self is nothing more than what it remembers, and what it remembers is always a reconstruction, then what is being preserved? And what is being quietly replaced?
II. The Trace
We know this kind of arriving: a scent encountered in an unfamiliar corridor, a handwriting recognised before the name registers. These are involuntary summoners, proof that the self has sediment. But they are unreliable, arrived unbidden and dissolved just as quickly, carrying no more than an impression.
Something more resistant is possible. Not memory, which reconstructs. Not sensation, which is transient. But the physical trace: the letter, the diary page, the handcraft gift — the debris of having once been somewhere, with someone, as a particular self — The Archive.
The archive here means nothing institutional. It’s something much smaller, a record made in the moment, before retrospect had the chance to revise it. Its defining characteristic is not what it contains, but what it resists. Unlike memory, ink does not bend to present needs; it holds the shape of what was actually written. Its evidential status is not that it tells us what occurred, but that it resists the one distortion memory cannot — the unconscious revision no one chose to make.
: Spoken words fly away; written ones remain.
Where memory is interpretive and mutable, the archive is fixed and evidential. It does not explain, contextualise, or justify. It persists, and in persisting, resists the erasure of what was there, indifferent to how it has since been remembered, reinterpreted, or quietly revised away.
III. The Estrangement
The archive makes a quiet promise: that what was fixed in the moment survives the moment. It keeps that promise, and in keeping it, reveals the cost.
The first difficulty is temporal. The archive is fixed; our self is not. Open a letter written ten years ago and the person who wrote it is still there. But the self reading it has moved on. The archived self does not grow with you. It remains exactly where it was, holding its original convictions, its uncorrected errors, its feelings not yet placed in amber.
This is not malfunction. It is the archive doing what it does. The archived self does not greet you. It simply remains. The encounter is not reunion. It is estrangement across time from someone who shares your name.
But temporal estrangement is the lesser paradox. The deeper one was named by Calvino: Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. The twilight, once photographed, is no longer the experience itself. It becomes an object that displaces what it sought to preserve. The diary entry did not preserve the feeling. It is what remains when the feeling recedes. At the moment of inscription, the living thing became evidence, and the thing itself is no more.
To archive, then, is already to have betrayed what you were archiving. Not through carelessness. Not through imprecision. Structurally, inevitably, in the very act.
Memory distorts through reconstruction; the archive through fixation. Both fail the self — differently, and without consolation.
To preserve is not to possess. To remember is not to remain. And to archive is not to keep — but to arrest. The question is not whether to mourn this. It is why, knowing all of it, one still reaches for the pen.
IV. The Witness
The previous failures were not accidents. They were clarifications. The archive was never going to preserve the self — the self was already changing before the ink was dry. What the paradox named was a mismatch between what we asked of the archive and what it is actually capable of giving.
A self without archives would not be freer. It would be more alone with its own reconstructions. The narrative self, unopposed, revises the past continuously: smoothing inconsistencies, reordering the sequence of events, quietly adjusting who said what and who felt what and why. The archive exerts gravity on this — not enough to fix the past in place, but enough that certain departures require effort. The self can revise; it cannot do so weightlessly. The mechanism is not prevention, but visibility. To revise against a fixed inscription is to leave a traceable gap between what was recorded and what is now being claimed. That gap does not prevent revision, but it makes revision audible.
This is what gravity means: not that the past cannot be reshaped, but that reshaping it in the archive’s presence cannot be done silently. Silent revision is the narrative self’s primary instrument: it adjusts the past until the adjustment itself leaves no trace. The archive disrupts this specific power — not revision, but quiet revision. Whatever the self now claims about the past, the inscription remains as the record of what it once knew. The revision is possible; the silence is not.
This resistance compounds. The archive is rarely a single inscription — it is a body of them, each sealed to its own moment, each made before the revisionist narrative that would now absorb them. A single “I love you” can be reinterpreted; a year of letters and diaries is harder to rewrite silently. To dismiss one year of evidence as delusion requires constructing a coherent counter-narrative against a constellation of witnesses. That construction is not impossible. But it is no longer a drift. It becomes a project. And projects, unlike drifts, leave traces of their own.
What the archive can offer is narrower than we had hoped, and more honest than we have admitted. It cannot preserve experience — Calvino closed that door. It cannot preserve identity — the self outgrows every fixed relics. What it can preserve is narrower: not occurrence itself, but resistance to the erasure of occurrence. Not who you were, but that something registered, enough at the time to be recorded. Not the weight of the feeling, but evidence that the feeling had weight.
Hoc fuit. This was. A minimal claim, and a relative one. It carries no interpretation, no judgement, no demand for continuity. It does not prove that the thing happened; it resists the thing being erased as though it did not. Memory can dissolve the very fact of occurrence; the archive outlasts that particular dissolution.
What Hoc fuit secures is more precise than “an event occurred.” It secures this: at that moment, something registered as significant enough to record. That registration is real, whether or not the record is innocent, whether or not the inscription was shaped by an imagined gaze. A performance is still an act, and an act still occurs. However, its terms are sealed to that moment — they cannot silently absorb the revisions a later self would make of them.
The archive’s claim does not rest on its innocence — that has already been surrendered. It rests on its date. What was written then could not yet know what came after: how the feeling resolved, what the person became, what the moment was later made to mean. Memory always reconstructs from the present; the inscription is sealed to its own moment. That seal is not proof. But it is the difference between a witness and a retrospective account.
The distinction is between identity-preservation and existence-preservation. We yearn the archive to present our former, stable self, recoverable across time. The archive cannot give this. What it offers instead is the evidence that something existed, resistant to retrospective erasure, indifferent to the story we have since constructed around it. This is not the same thing. But it is not nothing. And it may be the only form of honesty the past can hold.
V. The Monument
Hoc fuit is the philosophical answer. It is not the human one.
Sentimentality offers one answer: we archive because we are attached to the past, because we cannot let go. Nostalgia offers another: we archive to keep accessible a version of ourselves we preferred. Both are real. Neither is sufficient. Attachment does not explain the act; it only describes the feeling. And nostalgia is precisely the pathology the archive is meant to resist — the softening of what was into what we wish had been.
The archive introduces a counterweight to the narrative self’s project. It’s not perfect, not total, but real. That project is, at bottom, the desire for a coherent history: flattening ambiguity, folding the contradictions into something it can live inside. To maintain certain fictions in the presence of the archive, one must work against it. That work is not nothing.
But this answer has a limit. The archive is not innocent. It is selective, shaped by what was chosen to preserve, what was allowed to vanish, and what the medium made possible to record at all. The decision of what enters the archive is already an act of interpretation. The archive resists certain revisions while silently enabling others.
The more unsettling failure runs deeper. The archive is not assembled outside of observation — it is made under a gaze, even when that gaze belongs only to a future version of the self. The diary entry, the letter: none of these are spontaneous. They are produced knowing that they will be read. Self-fashioning enters at the moment of inscription, not only in retrospection. What is fixed is already a performance, shaped by what the writer requires the archive to record, rather than by what the moment actually contained. The archive resists unconscious retrospective revision. It does not resist conscious prospective construction. It fails memory’s test of objectivity — but earlier, and more deliberately: not in retrieval, but in origination.
And yet this does not dissolve the archive’s constraining function — it clarifies it. A construction sealed to its moment retains one form of independence that later narrative cannot annul: it was made before the revisions that would now reshape it. Whatever was performed into the archive then could not have known what the self would later require of it. That is the source of constraint — not the purity of the record, but its temporal anteriority. The archive does not constrain because it is innocent. It constrains because it is prior.
The critique holds. And yet the choice to archive survives it. Not by refuting it, but by standing beside it.
The deeper answer is not epistemic but existential. I do not archive to understand myself. The archive is too compromised for that too selective, too performed, too shaped by the gaze I imagined looking back. I archive because the alternative is to let what was dissolve entirely into what is now convenient to remember. Choosing a partial record over no record is not naivety. It is the only available honesty. The archive is not preservation. It is construction, made with a flawed instrument, by a self that knew its flaws, and continued anyway. Not because the record is clean. Because the refusal was real.
A fragment of what was, staked against obliteration. The monument does not need to survive. The act of making it is the argument.
The opposite of dissolution is not permanence. It is engagement. To archive is to refuse the passivity of letting the past become infinitely malleable. It is a small act, imperfect, and inevitably partial, against the entropy that would reduce everything to a narrative shaped by who we have since become.
VI. The Remnant
: Time, devourer of all things.
The archive is not a victory over time. Tempus edax rerum — the archive included. The polaroid yellows, the ink fades. Even the most carefully preserved record will eventually cease to be legible to anyone. The monument is temporary. This was always the condition. What the archive achieves is not permanence but postponement. It is a negotiation with time, one that time will win.
This argument does not protect us from what it describes.
The archive gives me fear. Not the dramatic kind, not the fear of being judged, but something closer to vertigo: the fear of opening something from a former self and finding he was right about things I have since abandoned, or wrong about things I still believe. The archive does not flatter. It simply waits.
The archive gives me sorrow. Not the warm kind. The forensic kind — the kind that arrives after the analysis, after the Calvino problem has been named and accepted. What was fixed in the moment is already gone; what remains is its replacement. I know this. I archive anyway. That is the part I cannot fully explain.
It gives me also confidence — of a strange and provisional sort. Not confidence that what I have made will last, or that anyone will read it with the precision it was built for. Confidence that the act was made at all. That something was here, resisting dissolution, asserting against erasure that it occurred. The monument does not need to survive the builder. It is not the confidence of my legacy, but the confidence of having been present. I have insisted that something here was worth the resistance.
And doubt. Whether this compulsion is conviction or simply the inability to let go. Whether Hoc fuit is a philosophical position or a consolation dressed in Latin to feel less like grief. Time does not negotiate. It simply continues, and takes with it everything I was trying to capture.
And yet I come back. To seek, and to document.
What I find, in returning, is not comfort. It is the kind of truth memory alone would fade: bare, indifferent, fixed to the moment rather than to its meaning.
Not “this defined me.” Not “this was who I was.” Simply this was. And I have made my peace with the smallness of that claim. The relic does not speak; it persists. Tangible relics of the past bear a truth where memory alone tarnishes — not because they are more vivid, but because they are evidential where memory is narrative. It is not the whole truth. But it is the part that does not require the self’s permission.
This frightens me and steadies me in equal measure, and I have stopped trying to resolve the contradiction. A person’s archive is not a record of what happened to them. It is a record of what they refused to let dissolve. That refusal — its shape, its selections, its silences — is the closest thing to a self-portrait that honest autobiography can produce.
I. 漂移
我们所谓的自我，不过是由无数瞬间散落而成，其中大多数已在时间中悄然消散。
心灵并不会还原过去，它只是将其重新拼装。每一次记忆，都是由记忆者所塑造的一次构造。而那个试图回忆的自我，早已离开了它所回望的那一刻。
细究一下“自我”的构成：有「经验自我」——当下的意识，此刻被活过的瞬间；有「叙事自我」——我们讲述自身的故事，由选择性的记忆缝合而成，勉强呈现出某种连贯；以及「历史自我」——拥有真正发生过的事，不依赖于后来如何被解释。在这三者之中，唯有最后者，既无法被记忆直接取回，也无法由任何以其名义保存之物所复原。记忆维系着叙事自我，也正是在此过程中，它扭曲了历史自我。
: 时代更迭，而我们亦随之而变。
见证者与证词本为同一实体，而二者皆在流动之中。
一个仅以自身回忆为根基的自我，会被那本应保存它的机制不断重写。叙事自我讲述自身，并将这一讲述称为身份。但这个故事在每一次复述中都被修改，被弯折为适应此后之我的形状。若有一种力量能够抵抗这一过程，它必须先于那个正在修订的自我而存在。如果自我仅仅被界定为其所记之物，而记忆始终是一种重构，那么，究竟有什么能被保留下来？又有什么，在不动声色之间，被悄然改写？
II. 痕迹
我们都熟悉这种“抵达”的方式：在陌生走廊中忽然遇见的一段气味，在名字尚未浮现前便已被辨认出的笔迹。这些都是非自愿的「唤起者」，表明自我具有某种沉积。然而它们并不可靠——不经召唤而来，迅速消散，所携带的也不过是一种印象。
某种更具抵抗性的存在是可能的。不是记忆——它会重构；不是感官——它转瞬即逝；而是物质性的痕迹：信件、日记页、手工制作的礼物，那些曾经在某处、与某人、以某种特定自我存在过的残余——即档案。
此处所说的“档案”，并非制度性的机构，而是更为微小之物：在当下被记录之物，在回顾尚未介入之前完成。它的决定性特征，不在于其所包含的内容，而在于其所抵抗的扭曲。不同于记忆，墨迹不会屈从于当下的需要；它保留着当时实际被写下的形式。其证据性并不在于它能够说明发生了什么，而在于它抵抗了一种记忆无法抵抗的扭曲——那种无人选择、却持续发生的无意识改写。
: 言语消散，书写留存。
记忆是解释性的、可变的，档案则是固定的，并因此具有证据性。它不解释，不提供语境，不进行辩护。它只是持续存在；并在这种持续之中，抵抗那种将「曾经存在之物」抹除的过程，对后来如何被记忆、再解释或悄然修订，皆保持冷漠。
III. 异在
档案作出一个安静的承诺：固定于当下之物将会存续。它兑现了这一承诺，也正是在兑现之中，档案的代价开始显露。
第一个困难是时间性的。档案是固定的，自我并非如此。打开一封十年前的信，当时的作者仍然藏在字里行间，但阅读它的自我已经改变。被存档的自我不会随你一同变化。它停留在原处，保留着当时的信念、未经修正的错误，以及尚未被封存的情感。
这并非失效，而是档案按其本性运作。被存档的自我不会迎向你，它只是停留在那里。这种相遇并非重逢，而是与一个与自己同名之人的时间性异在。
但时间性的异在只是较浅的悖论。更深的一层正如卡尔维诺指出：记忆的映像，一旦被固定为文字，便被抹除。黄昏，一旦被拍摄，便不再是作为「完整体验」的黄昏；它成为一个对象，占据了原本欲被保存之物的位置。日记并未保存那种情感，它只是当情感退去之后所留下之物。在书写的那一刻，活着的体验转化为证据，而体验本身已不复存在。
因此，存档本身已经是一种对所存档之物的背离。这种背离不是由于粗心，不是由于不精确，而是结构性的、不可避免的，并发生于这一行为之中。
记忆通过重构而扭曲，档案通过固定而扭曲。两者都无法保存自我——只是方式不同，且无可安慰。
保存，并不意味着拥有。记忆，并不意味着延续。而存档，并不意味着留存，而是使其凝止。问题不在于我们是否应该为此哀悼，而在于：既然明知如此，人为何仍会提笔？
IV. 见证
先前的失败并非偶然，它们是澄清。档案从未能够保存自我——在墨迹干涸之前，自我已然发生变化。悖论所指出的，是我们对档案的期待与其实际能力之间的错位。
一个没有档案的自我，并不会更自由。它只会更孤立地面对自身的重构。叙事自我在无约束之下，会持续修订过去：抹平不一致，重排事件的先后，悄然调整谁说了什么、谁感受了什么，以及其理由。档案对这一过程施加一种「重力」——不足以将过去固定在原处，却足以使某些偏离变得费力。自我可以修订，但无法无阻地修订。其机制并非阻止，而是显现。在既有记录之上进行修订，必然在「曾被记录之物」与「此刻被主张之物」之间留下一个可被追溯的间隙。这个间隙并不阻止修订，但使修订变得可被察觉。
这正是此处重力的含义：并非过去无法被重塑，而是当档案在场时，对其重塑无法以无痕的方式进行。无痕修订，是叙事自我的主要手段——它调整过去，使这种调整本身不留下任何痕迹。档案所打断的正是这一种能力——不是修订本身，而是无痕的修订。无论自我此刻如何主张过去，既有的书写仍然作为其当时所知的记录而存在。修订可以发生，但沉默地修订不再可能。
这种抵抗具有累积性。档案很少只是单一记录，它通常由一系列记录构成。每一条都封存于其各自的时刻，每一条都产生于后来将试图吸纳它的修订性叙事之前。一句「我爱你」可以被重新解释；但一整年的书信与日记，则更难以在无痕中被改写。要将一整年的证据视为错觉，就必须构造出一个能够与之对抗的连贯反叙事。这种构造并非不可能，但它已不再是漂移，而成为一种工程。而工程，与漂移不同，会留下其自身的痕迹。
档案所能提供的，比我们曾期望的更为狭窄，却也更为诚实。它不能保存体验——卡尔维诺已关闭这条路径；它不能保存身份——自我总会超出任何被固定的遗物。它所能保存的更为有限：不是事件本身，而是对事件被抹除的抵抗。不是“你是谁”，而是“曾经有什么被记录”。不是情感的重量，而是情感曾经具有重量的证据。
Hoc fuit. 此曾在。一个极小的主张，且是相对的。它不提供解释，不作判断，也不要求连续性。它并不证明某事确实发生；它所抵抗的，是将其抹除为仿佛从未发生。记忆可以消解“曾经发生”这一事实本身；而档案得以超出这种特定的消解。
Hoc fuit 所确保的，比“某一事件发生过”更为精确。它所确保的是，在那个时刻，某种事物被判定为具有足够的重要性，从而被记录下来。这一「被记录」本身是真实的，无论该记录是否无偏，无论该书写是否受某种被想象的目光所塑造。表演仍然是一种行动，而行动依然发生。然而，它的表达条件被封存于当时——它们无法在无痕中吸纳一个后来之我所施加的修订。
档案的主张并不建立在其“纯粹性”之上——这一点早已被放弃。它建立在其时间性之上。彼时所写之物，并不可能预知其后的发展：情感如何收束，人将成为什么样的存在，那一刻后来被赋予何种意义。记忆总是从当下出发进行重构；而书写，则封存于其自身的时刻。这种封存并非证明，但它构成了见证与回溯性叙述之间的差异。
这里的区分，在于身份的保存与存在的保存。我们曾期望档案给予前者——一个可跨越时间被取回的稳定自我。但档案无法提供这一点。它所能提供的，是后者：某物曾经存在的证据，对回溯性抹除的抵抗，对后来叙事的冷漠。这并不等同，但也并非虚无。或许，这是过去所能承载的唯一一种诚实形式。
V. 纪念碑
Hoc fuit 是一个哲学上的答案，却不是一个人的答案。
感伤提供一种解释：我们存档是因为依恋过去，因为无法放手。怀旧提供了另一种思路：我们存档，是为了保留一个我们更偏爱的自我版本。这两种解释都真实，但都不足。依恋并不能解释这一行为，它只描述了一种情感；而怀旧，正是档案所要抵抗的病症——将“曾经如此”柔化为“本该如此”。
档案为叙事自我的工程引入一种对抗力量。它并不完美，也不全面，但它真实存在。这个工程，本质上是对连贯历史的渴望：抹平歧义，将矛盾折叠为某种可以栖居其中的结构。在档案在场的情况下维持某些虚构，必须付出对抗它的努力。而这种努力，本身并非无物。
但这一解释也有其界限。档案并不纯粹。它具有选择性：由被保留之物、被放弃之物，以及媒介所允许被记录之物共同塑造。何物进入档案，本身已经是一种解释行为。档案抵抗某些修订，同时也在无声中促成另一些。
更令人不安的失败在更深处。档案并非在无人观察之中被生成——它总是在某种目光之下形成，即便那目光仅属于未来的自我。日记、信件——无一是完全自发的。它们是在“将被阅读”这一前提之下被写下。自我塑形，从书写之时即已介入，而不仅仅是在回顾之中。被固定之物，从一开始便带有表演性——它被塑造成写作者希望档案记录的样子，而非当下本身的全部内容。档案能够抵抗无意识的回溯性改写，却无法抵抗有意识的前瞻性构造。它未通过记忆所要求的客观性检验——但失败发生得更早，也更自觉：不在回溯，而在起始。
然而，这并不消解档案的约束功能——反而使之更为清晰。一个被封存于其自身时刻的构造，保留着一种后来叙事无法取消的独立性：它发生于那些后来将试图重塑它的修订之前。彼时被写入档案之物，并不可能预知后来之我会对其提出何种要求。约束正源于此——不是记录的纯粹性，而是其时间上的先在性。档案之所以构成约束，并非因为它无偏，而是因为它在先。
这一批评成立。然而，存档的选择仍然存续。它并非通过反驳得以维持，而是与批评并置而立。 更深层的答案并不属于认识论，而属于存在论。我并非为了理解自己而存档。档案对此过于受限：过于选择性，过于表演性，也过于受制于我所想象的目光。我之所以存档，是因为另一种可能更不可接受——让曾经之物完全溶解为当下的便利记忆。在“部分记录”与“无记录”之间做出选择，并非天真，而是唯一可行的诚实。档案不是保存，而是一种建构：由一个明知其工具不完美的自我所完成，并仍然继续。不是因为记录是纯净的，而是因为这种拒绝是真实的。
一段曾在之物的碎片，对抗湮灭而立。纪念物无需长存。建造它的行为，本身即为论证。 消解的对立面，并非永恒，而是参与。存档，是拒绝让过去无限可塑的消极状态——一种微小的、不完美的、且不可避免地片段化的行动，对抗那种将一切还原为“后来之我”叙述的熵。
VI. 残余
: 时间，万物的吞噬者。
档案并非对时间的胜利。Tempus edax rerum ——包括档案本身。拍立得会泛黄，墨迹会褪色。即便是最精心保存的记录，终将对任何人都不再可读。纪念物是暂时的。这从一开始便是其条件。档案所达成的，并非永恒，而是延迟。它是一种与时间的协商，而这场协商，时间终将取胜。
这一论证，并不能使我们免于其所描述之物。
档案带给我恐惧。不是戏剧性的那种，也不是被评判的恐惧，而更接近一种眩晕：当我打开某个旧物，发现那个过往的自我，曾在我后来放弃之事上是正确的，或在我仍然坚持之事上是错误的。档案不取悦。它只是等待。
档案带给我悲伤。不是温热的那种，而是近乎解剖式的——在分析之后，在卡尔维诺问题被命名并被接受之后才出现的那种。被固定于当下之物，已经消逝；留下的，是其替代之物。我知道这一点。我仍然存档。这是我无法完全解释的部分。
它也给予我某种信心——一种奇特而暂时的信心。并非对其持久性的信心，也并非对其被阅读的信心，而是对这一行为本身曾经发生的信心。某物曾在此，对抗消解，对抗抹除，主张其发生。纪念物无需存续于建造者之后。这不是关于遗产的信心，而是关于“我曾在场”的信心。我曾坚持认为，此处有某物值得这种抵抗。
还有怀疑。这个冲动究竟源于信念，还是仅仅源于无法放手？Hoc fuit 究竟是一种哲学立场，还是一层被拉丁文包裹以显得不那么像悲伤的安慰？时间并不协商。它只是继续，并带走我试图捕捉的一切。
而我仍然回来。去寻找，去记录。
在这样的回返之中，我所获得的，并非安慰，而是一种仅凭记忆必将消散的真相：它裸露、冷静。它所固定的是所发生的瞬间，而非其意义。
不是“这定义了我”。不是“这就是我”。只是：此曾在。而我已与这一主张的微小达成和解。遗物并不言说；它持续。过去的有形遗物承载一种真相，而记忆则使之失真——并非因为它们更生动，而是因为它们具有证据性，而记忆只是叙述。这并非全部的真相，但它是不需要自我许可的那一部分。
这既使我不安，也使我安定，而我已不再试图调和这一矛盾。一个人的档案并不是其经历的记录，而是其拒绝让其消散之物的记录。这种拒绝——其形状、其选择、其沉默——或许就是诚实自传最接近的自我肖像。
In the echo of all unwritten words,
QSD, QSB, and the once beloved QXD
April 1, 2026
A Random Word
Weltschmerz
The disillusionment people feel from realizing that the world keeps falling short of their expectations.