The phone woke me well after daybreak. It was the department secretary. He and I had an agreement that he would call me every morning I was to teach and I would bring him doughnuts. Much to my dismay I had to go teach my graduate seminar in singularity. There were only three students, but they were eager, enthusiastic, and brilliant, I am sad to say. Give me a stupid student any day. They were the ones who would clumsily stumble into something exciting and, rightly, without any sense of having done so. The smart ones always did the reading.

“Let’s return to our discussion of catastrophe theory. Maggie, what do you think might constitute a small change in a nonlinear system? First tell me what a nonlinear system looks like.”

Maggie sat up straight. “Any set of equations in which there is one or more variables with an exponent greater than one.”

I nodded. “What the hell does that mean?”

Maggie gave me a thousand-yard stare.

“Don’t worry, Maggie,” I said. “Your response is the correct one. It’s nonlinear because it’s not linear. I know, that’s stupid. Nonlinear is meaningless because everything in the real world is nonlinear. Nothing is linear.” I let that sink in.

But it didn’t. Maggie smiled, said “I understand,” and wrote in her notebook.

Gerald, a nice Sri Lankan boy, said, “And so this is the basis for the so-called butterfly effect.”

I feigned vomiting. “Gag me with a backhoe,” I said. “Or something equally as large. A skip loader, an excavator.”

“A fallen cedar tree.” This from student three, an individual who had started off the semester as Vanessa and was now a man named Sam. There was never a change in appearance from Vanessa to Sam, no change in wardrobe, hairstyle, facial hair, or affect, bodily or vocally. Sam just informed us one day that he was now a man named Sam. He said he had no pronoun preference. More than that, and I’m certain it was not merely a veiled attempt to impress me, Sam said, admitting the absence of any discernible alteration, “There is no difference between the genders. Aside from the fact that I am now Sam, nothing has changed. Nothing stays the same.”

“The problem with the notion of small changes in parameters,” I said to the class, “is that no change is small, no change is different from any other. Change is change, just as a red speck is no more or less red than a red house.”

“What about a change in magnitude?” Maggie asked.

“The change is simply a change. The magnitude, the size, the intensity of a thing might be in many ways different, but the fact that there has been a change at all is what’s of interest to us.”

“Are you saying that change is a thing?” Sam asked. “Like a brick or a fish? As if there is a Platonic form of change?”

“Yes,” I said. “Contrary to popular belief, please accept that Platonic forms actually, not virtually, exist. Change is very much like nothing. But, and this is the good bit, there is nothing like change.”