“The brief flare of illumination,” Wolkowski was explaining, “arises when images of one’s own time are struck like a match against the time of an earlier era.

“The past is the shape of the world into which I was born,” says Heinrich. “Benji is saying that our lives become the shape of the past’s fulfillment.” And here her fine husband makes a big circle with his two lovely hands. “Our lives are the redemption of the past, in other words. And future generations will come of age in the shape we have left

“Nothing is more persuasive than the beliefs of others,” Wolkowski was saying. “And that is a great misfortune for society as a whole. Groups are the creators and arbiters of beliefs, and a person standing alone is a fragile creature, barely credible.”

Love, he tells me, like devotion, leaves everything unfinished.

When so much was at stake, individual problems must not become the whole matter. Was this possible? To look away from her personal fate and try to see the entirety? Or else how could she live without shame, that humiliation in which a person cannot face themselves?

The collapse of the empire is the only justice available to the downtrodden and those with nothing.

She said that every person is housed in the word “I” and in the word “you.” Every single person no matter where they lived or when or how. If you forget everything else, Lina, remember what these words hold.

“A person is not what they know,” he said. “A person is what they yearn for. Eternity has no longings. But for finite things, mortal creatures, longing is their very nature. Therefore desire is the inescapable essence of a human being.”

“What am I,” he said, “other than the things I know?”