“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

It must be, he thought, that the way we treat things, people, animals and even ourselves, is in accordance with our beliefs about them. What we do is a mirror of the ultimate unvarnished beliefs we hold. Was belief so fundamental, so powerful? If so, he mustn’t let his thoughts rush by, automatic and unnoticed. He must attend to all that gives rise

“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.”

Would I prefer to be remembered wrongly, I wondered, if it meant that some trace of my life would persist, a barnacle on a raft, into the future? Would everyone want the same?

“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.

Could a person and the memory of that person diverge so far that recollection itself became a kind of betrayal?

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

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

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