Time Travel

Here they are again, the people whom I have never known, and whom I cannot imagine. here they are again, waves of loss, beating against the mind's shore. Loss of what I did not know. The past ambushing me again with its metaphysics of absence. I strain to make the brothers more real, to give loss a context. But there are limits to what the imagination can do....

One cannot undo the past, redo it, heal it, cure it. And yet I am consoled by this near touching, this near meeting of parallel lines that, after all these years, seem to be bending towards each other.

Eva Hoffman, After such Knowledge