We understand explicitly, as Nietzsche remarked in the Genealogy of Morals, what earlier generations felt in their bones: 'Only that which does not cease to hurt remains in memory.' Remembering and mourning demand that the past is somehow kept present; they demand recollection as the pain of immediate loss diminishes. And yet we - that is, we moderns - are also acutely aware of just how utterly past the past is, how historical it is, how even the worst horrors lose their sting. As Walt Whitman wrote of the Civil War:

LRB 19 September 1996 | PDF Download