What you call your past is a tiny portion of your actual living, a selection of situations and events that is supposed to account for the present. One of George Orwell’s slogans in 1984 was “Who controls the present controls the past; who controls the past controls the future.”7 Beneath his cynicism (history was always being self-consciously revised in that world, you remember), Orwell is accurately noting that it is the present situation that makes a given past make sense—and that a given past suggests a particular future. Even when we set out to change the present, the past defines the
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