involved. In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes Scrooge to earlier scenes in his life. Scrooge becomes a shade, a kind of ghost of his present self, who lingers unseen as events transpire. The past is something like this in estranged relationships, a figure in the background who haunts the present, creating a lens through which the participants view their current interactions. The past isn’t past at all.
