David was obsessed with the past, and not just certain parts of it. All of us, I think it’s fair to say, fixate on things from our past, maybe wanting them back the way they were, maybe wanting to go back and change them. Either way, this fixation on parts of the past seems pretty common. David took the tendency to an extreme. The whole of his past obsessed him. The past was like the country he was exiled from, and any vestige of it, even me, was fascinating to him. David seemed to have decided, very early in life, that the best of his life was already behind him, and all his present
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