Photographs don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of
time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn’t even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.
But perhaps revelation often comes when you’re not looking for it, resolution when you don’t realize you need it.
In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.
History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.