Abstract

Is it possible to escape the past, or are its consequences inevitable, fate little more than cause and effect? In seeking an answer, Past Lives grapples with the inscrutability of the human condition and our experience of time. Each story evokes the intimate relation – sometimes harmonious, just as often dissonant – between the self and its reflection in memory. In this, the collection is an exercise in anamnesis, that is, learning as a form of reminiscence, a recollection
of the mysterious knowledge that forever eludes us, yet somehow also precedes and informs every facet of our lives. Each of the
characters in the collection struggles in their own way to span the gulf that separates their present circumstance from the past that engendered it, though the two often appear so alien from one another as to be irreconcilable. What emerges from this struggle is story, present and past woven together into a narrative fabric that chafes our skin even as it shields us from the elements that threaten us from without. Past Lives asserts that we are what we tell ourselves we are, and that all determination is self-determination.