“The longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves” (Meagan Adler)

After reaching the end of our complex reflection with Tony as he recalls his past and tries to construct a version of his history, written by the “self-delusions of the defeated” (pg.133),  we emotionally struggle as we experience the malleability of the past and painfully realize that “the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.  Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves” (pg.104).  As we see the change in Tony’s perspective of his past with Veronica we are able to understand the subjectivity of his history as he transitions from seeing her as “someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you” (pg.105) to remorsefully seeing her as a victim of a cunning and manipulative action.  It is through time’s malleability and indefinite structure that makes our supposedly objective pasts rather subjective;  as Tony expresses, “We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history- even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?” (pg.66).  As time progresses it begins to redefine our pasts, for “give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical” (pg.103).   Overall, the more we know the more we realize we do not know and regardless of the size of the “holding pen, whose boundaries” at first might be “undiscernable” (pg.10), there is always a further question to the meaning of our lives and our illogical pasts.  History is not a factual subject but rather is “that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (pg.18).  As time passes and we come to the painful realization that there is no sense of an ending because there are not answers in an infinite and indefinite universe.  As Tony reflects, “There is accumulation.  There is responsibility.  And beyond these, there is unrest.  There is great unrest” (pg.163).  As he begins to see with clarity the beyond “squalidly mediocre action” (pg.50) that Adrian cowardly committed in order to avoid his troubled life, the more Tony realizes he did not know.  For as he expresses, “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed” (pg.3).