If you trace the course of your life back far enough you begin to see how nothing has ever left you, every encounter you have ever had, every place you have ever been, all the lovely moments and terrible time taken together, leaving a residual, coloring and contouring every facet of who you are just as you are. There is a faithfulness to history. Even the events you do not remember have a way of remembering you, their influence echoing still, effecting and affecting your body and being, doing and thinking in a seemingly seamless continuity rippling through every moment of which we are each but a small part. Everything counts. Nothing matters. Both presence and absence play within us from what is past. Knowledge here is power, while ignorance is often bliss, affording us an illusion of independence from our past even if the past is never quite past. Tracing every present is a former, with the future a mere contingency masquerading as a necessity, and linked irrevocably to each moment’s unfolding historicity. Our customary way of parsing time into separate elements of past, present, and future is useful though contrived. We can notice the artifice of chronology whenever we sense the strange simultaneity of a moment’s novelty and redundancy, perhaps walking into a room for the first time, or hundredth time, and feeling everything is familiar yet everything is new, a touch of déjà vu or jamais vu and not a disorder of memory, for all moments are ripe with what has been and never been, even if rarely given a second thought, life’s odd ability to leave us with an impression at once wearying and wonderful. Haunted is what we are, and haunting is what we do. We are possessed by a spectral feature animating our days, the very presence of the present suffused with an elaborate ancestral heritage beyond perception, our current speech and thought infused with revenants we have never met but whose bygone days are far from gone. We live spirited lives. Our existence is only through the ethos of a lineage, the likes of which we know close to nothing about.