They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
“This Be the Verse”, Philip Larkin, 1971
For a century, my family has been preserving a bunch of factoids about their history, stories told to bolster our psychological positions in relation to acts that have long since been long forgotten by anyone else. Feel free, dear relatives, to tell me if you detect any falsehoods. Despite my best efforts, I’ve long since lost the ability to tell.
