Two personal experiences led me to think more deeply about issues that are taken up in this book. The first concerns my father, who died in 1982. Although we were never particularly close, especially in the last decade of his life, I never doubted that the way I saw the world and my place in it owed much to his influence. My weekly calls, brief and perfunctory though they might be, and my occasional trips back home, underscored for me how much I resembled him, for better or for worse. But in the years after his death, I thought less and less about him. Except in rare moments, he quite literally vanished from my conscious life. I had, for several years, lit the yearly Yahrzeit candle in his memory but even that small gesture lapsed. Perhaps my failure to hold on to his memory, and therefore hold on to him, said something about our lack of intimacy while he was alive. Perhaps it was just the more or less inevitable erosion of memory by the passage of time and the accretions of a life lived forward. Whatever the explanation, I was troubled not so much by his death as by my failure to keep him in mind after he was gone. Vaguely, I felt that perhaps I had done something wrong, that I ought to have done more to preserve my father's memory, and that I had somehow been disloyal to him and what he meant to me by the apparent ease with which I forgot him.