Thicker And Thicker Layers Of Time -- October 15, 2018

From Carole Angier's 2002 biography of Primo Levi, The Double Bond, p. xvii in the preface:
Often, indeed, my irrational chapters seem to me more true than the rational ones, because they contain more of the truth about remembering and reconstructing the past (which was, of course, a central subject of Primo Levi's). The sense that there are thicker and thicker layers of time between ourselves and the person we want to remember, that it is harder and harder to reach her -- this is one of the most poignant truths about any act of remembering, but one that biographers and histories exist to abolish. The more successful they are, the more they abolish it; which means (and not only here) that there may be more truth in failure.