Over the years, he had seen untold people pose for a photograph beside anything anywhere with even a whiff of history, to touch in this way a past from which they were otherwise cut off.  They were as if an other species to him.  He worried that he too often lived mired in the past — wherein lay buried the sources to the conflicts he dealt with in his jobs.  The past was his ever-present.  If he overlooked a moment in the present, it was because he could not place it in the context of its past.  The past was his defense against the self-important present, an armor against which any spear, however futuristic, would collapse.  His versions of stories often found favor because he felt it possible to make more seductive, more memorable, a story of any part of the past than was possible to make of a story about the present or what comes after.  Unlike so many people, he felt cut off from the present, and sought it out by mostly making escapes into it from somewhere out there in the past.