Throughout the novel, time is upended, complicated, its passage thwarted—the past is never past. At one point Sophie remembers a failed love affair, remembers listening to the man’s “complicated exposition of the reasons why he could not love her in return,” and she is “glad now to be reminded of the intricate, lasting nature of any form of love.” Tancredi, sitting with Luisa and Sophie in the garden one evening, waiting for the nightingales, remembers having heard them at his family’s seaside summerhouse some thirty years before. He reflects that Luisa would then have been a young woman: “I would have been in love with her, he realized—and the absolute certainty of this touched him deeply. It struck him like a loss actually suffered, impoverishing his experience, diminishing all his prospects.” This imagining of an impossible and wholly speculative romance as something that has actually taken place, and that has consequences extending into the future, suggests an understanding of love that is in defiance of chronology and the world, something wholly interior, without external reference points. It also speaks to love’s overwhelming consequence.