Virginia Woolf made this observation in one of her many diary entries, noting that when we’re living through a moment, we’re often too caught up in the immediacy of it to fully grasp its emotional significance. It’s only later, through memory and hindsight, that we can truly examine and appreciate the emotional weight of our experience. Our memories allow us to realize the full depth of a feeling we perhaps couldn’t process completely in real time, such as a childhood summer spent with family that seems far more magical and impactful in retrospect than it did while living it. For Woolf, this made the past a thing of beauty. As she wrote in a separate diary entry, “The present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye.”