Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: Say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they’re still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What’s more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all.