First Sentence

"Whether they look for remembrance or forgetting, individuals and societies always build a continuity into which they can inscribe themselves, especially when this continuity has been rendered difficult by a historical or geographical rupture, as it has for people said to be 'in diaspora': for them, history is no longer a continuous flow expressed by an uninterrupted transmission, but it becomes a time broken into before and after; and familiar places, in which history is spontaneously rooted, are not inhabited day after day, but are replaced by an imaginary 'elsewhere' that dwells in memory."