It has been battered by bombings around its edges, but the war has been kept from its heart, largely because of its ancient, shared past, bound by trust and generations of intermarriage.
I regard those rows of memoirs and letters as voices from the past, bound into books, and I like to make sure they are all there, alive and well.
At the same time, though, hardly a day goes by during which they are not reminded of how much their cherished chunk of the city has changed, as they walk past barricaded streets, elbow past tourists bound for the platform, observe from 10, 20, 40 stories high the strange new world that is now Lower Manhattan.
Our past Binds us together, allies through the years; Our common values, language - and, not last, A shared approach to global threats and fears; All these make our alliance one to prize.
THE Germans' bid to come to terms with their communist past was bound to be tricky.
Biswas was oppressed by feelings of inauthenticity, not of present loss, but of something missing in the past, something bound up with the humiliations of India itself, from where his father, like Naipaul's own grandfather, had arrived in the Caribbean as indentured labour.
Any politician who calls for a "rupture" with the past is bound to unsettle those in privileged positions, such as workers in unreformed public sector institutions - which is why his victory in the second round of the elections is far from assured.
But any view of the past is bound to be subjective depending on factors like your age, Opie believes.
It's all very well to say that he who doesn't remember the past is bound to repeat it.
As the saying goes, that those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.
In an unbelievable and eventually tossed-off plot twist, it's revealed that certain episodes in Lambert's past could bind the heedless, privileged Kip to Lara in unexpected ways.
