Five answers in today’s crossword are haunted by the past in one sense; I, as its constructor, am haunted by the past in another. For this puzzle is, in a way, a revisiting of Crossword 48, from 2018, against which it may be said to reverberate across the dimension of time. When you finish it, you will want to solve Crossword 48 again so as to admire the interplay between them. Like two black smudgy squares in two Rothko paintings, they might at first seem more or less identical; however, closer study will reveal in them, as in those paintings, subtle variations of shading and nuance that reflect, in ways that transcend paraphrase, the full range of the human experience, in all its tragedy and triumph.
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