"If I let the past go, I lose it"

Some readers will feel the argument as a threat. If the golden version goes, the past goes with it. The summer stops glowing. The people in the photograph get smaller. This book is asking for a loss.

Two things. The first is that the fade isn't erasure, and neither is the correction. Walker's review found that the feeling drains from bad memories, not that the memories go. The good memories keep their warmth. Putting the problems back doesn't take the warmth out of the beach. It puts the rent next to it. You'll still have the beach at full strength. You'll also have a truer picture of the summer, and a truer picture is more of the summer, not less.

The second is that the visit is the thing that keeps the past, and living there is what wears it thin. Go back to Wildschut's finding in chapter 11. What nostalgia does, when it works, is connect you to the people in the memory, and make you feel that your life has had shape and meaning. That's keeping the past. What the sigh does is turn the same memory into an instrument for measuring the present, and a memory used as a ruler stops being a memory. You stop seeing the friend on the beach and start seeing the fact that you don't have friends like that now, which isn't true, and isn't about the friend.

So the choice isn't between keeping the past and letting it go. It's between two ways of keeping it. The golden version keeps a picture with the problems cut out and uses it to make today look bad. The whole record keeps everything, the beach and the rent and the friend and the friend's own problems that summer, and visits it, and comes back. The second is more of the past and it costs you less.

There's one more thing. The people in the photograph had problems, and taking their problems out of the picture takes something out of them. The friend who's dead now was, that summer, worried about money and in love with someone who wasn't interested, and that was part of who they were, and the golden version has cut it. Chapter 19 is about this. For now, notice that putting the problems back gives you back the whole person, and not the poster of them, and that the whole person is who you miss.