Just to raise this out of the swamp, it is worth pointing out that Gabriel Conroy in the story of "The Dead" is being undercut by his own deadness, which is revealed in this cliche-ridden speech, and which he takes a kind of awkward pride in. The reason why the story is so heartrending at the end is that the real connections to the past (his wife's love for another man, dead for love of her), and what it means to be part of the past, are unknown to him; and when he does discover the true meaning of what it would mean to know the past, he sees himself to be a failure as a human being.