I understand now - Louise was ahead of me - that old Bensonhurst is lost to me, part of an irretrievable past.

Now Rena's written thoughts seemed like ghostly memories out of an irretrievable past.

She went back to setting the table, feeling pleasantly sad and nostalgic for Margaret and Brian and the other kids, for Omaha and the irretrievable past.

Apparently the localized existence of Tuesday, which until now had persisted in the vicinity of the sink, had vanished, becoming a part of the irretrievable past.

Gray days, which are also frequent, turn the city into a lithograph, a nuanced vision of an irretrievable past.

These young actors evoke a tightly knit community collectively caught between an irretrievable past and a problematic future they must invent together.

Humbert Humbert is, like so many Nabokovian narrators, a man obsessed with an irretrievable past.

That time too has receded into the mythic, irretrievable past, and most of Generation Expat has come home.

Each building is an image, briefly flashed onto a narrow strip of time between an irretrievable past and an uncertain future.

A tailor, back when it was all cut and stitched by hand, hunched over all the little detailing ..." He sighed for the irretrievable past.