“We’ve been dissected, psychoanalyzed, cut open and down,” Bill Clinton said of their marriage in Toronto, “but it’s been the most interesting thing you can possibly imagine; it’s still interesting to me today.”

It’s true. And that may be good enough for them. But it won’t be good enough for us. What do you do with a story like the one they told about meeting at Yale? What about NATO and all the rest? We need to have some sense of what the 1990s, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, the concept of the Clintons, all means. Prepare for pain. It’s only beginning because something else has ended.

“In your eulogy at President Nixon’s funeral,” the moderator began in one question, her last of the night in Montreal, “you quoted from his remarks, and it really kind of resonated with me. ‘Unless a person has a goal or a mountain to climb, their spirit will die.’”

“And the question for both of you is: What’s the next mountain you are excited to climb?”

Their responses were fine, of course, all about finding an economically viable solution to climate change and addressing the opioid epidemic. But there was just enough of a momentary pause between question and answer for your breath to catch.