How do I know the past is not a fiction conceived to reconcile the difference between my state of mind and the present.
There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.
The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
Any attempt to recreate a world of 1814, or 100 years before that - I think it's important to understand that the people of the time had a different concept of what reality was. Their reality was much more haunted.
Every work of history constructs contexts and designs, forms in which past reality can be comprehended. History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.
First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
I loved that television show Mad Men because it really was a reminder of what reality was back then.
The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.
I'm really freaked out by time. How, for instance, what I did last week is not real in the sense that it's happened. It's just a memory that's filed away in my brain.
We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.
