History is the presence of the past

Great landmark works of culture hold a culture still, prevent it from changing, because many works, many thoughts and ideas, reflect off it, and it builds a (nightmare of) history. English culture is attached to Shakespeare and can’t move past him. It relies on him. If it were to forget him it could move on but it wouldn’t be English anymore because the definition of English culture is Shakespeare (et al). Much-referenced works, seminal works, create culture and solidify it, freeze it in definable place in the roiling unreality of unacknowledged space.

History and the past are not the same. The past is what once was. History is the presence of the past.

History is the record of the past and the knowledge of the absence of a record. (A known absence of a record is also a presence). If you want to return to a prehistoric (or more accurately an ahistoric) time you don’t need to destroy anything except all people above the age of two. All will be forgotten immediately and mankind will enter an Edenic pre-Fall state for 10 years. History will begin again when the human race turns 12 and learns to remember. It will probably begin sooner than that.

To remember. I’ve written this someplace else. To give a limb to what was. Re – again; member – limb, extension, acting force. ‘I remembered it’ – I gave it arms once more, let the dead thing influence the world though dead. Or recall – ‘I called it’, summoned it, to a place/time it wasn’t.

History holds identity together. Without consistent history you are every ship of Theseus. You stop dead in your tracks because without a past there is no future and no reason to do anything. You have no memory of hunger so you don’t need to eat; you have no memory of responsibility so you don’t act.