The past as such does not exist. It is not real. The past is the history of a memory; it is the excess of one’s experience of an event. It would be inaccurate to think of this a recollecting an immutable action (one that can only be interpreted in one way for all time) because as memory is the excess of one’s experience, the experience itself is of a virtual event (i.e. an event is always mediated prior to experience). The memory of the event is always a virtual history in which one remembers what one saw (again, a mediation!). We never have unmediated access to the event (or to the object of our relations) itself.
When one writes of past events (which is all what one can write of), one is actually organising and recollecting memory in the present. The act of remembering is a repetition of an unlived future, it is the consolidation of memories into one crystal moment of eternity. We can speak of major world events such as May ’68, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, etc; however, in doing so, we are contracting a multiplicity of memories and interpreting them through other memories (e.g. events that have occurred between ‘then’ and ‘now’) to create a singular, transitory excess of experience. These memories have been long forgotten as mediated memories — metaphors understood by analogy and, to borrow a term from web technologies, ‘tagged’. There is a reason why one’s life can ‘flash in front of’ one’s eyes, and this is because memory is always incomplete and fragmented. One’s entire life does not play back in its entirety when it ‘flashes in front of’ one’s eyes; it is contracted into one crystalised moment that is never repeated.
