Time, Presence and Justice to History.

"The past is not merely the precondition of the present, but a condition of it." - R.G.Collingwood. (from the article Time, Presence and Historical Injustice by Berber Bevernage)

When we recollect the past, do we actually reconstruct it? When we are talking about history, are we referring to the word 'history'? Or an idea? Or a memory? Or history itself (which only exists post the event which it describes, and is hence different from The Event because The Event in its present state is not called The History)? We construct 'the idea of the past' in the present. But we call it The Past. This is problematic. What is The Past? Events, people, experiences, places, sights, sounds, smells, emotions. All that put into one word. This one word makes us recreate these experiences based on what we know from our own memories and others'. These experiences automatically do not 'exist' as we imagine them, because they are labelled past. There is always the dichotomy between what we are trying to recreate now and what has already happened. Yet we try to describe these histories to the realest details, so that they may transcend our man-made boundaries of time (near-real being near-existence, being near-presence, being near-present). The way in which we view time itself might be the reason why we can't make sense of it. I don't experience days or hours or minutes. I experience time organically, non-systematically. Who's to say what my past is and what my present is? It seems to me that for the benefit of communication, we've brought down richer experiences into flat dimensions. Hence arise terms like 'anachronistic', 'warped' or, my personal favourite - 'absurd'. What's with that?