I rather believe with Faulkner, “The past is never dead, it is not even past,” and this for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past; it consists of the monuments and the relics of what has been done by men for better or worse; its facts are always what has become (as the Latin origin of the word: fieri—factum est suggests). In other words, it is quite true that the past haunts us; it is the past’s function to haunt us who are present and wish to live in the world as it really is, that is, has become what it is now.

—Hannah Arendt, „Home to Roost“, New York Review of Books, June 26, 1975.