I am currently writing a book which attempts to come to terms with the difference of the past in a way that simultaneously interrogates the present. What does it mean for something to be 'historical', to bear the stigmata of History? Anyway, I find these words, of Fredric Jameson ("Marxism and Historicism"), to be excellently suggestive:
We will no longer tend to see the past as some inert and dead object which we are called upon to resurrect, or to preserve, or to sustain, in our own living freedom; rather, the past will itself become an active agent in this process and will begin to come before us as a radically different life form which rises up to call our own form of life into question and to pass judgement on us, and through us on the social formation in which we exist. At that point, the very dynamics of the historical tribuneral are unexpectedly and dialectedly reversed: it is not we who sit in judgement on the past, but rather the past, the radical difference of other modes of production (and even of the immediate past of our own mode of production), which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not, what we are no longer, what we are not yet. This is the sense in which the past speaks to us about our own virtual and unrealised 'human potentialities,' but it is not an edifying lesson, or any kind of personal or cultural 'enrichment'. Rather, it is a lesson of privation, which radically calls into question the commodified daily life, the reified spectacles, and the simulated experiences of our own plastic-and-cellophane society.... It is the past that sees us, and judges us remorselessly, without any sympathy for our complicity with the the scraps of subjectivity we try to think of as our own fragmentary and authentic life experience.
Indeed.