Historical Present

One of the many hats I wear is the figurative topper of the president of the Century House Historical Society. I'm no historian, but now I'm dealing with historical issues many times a week. Faulkner once wrote "the past is not dead. It is not even past," and my particular version of this is "History does not stop." Thinking this way allows me to adaptively reuse an abandoned cement mine as a fundraising music venue. However, this realization about history has grammatical consequences, since it results in one of my bugbears, the historical present, that is, treating ancient, completed events as if they were still in progress. This practice calls into question the very existence of a past tense, which consequently calls into question all verbal tenses. The struggle between past and future comes to an end in an uneasy truce. Sequential action is reconceived as simultaneity. With such a perspective, "causality" is either the misinterpretation of a predetermined lockstep of a fatalistic gelled reality or exposed as the capricious Brownian motion of events careening into each other with no long term consequence, just an inevitable journey toward heat death.