Past and present are two tenses that are two kinds of being and some late or just past twentieth century novelists elaborate that while a later generation largely does not.

Time is always ironic, As the past, ever mentally marked as the past, moves on to successive presents, the mind is capable of comparing the two and the many to see what is surprisingly the same and what is surprisingly different and decide which of these times are real and which of any number of them are false or simply one a paler image of the others. So to a Christian, what happened two thousand years ago remains lively and thinks of many present moments as replaying past dramas of atonement and salvation and the lifestyles of ancient Judea. The present is recapitulation. On the other hand, people can be amazed at how different things have become, fully aware and validated by the present, as when I reflect that a surgeon that saved my life a quarter century ago saved my still existent life while people just a few years before had died of the condition. The present, in that instance, is progress rather than recapitulation. Freud, for his part, thought the past was a very lively part of the present in that it spoke in symbols of what mattered in the past even if not part of present recollection. But the mind knows what it remembers and hath wrought what it may.