The inability to keep the past alive is the truly reactionary feature. -Ortega y Gasset

Here Ortega puts his finger on something that is often misunderstood.  True reverence for the past is not the same thing as wishing for its return.  To feel the past as part of oneself is to know it is alive, ever-changing in relation to the self that necessarily alters as it passes through time.  It is only those who have no real connection to the past who can view it as something unchanging, because it is something outside them. ~Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit

Indeed, it is only those disconnected from the past who believe that they can keep replaying the same episodes from the past and acting as if the past were recurring again and again (e.g., those who always think it is 1938); only those who hate the past would diminish it by imagining its continual recurrence in the present.  The reactionary loves the past as he loves a long-lost lover–he does not love her any less because she is unobtainable and gone forever, but indeed loves her all the more because she will never return.  He does not wish for her return, because her return is unnecessary for love to endure.  Though lovers perish, love shall not, and death shall have no dominion.