How's this for a concept: the book of Genesis turned the past into a mental construct.  "If not for its intercession, today we would perhaps be dealing with the past as simply one more reality, like any other object of perception" (César Aira, The Literary Conference).  Aira also says of Genesis: "The mere idea of Adam and Eve's existence, of humanity (the species) retroactively reduced to a single couple, gives rise to genetics.  I would even say that it is as far as the imagination can go in this field.  Genetics is the genesis of diversity.  But if diversity has nobody on whom to spread itself out, it turns on itself, gets tangled up in its own general particularity, and therein the imagination is born."