Definition of "pastness" []

• The quality or condition of being past. (noun)
• The emotion or feeling evoked by memory: "the one wave of recaptured pastness with which many a gifted writer makes his debut” ( John Simon). (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "In other words, all music — regardless of age — is ideally immediate and timeless, and as the technology of reproducing music — regardless of age — improves, the "pastness" of music falls away."
• "Condillac's reasoning is less than explicit at this point, but he seems to have taken this experience to provide us with an awareness of what we might call the "pastness" of the echo, and at the same time of the continued existence of an identical self which experienced both the past perception and the current ones."
• "There may be a specific feeling which could be called the feeling of "pastness," especially where immediate memory is concerned."