| There is a patina of pastness and folkloric authenticity that pervades the marketplace. |
| It calls up the seeming paradox of writing a history, an account of pastness, of things that are of the relative present. |
| The nostalgic gaze sacralizes concepts, objects, forms, and states from the past and reproduces them in a present that simulates and commodifies their pastness. |
| Take Mr. Warren's formulation that 'this is the way that the pain of the past in its pastness is converted to the future tense of joy.' Falstaff was a character who had done everything. |
| Any event must have all three properties, pastness, presentness and futurity, but this is a contradiction. |
| This change requires us to place futurity, rather than pastness, at the heart of our thinking about culture. |
