pastness
1
9.9
- noun
- /ˈpæstnəs/
- The artist captures the pastness of the landscape, evoking a deep sense of nostalgia.
- the pastness of the past
Examples
-
The pastness of her memories often brings her both joy and sadness.
-
It marks the mobilization of reflective nostalgia into an affective retelling of queer history, while constantly drawing attention to the pastness of the present.
Academic text (2013) -
That it is not their pastness that makes them historical.
-
The parameters of this pastness vary somewhat.
Academic text (2000) -
Stare decisis, for example, holds that past decisions, simply by virtue of their historicity, their pastness, shall be binding.
Academic text (1994) -
The image indeed returns, but it emerges from a past whose pastness, adhering to it like some dark shadow, accompanies it into the present.
Academic text (2002) -
This meeting or blending extricates the work from its pastness and enlivens the viewer's present.
Academic text (2007) -
Brideshead's war provides Ryder's portal to the past, but in a mode underscoring both its irretrievable pastness and the present's relative poverty.
Academic text (2000) -
Although the Evre boat trip is an experience that Gracq has not repeated since his childhood—an experience, therefore, which is nearly synonymous with the idea of pastness—there exists a connection between this past and the future of the experiencing subject, as well as the present of the writer.
Academic text (1995) -
In literature, the pastness of a character's experiences shapes their current choices.
Synonyms
Being a real event that happened in the past
Being earlier than another event in time
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
The word pastness comes from past ('gone by') and the ending -ness ('state or quality'), like in darkness or happiness. So pastness means the 'state of belonging to the past', or the quality of being 'in the past'.