I want to speak of that sense that there is something, someone, beyond sensing. Something that has passed. At night, I hear the trains passing. The noise swells and so I feel the train coming closer, closer still, the rhythmic cadence of metal wheels on metal rails, coming through the town, across the back-streets, and then it passes. The sound grows fainter and then it is gone. The train goes on and on. But from where I lie it has gone, passed-by, for that train is no more than the sound of its passing. It is this time beyond-hearing, this frayed moment when something, someone, is drawn into darkness, that I wish to speak about when speaking of the past.
(..)
The notion of the feeling of pastness, which has been explored in recent writings concerning the conundrum of evocative memory, suggests that what distinguishes memory from either imagination or perception is precisely the sense that something once was but now is not. The past is, therefore, at once a felt presence and a felt absence.

//John Harries, The absent other and the limits of immanence, Beothuk ghosts and the feeling of pastness