It was perhaps only a grammatical accident that the verb to be should be both transitive and intransitive. To be here was always to already be something and yet the something appeared contingent and changeable so that it seemed that an intransitive being must lie behind the activity of presence. Again, the same logic could be applied to having in the sense that presence was always the possession of a certain self or identity. One cannot be present without knowing oneself to be present and hence being able to identify certain contents as oneself, beginning with short-term memory. The connections between short-term memory, the memory of a second or two in the past with medium term memory of roughly a day and with long-term memory embracing the entire previous life is contingent, although usually taken for granted. The property accumulated in this way and identified as our own in apparent but necessary unmediatedness is often immense, but the possibility that it can be disowned, or even redeemed in some way, is seized upon, or possibly recognised, the moment it is suggested. This impression of being a stranger to oneself is only enhanced by evidence of the inaccuracy of long-term memories, of their dream-like revisioning. Still, these arguments seemed to him to be superficial, they were attempts to tease the past into revealing itself. The secret of time was not in the punctilious present but in its failure to contain something too large for its divisions.