Concern over future pain was not just seeking to spare himself from suffering but also from the bitterness of regret at at having failed to avert an avoidable suffering. This emotion would express itself in the form of anger at a past self because of its selfish preference for its own expedient profit over its responsibility to a later, a future self. From the perspective of the future self his entire existence ought to be in its service, and he could not deny this obligation since it responded to the same entitlement as he felt towards his current past. The past pleasure, or rather the otium of this present now, would have been used up by the time of the projected future and count for nothing in the face of the tortures being endured in that now. As for the case of current sufferings, these might even be thought of as clearing the way for future enjoyments, if he could imagine, and he was readily inclined to do this, the relief experienced when they were exhausted. In this way selves in time existed in a kind of sociality, or bound together in sticky bonds like a family. A current self might take credit for the achievements of a past self, without really knowing, that is, being able to fully remember, what went into them, and of course the same would apply, mutatis mutandis, to past humiliations. The internal space that separated him from himself in this way was thus akin to that which separated him from others, while at the same time being as different as intimate relationships are from other, more formal, kinds of social relations. The future selves in this structure seemed to have much more than imaginary reality. That they were inevitable gave them a flavour of necessity and hence a reality that was in some ways greater than that of the present, whose essence was contingency, and to this was added an enormous cultural momentum, the imperative to live towards the future. Similarly, he was more than the heir of his past, he was answerable for it and was therefore expected to be able to recreate it inwardly and expose its latencies if called upon. Proximal internal temporal relations were ones in which the identity between past, present and future selves was fully effective through these bonds of answerability and responsibility. There were also distal temporal relations defining an identity with a different, perhaps more literary, character.