It's true that certain one-off events occupy a special place in the geography of the past, but what holds most of the weight of time past are situations properly described by using the imperfect tense, 'I used to...' or even more imperfect, 'We used to...'. There is a special pull exerted by the recall of moments in this mode, you land not at a specific date but in the midst of an indefinite plurality of days or hours. If your past self seems to be alive and to be gazing knowingly out at you it is because it is an accumulated deposit of repetitions, because the mind was freed in such occasions from the exertions of making out newly changed circumstances, from the need to anchor itself so firmly in its present. Allowing the temporal point to be more uncertain allows the sense of consciousness to be less vague. Is this idea just an effect of reading too many novels, in particular Proust? No, it seems rather that Proust was taking advantage of something already quite prevalent in literary language. Flaubert was perhaps the master of this effect of the imperfect, but it was a discovery that he exploited. It is perhaps like the uncertainty principle, the the uncertainty in time multiplied by the uncertainty in consciousness equals a constant, the coefficient of experience. It is not experienced when it happens but awaits a futurity to be realised - and hence it explains what it is you are doing when you think yourself to be bored, when you know something is going on, that your are 'doing' something, because life seems 'thick', but you don't know what it is. Life is made up of epochs ruled by the imperfect tense, and of the often sharp transitions between them, which accounts for the bulk of the distinctly located memories, the point-memories. This quality of the imperfect as the reservoir of consciousness is also a quality in music, but harder to clearly distinguish. What music is in the imperfect tense? The Goldberg Variations, Schubert when he is suddenly magical, Schumann's Kinderszenen, Lizst's Années de Pélerinage at least?