If the self is only in the now this is because it is primarily feeling, perhaps as in that definition of consciousness as there being something it feels like to be. We are our feelings but we have little control over them; we are also the change in these feelings. So, not just qualia but changes in qualia, and changes in the changes, all of which are yet another kind of qualia. (Does the need to include 'meta-qualia' make nonsense of the whole qualia thing?) Changes in qualia are necessarily mediated by meanings or thoughts, or indeed by representations, so thought and feeling here are inextricably knotted together and this open nexus is more like the self, indeed more 'like' consciousness, than any feelings on their own.