For me, it is impossible to feel an emotion as past. Thus I know that I was sad, but I have no consciousness of any state of sadness. In order for these nonaffective images of sadness to renew their original meaning and their life, I am obliged to retranslate them into affective terms; but then I relapse into emotional states in the present, which is to say that it is my present self that is sad, and no longer only my past self.