preteritenessn.

1665 J. Sergeant Sure-footing in Christianity 205 The preteritness of the Thing has so fixt its Existence to its proper time, that 'tis not now obnoxious to variation.

1692 R. Bentley Boyle Lect. vi. 23 We cannot conceive a Præteritness (if I may say so) still backwards in infinitum, that never was present.

1854 J. R. Lowell Jrnl. Italy in Wks. (1890) I. 140 The feeling of preteriteness and extinction.

1866 J. R. Lowell Lessing in Prose Wks. (1890) II. 219 Klopstock..is rather remembered for what he was than what he is—an immortality of preteriteness.

1969 Econ. Hist. Rev. 22 196 The conditionals which a historian uses are irretrievably counterfactual because of the mere preteriteness of his subject-matter.

1984 Russ. Lang. Jrnl. 38 90 I would argue subjectively that the suddenness and uniqueness of the shift serves to emphasize even more clearly the preteriteness of the rest of the narration.

2001 Arbeiten aus Anglistik u. Amerikanistik 26 120 The manifest contradiction between preteriteness and the illusion of immediacy is merely the temporal equivalent of the tension between the inherent solipsism of the epistolary form and the illusion of intimacy which is generated by the reading of a letter intended to someone else.