Like many people, Jessie had known a number of different, clearly defined, immediate presents, and as each of these phases of her life had closed by being replaced with another, it had lost reality for her; she no longer held it with her. The ribbon of her identity was always that which was being played out between her fingers; there was no coil of it continuing from the past. I was; I am : these were not two different tenses, but two different people.
…
An excerpt from Nadine Gordimer’s novel, An Occasion for Loving.
