Abstract

Life narratives are continually subject to reconstruction. Mundane as they might be, chance encounters, events such as career downturns, and occasions like psychiatric consultations prompt life revision. Emphasized are terms that reference the present, points of departure for the pragmatist analysis of experience through time. In a seminal lecture titled “The Present as the Locus of Reality,” philosopher George Herbert Mead (1959/1930) flagged this decades ago, explaining that, in practice, “a reality that transcends the present must exhibit itself in the present” (p. 11). As Arthur Murphy indicated in prefatory remarks, “(It was Mead’s view that) the irrevocable past is the past of any given present, that which accounts for its occurrence” (p. xviii).