Light Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light. - T. S. Eliot

I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance

The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.