That sense of presentness is absent from van Mieris.

In its groundless presentness, revelation must now permanently touch the ground."

The pace, the crowds, the din, the grinding pulsing presentness of it.

In this "presentness," he says, is our salvation, a mystical thought but, as he sees it, of an ordinary kind.

This kind of presentness, and sense of presence, is, I think, what Hockney would like to capture.

That's what one has to recover, writing about the past, I suppose-its presentness, not pegged down by the heavy inevitability of history and hindsight.

In her work she fears "perpetual presentness, [that is] time is constant without conclusion."

Minimalism (or "literalism" as Fried called it) offered an experience of "theatricality" or "presence" rather than "presentness" (a condition that required continual renewal).

De Staebler's archaic figure symbolizes the process that leads to the eternal effect - that uncovers the eternal presentness of the primitively memorable - and the effect itself.

Gibson arrived at the character of Konrad through witnessing the serenity, the alert, relaxed presentness, the inner transparent stillness of an FBI sniper he serendipitously encountered.

In the show's catalog, Susan Larsen, the guest curator, writes: "The wildness of Maine generates a strong sense of 'presentness,' of living in the moment and feeling deeply alive."

Maybe it's the very presentness of television as a medium, or maybe it's that many of the triumphant moments that Mr. Donaldson describes have relatively little resonance in the longer run of history.

On the back of the "piroshki with cabbage" recipe, Baudelaire remarks: "The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is drawn not only from the beauty in which it can be clothed, but also from its essential quality of presentness."

Specifically, he argues that since every event that occurs will at one time be the future, at another time be the present, and at a third time (and forever henceforth) be past, every event exemplifies or instantiates every temporal property: futurity, presentness, and pastness.