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Please tell me the reason behind the usage of the past present. Thank you.

I was interested only in saving my life. I had finally noticed that I seemed to have reached a state of hopeless and life-threatening despair, and it occurred to me that sometimes people in this state will approach God for help. I think I'd read that in a book somewhere.

I don't understand how the past perfect tense is used here. Isn't it supposed to state an action that happened in the past of another past occurence?

Futurist · Accepted Answer

You are right; the past perfect tense refers to an act, state, or condition that was completed before another specified past time or past action.

If you think about it, that is indeed the case here. When the author says 'I was interested only in saving my life', he is referring to a past time. When he then says, 'I had finally noticed', he's saying that he came to his realisation in the lead up to that past time. Did the author really mean to say this? We can't know.

The sentence is, I must say, a sample of rather bad writing. The author says he 'had finally noticed', but then he uses the word 'seemed', which casts doubt on whether he really noticed at all. And the thing he seems to have noticed turns out to be his own state of 'hopeless and life-threatening despair'. How could he, for a considerable time, fail to be aware of his own hopeless despair? And then, when he finally comes to be aware of his own state, how could he still be unsure of it? If he was in a state of life-threatening despair, he was, presumably, thinking about killing himself. How could he not know he was thinking about killing himself?

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