ahnengeist

The story

German compound. From German ahnen (“to sense, to have a premonition; to intuit something not yet spoken”) (compare Ahnung (“foreboding, vague foreknowledge”) and Ahnen (“forebears, ancestors”)) and Geist (“spirit, ghost, mind”). The compound evokes a ghost that arrives from the future rather than the past: the self that already knows, standing just beside the moment, watching it unfold.