Moroni is looking toward the future. He has addressed Joseph Smith directly and also a future audience. He tells that audience, “I speak unto you as if ye were present.” Such direct addresses to the reader are more common in Moroni’s writings than in Mormon’s. The fact that he is alone and that his mission is designed to benefit, not his contemporaries, but people of the future, explain why it dominates his attention. He speaks to the future because his thoughts and desires are intensely directed toward that future and his personal role in it. Imaginatively, Moroni is identifying with the future, addressing it as though he were with those future readers or, as he says, they with him.