A moment of time at the edge of presence announces itself from the future and then blossoms with a certain character, and this character is the way we have of holding on to it in memory and of watching it fade into the past. This picture of time is conventional and persistent: time is made up of moments, it is near to being purely quantified. The moments could be discrete, atoms of life, of awareness, of being here, Dasein. Only so many of them to count down until death, until cessation, until the bag is empty - and the rottenest ones on the bottom! To live like that takes a certain blind courage, relinquishing each moment to to the past, which is nothing, the ghost of a ghost. And even if you found some other way to be in time you'd still end up losing that, your only victories over time, through art or fame or progeny, are Phyrric. The bright flare of each moment, something hopeful about it, a promise, as if it would give itself to an experience which would eternalise itself.
Und Schlag auf Schlag!
Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
[...]
Die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,
Es sey die Zeit für mich vorbey!
But however beautiful is always fails, this moment so vivid that can't be seized. It passes, it was. You believe we are the prisoner of time in this way, but do you really experience such a flow? And if you did, who would it be experiencing it, half in and half out of the flow? It is all involuted in the unknown present. The sense of time is made by you without my knowing it.