The now is perfectly real, that's obvious. A little while ago it was a future now and perfectly unreal - how did it become real? Or else what makes it seem that we are talking about exactly the same now? It is not the now continually upwelling freshly that endures, it's the unification of the field of experience which seems to be the work of the 'I' which endures just because the 'I' is the sort of thing that experiences time and so is not bound to time. It is perhaps no more than an idea that has become attached to memory, as if memory could not do its job without it, like one of those parts that you can remove from a machine and find that the machine works perfectly well without it.