it would remain inoperative. What is making present something long past supposed to accomplish for us?
Indeed, if this making present pertained only to a being that previously was and is now no longer, if this making present pertained to a sequence of thought-acts carried out by thinkers who lived in the past, then we would be fixing our search upon something that has disappeared. However, we do not want to make a past being live again in the present. On the contrary, we want to become aware of being. In reflection, we remember being and the way it inceptively presences, and presences still as the inception, without thereby ever becoming a present being. The inception is certainly something that has been but not something past. What is past is always a no-longer-being, but what has been is being that still presences but is concealed in its incipience.
The concealedness of the inception does not mean the inception has been covered over.It implies only the peculiarity of an inception that first strikes us from its nearness, that cannot be experienced in the realm of what is self-evident. Perhaps this inception of being is closer to us than everything we know and allow as the nearest; closer, that is, than all beings, which, as actual, seem to absorb into themselves and rule over everything.
The past is past. That means the former beings are no longer beings. All historiology deals with beings that are no longer. No historiological presentation is ever capable of making a former being into the being it was. Everything past is only something that has passed away. But the passing away of beings occurs in the essential realm of being. This does not, of course, "subsist" somewhere "in itself," but is what is properly historical in the past, the imperishable, and that means it is an incipiently having been and an incipiently presencing again.
Remembrance of the inception is not concerned with beings and what is past, but with what has been, and that means with what still presences, being. Perhaps the inception continues to appear, for the most part, so completely as something unattainable because it is overly close, so that we have continually overlooked it due to its nearness. Perhaps it belongs to the peculiarity of the abode in which our historical essence remains bound that, though we certainly do not lack sight and sense for the closest