Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it arises? Yet with regard to the pure sequence of "nows" we have as much right to say one as the other. When Dasein talks of time's passing away, it understands, in the end, more of time than it wants to admit; that is to say, the temporality in which world-time temporalizes itself has not been completely closed off, no matter how much it may get covered up. Our talk about time's passing-away gives expression to this 'experience': time does not let itself be halted. This 'experience' in turn is possible only because the halting of time is something that we want. Herein lies an inauthentic awaiting of 'moments'-an awaiting in which these are already forgotten as they glide by. The awaiting of inauthentic existence-the awaiting which forgets as it makes present-is the condition for the possibility of the ordinary experience of time's passing-away. Because Dasein is futural in the "ahead-of-itself", it must, in awaiting, understand the sequence of "nows" as one which glides by as it passes away. Dasein knows fugitive time in terms of its 'fugitive' knowledge about its death. In the kind of talk which emphasizes time's passing away, the finite futurity of Dasein's temporality is publicly reflected. And because even in talk about time's passing away, death can remain covered up, time shows itself as a passing-away 'in itself'. [426]
But even in this pure sequence of "nows" which passes away in itself, primordial time still manifests itself throughout all this levelling off and covering up. In the ordinary interpretation, the stream of time is defined as an irreversible succession. Why cannot time be reversed? Especially if one looks exclusively at the stream of "nows", it is incomprehensible in it:self why this sequence should not present itself in the reverse direction. The impossibility of this reversal has its basis in the way public time originates in temporality, the temporalizing of which is primarily futural and 'goes' to its end ecstatically in such a way that it 'is' already towards its end.
The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of "nows" which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein. The ordinary representation of time has its natural justification. It belongs to Dasein's average kind of Being, and to that understanding of Being which proximally prevails. Thus proximally and for the most part, even history gets understood publicly as happening within-time.1 This interpretation of time loses its exclusive and pre-eminent justification only if it claims to convey the 'true' conception of time and to be able to prescribe the sole possible horizon within which time is to be Interpreted. On the contrary, it has emerged that why and how world-time belongs to Dasein's
1 'Daher wird auch zunachst und zumeist die Geschichte öffentlich als inner zeitiges Gescheher. verstanden.' The words 'öffentlich als' are italicized only in the later editions.