With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past and Unalterable.
The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.
There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.
Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent -- or should I say next to nonenexistent? You will thus be forgiven for valuing the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.
And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Its time-boundedness makes of this mere possibility a present impossibility. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up? The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.
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*These are nonepistemic uses of 'might.'