Time runs off continuous with the previous nows getting further and further "away" until they fade off into the distance. Distant past retentions draw together as in a spatial perspective. This fading away is not a changing of the phase and its nature: a middle C is still a real, sounding middle C, not an imagined, conceptualized or recollected one, but is modified in its mode of givenness so that it is given as the past of the current now.

Husserl claims that any retained moment had to originally have been a now at some stage. In a complementary fashion, a now is always the limit of a retentional series, a boundary edge. We couldn't have a now without retention and protention, nor vice versa.