Time is an extension of space. When humans in places are able to move, the intuition of spaciousness increases. Movement makes the same room paced becomes large. Time gives space to space.

But is space an extension of time?

When I am on a video call with my daughter on the other end of the world, where is our place? The materialist answer is that we have no place; we are nine thousand kilometers apart, separated by satellites and a screen, and the communion is a courtesy. But this answer fails the phenomenon. We are somewhere together. Where?

The video call works because the world is a place, and the world is a place because the world-place is vague, vague because anything else gets magnified into separation. My daughter and I are somewhere, not just in time. The screen does not interrupt this; the screen is part of how the place gathers. Magnify enough and we will always be separate — atoms and void, no two people sharing any place ever. So if place required precision, no place would survive scrutiny, and yet places obviously exist in the only sense of “exist” that matters. Places are real. Magnification destroys precise places. Therefore real places are constitutively vague.

Heidegger said the thing things — the jug gathers earth and sky and mortals and divinities in the pouring of the wine. Ding, etymologically, was the assembly, the meeting where matters were settled. The thing was always a gathering before it was an object. Place is the same word at one remove. A place is a gathering of gatherings, and a gathering cannot be magnified into nothing because it is not located at a point — it is located at the relations that constitute it.

The mysterious survival of the passage of time is made possible by the mind. and the mind is where perception must arrive.. how could we receive a place without the mind being a place that can receive a gathering of gatherings?

Vagueness is not the failure mode of place. It is the mode. Space is an extension of time because of vagueness.

On Lineage

This note is a step down from the essay my father and I crafted (Sage, 2017), where our method was always to get under the language games into real understanding. The experience of language when you mean something — vague, but also real — as a result of excavating language, is my inheritance from him. And from him too the instinct to honor the lineage of words, though I took it further into etymology than he ever needed to. To honor our ancestors, and to honor those arriving later to this scene of touching reality with words: my daughters. To our sons and daughters.