This is the time of my life when I am not. "I" is unsteady at the very least, if "I" is said to exist
at all. There are some times and places where I would agree, but I know it has not been and is
not always so. The borderlines are blurry if not nonexistent. They are imagined to gain a sense
of order and control, nothing more. I agree that I am not the same person as I was at fourteen, true, but where is this borderline? Could it have just happened to be on my fifteenth birthday?
Where does that follow? I am not the me that was three days ago. I take the time-space
continuum a little differently. Time and space cannot be neatly contained in a labeled box. I can still be me at seventeen. Sometimes I am four again. These person-stages are fluid, spilling
over into one another, sometimes repeating, sometimes missing, perhaps spilled over into
someone else's person-stages or maybe landed on Mercury. Just because that time and place
have occurred does not mean they are not still occurring or will not re-occur. This person does not exist at any given time or place but is a collection of times and places. Maybe. Kind of like
the Japanese Emperor having no name until death. It is not a life until it is over, that sort of
thing. But it's not over ever, not really. These times and places can go on an infinite amount of
time and space. If the Emperor still exists in the soil, fertilizing the plants, and if he had
reproduced, his DNA still exists in his offspring, and if he exists in the minds of the people, is
he truly dead? That is, the question of the soul notwithstanding. A collection of person-stages
hints finite, but time and space are infinite. Perhaps. If they are, then these person-stages
continue past physical death. (20)