The four-dimensional worm

Give time an axis and draw it. A person is then not a shape but a shape extended along a fourth direction — narrow at one end, tapering at the other, looping wherever they walked. Philosophers call the view perdurantism: you are not wholly present at any instant, you are spread out, and what you call "me right now" is a cross-section.

Nothing mystical is being smuggled in. Minkowski said it in 1908 in a physics lecture — space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows — and the geometry has been standard ever since. What is startling is only that we never see it. And the shape it makes is not noble. It is long, soft, blind at both ends and tapered: it is a worm. Which is the word Isaiah reached for, in a verse about being small and being helped.