Me at 75…and at 5

I am. I know that I am because I experience things and react to them and because I experience myself experiencing things and reacting to them. 

I am 75 years old. Since I am 75 now, I must have been 5…once. And that’s not a problem for me because I remember being 5. In fact, I feel like I’m in touch with that 5 year old version of myself right now.

How so? First, I remember things that happened when I was 5. I don’t just remember that they happened (history), I remember them happening. Second, I don’t just remember things that happened from the outside in; in some cases I (re)member them (N.O. Brown),  I (re)experience them (from the inside out), or I experience them for the very first time (Proust).   

Finally, when I experience myself, I don’t experience a bunch of different selves; I experience a single entity. Being ample, I am smeared out over space; being ancient, I am smeared out over time. 

As is so often the case, the key insight is captured in a nursery rhyme:

As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with 7 wives, and every wife had 7 sacks, and every sack had 7 cats, and every cat had 7 kits…how many were there going to St. Ives?

Every hand in Mr. Maguire’s advanced math class shoots up. We know the answer: obviously it’s 7⁴ (2,401) – except of course it isn’t. Our math accounted for wives, sacks, cats, and kits, but it didn’t include the beleaguered traveler who’s stuck with these recalcitrant companions. So the right answer must be 2,401 + 1 (2, 402) – except that’s also wrong.

How many were going to St. Ives? Only one! “As I was going to St. Ives…” 

So other than demonstrating our ignorant arrogance, does this doggerel have a point? You bet it does! My trip to St. Ives includes up to 2402 potential encounters, but there is just one traveler (me) encountering all of them. I am the constant unifying all my experiences. “Everything flows” (Heraclitus), except me. I am an island in the stream. 

This phenomenon is the subject of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In this multi-volume autobiographical novel Proust recounts his discovery of a ‘wormhole’ capable of conflating events (with no loss of detail, i.e. information) far separated in ordinary spacetime. 

According to Proust, Italy-yesterday and France-today can be coincident; they can occur in one place and at one time which is either both Italy-then and France-now or, what amounts to the same thing, neither Italy-then nor France-now: A*B = -A*-B.

To be specific, spacetime is not substructural. But also, let’s be clear: the spacetime between the two ‘events’ is not obliterated; it’s still there, part of the cosmic superstructure. But Proust found a way to bend that structure so that far distant points effectively become adjacent or even co-incident.

Proust established the principle of non-locality based solely on his analysis of human experience. 50 years later, John Bell proved it mathematically, and over the next 25 years, Alan Aspect confirmed it experimentally. 

Name your poison. Phenomenology, mathematics, or physics? The phenomenon of non-locality is triple confirmed. Only hard core realists remain skeptical.

There is a house in my neighborhood that always catches my eye. A soft light fills the windows every evening. I long to know what life’s like for the people who live there, so…

I decide to take a peek. After dark, I approach the house. I stand in the bushes in front of a first floor window and I look in. The things that go on behind supposedly closed doors! I am a voyeur.

But this only whets my appetite. I need to experience life on Cherry Hill Lane first hand. So I break in. Now I am a burglar. But much to my surprise, the residents do not immediately call the police. 

They let me tell my story and, when I finish, they invite me to stay. I am a house guest. But not for long. My host family is only renting, their lease is up, and they’ve already made plans to move to America.

On learning this, my first reaction is panic. I’m about to be locked out of my dream house, probably forever. Then it occurs to me, “Perhaps I could buy the property.”

“Who owns it?” My hosts don’t know, they send their monthly rent check to a lock box. So I visit Town Hall. Only then do I learn the truth: I already own the house through a blind trust my grandfather set up for me at my birth. 

I am simultaneously owner, landlord, house guest, burglar, voyeur, passerby. But I am just me. All these things are parts of what it is to be me. So what’s it like to be a 5 year old version of myself? It’s exactly like being a 75 year old version…because 5 year old me is 75 year old me! 

It is the 75 year old me, because there are no versions; there’s just me. I am simple, not composite. I’m single, not legion. I have no ‘aspects’, I have no ‘hair’. I am a quantum of being. Quiddity without quality. I just am, and in so being, I’m doing my very best impersonation of God.

Sidebar: A friend of mine, now deceased, used to ask everyone he met, “Do you think people can change?” At the time, I didn’t have an answer; now I know. Yes, people are chameleons constantly in the process of changing; and no, because there’s nothing to change from, nothing to change to, nothing to change or have changed.

In Exodus 3, YHWH tells Moses, “I am who am;” he is ‘am-ness’, i.e. Being. Like YHWH, I am a quantum of being. But whereas YHWH is Being per se, I am a being, a reflection of YHWH. I am only because I participate in am-ness, i.e. in YHWH. To be clear, I am not God! But I only am because God is.

And like God, my template, I am one being with innumerably many faces. 5 year old me is one face, 75 year old me is another, but behind every face is the one and only, ever unchanging and unchangeable me.

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Winslow Homer — Snap the Whip (1872), oil on canvas - Set against a rural American schoolhouse, barefoot boys play a lively game, linking hands and spinning across a sunlit field. The scene captures the innocence, freedom, and communal spirit of childhood in post–Civil War America. Through warm light and sweeping motion, Homer contrasts the simplicity of country life with the encroaching modern world, turning play into a symbol of youthful resilience and unity.