At your birth did something come into the world that was not already there? It might seem as if birth were a kind of penetration, you were pushed and pushed and the interior of that other place was breached and you broke through into a canal you didn't know was there and, expelled through it, with stress and storm, you penetrated into this 'breathing world'. Only much later did you discover that that other place had all the time been simply a part of this multiform realm you've gotten used to calling home. You learned its rules and to accept the idea that everything is to be found somewhere in here, although you never quite believed it, and kept searching for proof. Again, there is the image of an eye opening for the first time, awakening to life, gazing out in ignorance and trust and wonder. But this image presupposes something before. The opening of your eye was an action that you, or the you that preceded you, deliberately took, a definite and motivated act, so that there must have been a whole structure already in place. But was there a first moment, a moment without a before? This is the kind of question you ask yourself from out of the received notion of time for which there must always be a before. What then, could the birth of time have been? If there was no time before time there was no space before space, no arriving somewhere from somewhere else. Whatever the origin might have been, it is no event, could not be separate, be at any distance, from this, here, now, in any way.