“The accident occurred at the intersection of Fifth and Elm.” You hear such things on occasion, or “where did it happen?” There is an implicit assumption that an event has a location. I do not understand this. And event is a happening. Happenings don’t have a location for they don’t have a body or a size.
If two cars hit each other, where does the accident occur? Between the cars? The volume of space the cars occupied when they first hit? Or the volume of space traced by the cars from the beginning, to the end, of the accident, i.e. a 4-D volume? The concept is simply not well-defined.
To take some other examples–I love my wife. Where is the love? Last year, I loved my dog. Where did this event occur? What was its location? The sun got a year older last year–where did the aging occur? If I talk to a Dutch friend on the phone, where does the conversation, the talking, occur? If I bury a time capsule, and you dig it up after I’d dead, where did the message-conveying occur?
