This chapter defines the position that the whole book is going to argue for: the continued existence of the past. Taking David Berman’s line “the world is 66% Then and 33% Now” as the point of departure, the chapter takes the existence of the past as an ontological issue and emphasizes that this issue is different from questions about memory and knowledge about the past. In a next step, the chapter lays out that the book will not rely on the obvious possibility of true statements about the past as an argument for the existence of the past—affirming David Foster Wallace’s statement: “If [philosophers] want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics”. Finally, the chapter makes it clear that the issue of the existence of the future is explicitly not in the scope of the argument of this book, which aims to be compatible with both the existence and the non-existence of the future.