A witness is supposed to be someone who was there: a person in relation to an event, receiving it and carrying it forward unaltered. The foundation says a witness is not in relation with the event at all, because the event is over and what is over cannot hold up its end of anything. A witness is what an act left behind in a living thing — a mark, not a window — and testimony is a present reading of that mark. That is why a camera counts, why you can become a witness six days after the fact, why two honest people on one corner carry two different crashes, and why nobody has performed an unwitnessed act. … readWhat Is a Witness