These words are used on a daily basis, usually with some sarcasm, or extreme exaggeration. “I’m going to be doing this homework forever,” or, “that desert road looks like it keeps going forever.” People use these words, but never really consider what they mean.
Have you ever, if not for just a few seconds, thought about eternity? About the seemingly impossible likelihood that time had no beginning, and has no end? It seems that, when your mind wanders into that uncharted territory, you feel an imminent and inescapable sense of hopelessness. It is a horrible experience.
Why? Infinity is not a concept that can be comprehended by any human being. It is an unfamiliar warp of the laws of anything. Human beings, so used to the logical, finite logarithms and patterns of nature, are not in any way capable of understanding eternity. The largest numbers we ever encounter in our lives are usually limited to the trillions (that’s 1x10^12.) Perhaps, if we counted every blade of grass on the planet we would likely still be under the realm of the twentieth power. So take a trillion, and set it to the trillionth power, and imagine that number being printed by a (very fast) printer—giving you enough pages of zeros to stack to the moon (and simultaneously eliminating every source of paper pulp in existence.) It’s a lot.
But continue. The galaxies of the universe (which, as far as we are concerned, have no limits,) are rapidly and inexplicably accelerating away from each other, into nothingness. Time and space will continue to the infinite power. Scary?
This of course brings about the question, “Kevin, what concoction of banned substances are you on?” I’ve mentioned numerous times before that I think too much, and in this case it really was way too much. I was watching the Discovery Channel the other day about the phenomena of eternity, and I started to really delve into it. Really think deep into it. I was attempting to imagine what eternity would be (will be, rather) like. This idea is charged with a high mental voltage, and whenever you try to think about it, the shock of such a concept forces you to retract at once. Perhaps it was intended for human understanding to be limited at some point, to protect us, or constrain us, or whatever. But this time, I kept going, trying as hard as possible to understand it.
It was terrifying. It was like the worst cognitive collapse from an overdose of a horrendous drug cocktail. It was like the hand of whatever grabbing control of my brain. I don’t even know why I’m trying to explain what it was like, because it was really inexplicable. I ended up sitting on my bed shaking until I could fixate on something concrete and limited in size, like a can of Pepsi on my desk.
My advice to you is to never in your living days purposefully think about this. It is petrifying. What you should do instead is lead a normal, dumbed-down human life, and not think or philosophize about things you will never understand…and appreciate the easing notion that the “endless” desert road is wonderfully finite.
“Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, but an eternal ‘now’ does always last.”
-Abraham Cowley
Current Mood: Uncomfortable
Listening To: "Time" by Hootie & The Blowfish
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