eternity. a new fragrance from james joyce.

senior year of college. dr. dickinson's literature class. silly me, i chose to write my paper on one of the most difficult books in our collection of modern classics: james joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

i wrote the paper, and i think i got an A- or something like that. but to this day, i have no effing clue what the book was about. not a clue.

when i stumbled upon this quote from the book, though, i was able to digest this little piece. joyce writes about ETERNITY and how incomprehensible it is. . . kinda like his novels, if you ask me.

at any rate, it's beautiful. i just wanted to share.


"For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this.

You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all?

Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun.

And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun."