I’m now really enjoying “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce (see blog entry The Incomprehensibles for explanation). I’m reading it using the highly recommended random-passage-at-a-time technique. And I’ve realized that this method is very similar to the method used for reading the bible, which I was taught way back in Catholic Land (which is east of Xanadu). But I prefer James Joyce. Is that blasphemy? Oh well, I’m pretty sure I’m already going straight to hell when I leave this mortal coil. Unless I can't leave. Maybe I'm immortal. Then what happens? What if I'm trapped here. On Earth. With Mankind. For Eternity. Hell.
Here’s what James Joyce has to say about eternity (in hell):
“…What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever?… 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.” (pgs. 140-141)
That's one freakishly obsessive-compulsive bird carrying away all those grains of sand.
James Joyce really loves the word 'million'.
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