Series

Measuring and counting, man meets infinity in the shape of distances that are too large to be measured and numbers too large to be counted. These experiences have been and always will be a source of speculation. Man’s encounter with infinity has given us both the belief in eternal life with or without a beginning, and the opposite belief that the world was created once and will perish once. In the Bible, the sand of the sea stands for the uncountable: Jacob to God: “And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.” In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce wrote a very expressive passage about infinity. An Irish priest talks about eternal punishment: “What must it be then to bear the manifold tortures of hell 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 of the seashore…. Now imagine a mountain of sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens … 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 sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before he had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it has carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even an instant of eternity could have said to have ended … after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes your brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.”