Eternity!

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--Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the

eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man

can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the

pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as

they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the

same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear

even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What

must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? 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.

A PORTRAIT OF THE
ARTIST AS A YOUNG
MAN

JAMES JOYCE