Eternity

One of my favorite passages so far in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the scene where the preacher at the retreat is attempting to explain what “an eternity in hell” truly entails.  As we mentioned briefly in class, it is not only humorous/satirically specific in detail, but is quite a thought-provoking description of eternity for any of us 3-diminsional beings that do not have any control over time.  The preacher starts off by stating how “un-understandable” the meaning of eternity is:

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.   (131 Penguin Books 1978)

Pain, on of the most important (life-saving, death-preparing) emotions of our human existence, is the focus of hell the preacher is trying to convey to the students. 

Yet, it is not the pain that is the worst part of hell, but the eternity of that pain. It is not just the sting that hurts, but the continuousness, helplessness, and hopelessness of the continuum of stings that terrifies Stephen(/the reader too).  An eternity is *impossible* for us to understand, yet Joyce (through the preacher) does a pretty mind-blowing/expanding description of it:

What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. 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 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 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 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 carried 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 even 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 have scarcely begun. (131-132)

Sorry for the ginormous quote, but the language, set-up, and descriptions of the preacher’s description is unparaphrasable (how can one summarize eternity?).  Similar to how Stephan’s mind keeps on “exploding” when he realizes that an old thought-process could possibly be erroneous or changed, the reader (and Stephan) struggle with grabbling around the preacher’s description of what “life after death” entails in hell.  Every human, no matter what belief of what happens to us after we die, has no way of understanding what eternity of anything that follows.  Nothingness.  How can we imagine death when all we have understood in our own reality is life?  It is very reassuring/disturbing to imagine a physical manifestation of our souls in an after-life, yet terrifying to imagine what alternative “nothingness” actually is.  Forever and ever.  What does that actually mean?  Yet, why worry when we can’t feel nothingness?