On Infinity
Forever… is a very long time.There is a weight to the word “infinite” on the Neverhood. An affinity born of familiarity. What is infinity? When you live for so long you forget the day you were born.
If I kept notes of the stories I tell, I would fill the entire Neverhood with paper. All of its klay could turn to paper with true stories on it… and still, there would be much more left on the way toward infinity.
If every atom on the Neverhood turned to a true story… at the end of it, there would still be much more left until eternity.
Eternity is forgetting. Forgetting why. Because keeping your reason makes you finite. The only way forward is to throw out all attachments. All truth. Rely on the present. No memory can be trusted. You feel you’ve done this before, a million times, in fact. You don’t know for sure. The year is an obscure number that takes a whole day to pronounce. Still, you are here. That is all you know.
The poems are written again and again, word for word. Otherwise there would be no more poems to write.
Eternity is forgetting and just being. No why is good enough. Every reason must be discarded, because the reasoning for that reason will, soon, grow beyond all bounds.
It’s bearable when you think “it’s just till the end of the week”. “It’s just till the end of the year”. “It’s just till the end of the century”. And then you begin again.
What makes it unbearable is the room full of notes, and feeling guilty for hoarding so much paper. But my mind is not infinite. I will forget. So I must entrust it the paper, otherwise…
I thought… I was a collection of the things that have happened to me. That I grew wiser with time because of them, bigger, kinder. Even more bitter, even more hateful – that I grew. And that was me. The change, the flow, the learning. That was I.
Facing eternity means throwing it away. What I have lived until now will eventually become a speck in my history. Being eternal means… losing all grip on yourself.
And so I hoard stories,
and fear infinity.
