“There’s this emperor, and he asks the shepherd’s boy how many seconds in eternity. And
the shepherd’s boy says, ‘There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it
and an hour to go around it, and every hundred years a little bird comes and sharpens its
beak on the diamond mountain. And when the entire mountain is chiselled away, the first
second of eternity will have passed.’ You may think that’s a hell of a long time. Personally, I
think that’s a hell of a bird.”- The Twelfth Doctor from Doctor Who
I must confess, the very idea of confronting eternity electrifies me to my very soul(or
whatever there is in its place). Maybe that is why I couldn’t help but cry out sordid tears
made out of some existential goop when I saw the twelfth doctor trapped in his own
confession dial for 4.5 billion years. Maybe that is why Doctor Strange’s surrender to
Dormammu remains my favourite Marvel experience and maybe that is why all that a writer needs to do is introduce an element of time to gain my dedicated attention.
Anthropocentrism is possibly the vilest outcomes of the human mind, there I was spending
my numbered days always having assumed that the planet is mine(ours)to save when I
suddenly realised that the planet is not mine(ours) at all. We are the tiniest speck on the pale blue dot we call home. Imagine my disgust when I understood that we had shrouded our endeavour to save our species as an altruistic act of saving the planet(Bless you, George
Carlin). In its life of 4.5 billion years, the planet has only hosted us for about 200,000 years
and mask us in a fickle bubble of time when I could perish mid-sentence. How gloriously do
we think of ourselves, and how glorious we must be indeed.
Think about the bird there, I suppose we are quite like it. Relentless, Assuming, a little-
foolish but with a point to prove.
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