A parable on eternity

I don’t know why but reading Udi Dahan’s post on inifinite scalability reminded me of the following little parable. I trace it back to my Grandma who’s since then long gone and was born in 1904 (one year before special realitivity was published, 32 years before Turing’s machine was described).

It is about eternity:

“Imagine a bird. Every year, on its travels, it visits and stops by a large mountain, a mountain so large that Mount Everest pales in comparison. Every year, that little bird polishes its beak against the cold, hard stone of that mountain. The years pass by, and every time the bird polishes its beak, some substance of the mountain is lost, ground away by the bird’s hard bill. One day, the mountain was gone, ground down by countless visits of that immortal bird. That was the moment were one second of eternity had passed.”