CAN YOU DIG INFINITY? If you ask most people if they know what infinity is, they will say, “Yes.”

On the surface infinity is easy to figure out. It simply means something that goes on and on without end. Even a small child can grasp the general concept of the infinite. However, when you get down to it, you find that many people have a lopsided, shortsighted view of what infinity really is. 

For most folks this is the standard vision of the infinite: You go outside on a starry night and you look up into a cloudless sky and you see the infinite cosmos spread out before you in all directions, and you think, “Ha, ha! There, that is infinity, right there. It is as plain as the nose on your face.”

However, that interpretation leaves much out of the equation. People tend to think of infinity as a matter of distance radiating outward. “From here to eternity is a long ways away.”

Roll your eyes back into your head for a moment and look in the other direction. Think about size as well as distance when contemplating infinity. When traveling inward into subatomic territory, we find the other end of infinity. For just as deep space goes outward forever, so too does inner space. Small never ends. We can chase it in a lab as far as identifying a few quarks, but then it shrinks away out of reach like a distant galaxy.

Students would tell me they couldn’t figure out the world because it was too large and complicated. Backpackers would star gaze and comment on their insignificance. I’d just turn it around on them. “Look inside. Your mind is infinite. Dig it.”

If I could take a space adventure, I wouldn’t want to travel frozen in a sepulcher until we reached our destination. Nor would I wish to travel near the speed of light or flounder through a wormhole. The destination would look similar to what we’re seeing now, I suspect. Why go through the trouble?

If I could take a space adventure, I would want to grow infinitely large.

Of course, I would have some special breathing apparatus and stretchy suit designed by Marvel, but I’d like to have our solar system within my wingspan.

What would the sun look like when it’s the size of a golf ball? Could I grab a hold of it with specially designed gloves? If I continued to grow, would I just be kicking around in a sea of marbles, some hot, some not? What happens when the marbles shrink to grains of sand?

How would space look to an eyeball the size of the rotation of Pluto? Would we see the same swarm of white points in a sea of darkness forever, no matter how large we grew? Or would stars and planets coalesce into new shapes as I expanded and emerged out of someone’s kneecap or the tip of a tail of a masked shrew? Would I pop out like Ant-Man in an alternate universe and discover we are but a quark ourselves embedded into the lives of others? Our millennium is their second?

Would I grow through this alternate universe, becoming, in succession, a similar-sized alien, “Dude!” then a benign giant, “I come in peace!” and then grow outward to yet another swarm of galaxies like marbles and onward to pop out once again on some fisherman’s big toe, or a blade of grass, or perhaps a worm’s hole?

I obviously have way too much time on my hands.

I recall that infinity used to frighten me when I was young. I would sit out under the stars and look up and feel small and insignificant. How could I ever understand all this? I felt like I was at the short end of existence, and life was to be an uphill struggle.

I’m forever thankful for my liberal education. It exposed me to everything from Zen to Albert Einstein. I felt disoriented and unsure of my place in the world until nearly a college graduate when a combination of philosophy, physics, and literature classes led me to understand that I was not lost, that I was neither small nor insignificant. Our existence is in middle of it all, not at some bitter end. Infinity travels in all directions with us happily in the center.

To quote a bit from Lord Buckley’s hipster rap on Jonah:

“(Jonah) said, ‘Lord! Lord! Can you dig me in this here fish?’ And The Lord said, ‘I got you covered, Jonah.’

“And Jonah said, ‘Man, the Lord’s sure got a crazy sense of humor! Maybe that’s the reason I dig the cat so much! Tells me he got me covered. The cat got me surrounded!’”

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.