AG: I read somewhere that you had a professor in college who described eternity as this process of whittling down a metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter to the size of a pea with a single feather, and that you took his words verbatim and wrote “Randy Described Eternity” from Perfect From Now On.
DM: Pretty close. I think it’s a standard metaphor that’s used by Christian religious people to describe eternity. It wasn’t exactly that. I had to change some things from how I remembered because of syllables and meter and stuff, but basically that’s the idea—something giant getting slapped with a feather [until it’s worn down to nothing], you know, just some ridiculous metaphor for how long eternity is.
From Antigravity Magazine
antigravitymagazine.com/blog/doug-martsch-built-to-spill/
AG: I read somewhere that you had a professor in college who described eternity as this process of whittling down a metal sphere ten times the size of Jupiter to the size of a pea with a single feather, and that you took his words verbatim and wrote “Randy Described Eternity” from Perfect From Now On. DM: Pretty close. I think it’s a standard metaphor that’s used by Christian religious people to describe eternity. It wasn’t exactly that. I had to change some things from how I remembered because of syllables and meter and stuff, but basically that’s the idea—something giant getting slapped with a feather [until it’s worn down to nothing], you know, just some ridiculous metaphor for how long eternity is.