Eternity.  For some, eternity is a myth; for others, a dream; for others, a very present longing; for others, an indefinable hope; for others, visible reality.  Incomprehensible (who can conceive of a state which has no beginning nor end), mortally unattainable (can anyone ever hope to live without being born?), and yet dragging itself through most of our imaginations, eternity burdens us.  It stirs us, it cajoles us, it beguiles us, it soothes us.  It also offends us, promising a life that is, by any credible reason, temporally impossible to obtain.
     Maybe that's the point.  Real or not, eternity speaks to us because it tells of realities beyond our ken, yet realities whose presence most of us wish would be so.  Who would not want to know that this life is not all there is?  Who would not want to know that this world will not always be its broken (yet glorious) self?  Or that it had a future beyond comprehension?
     If eternity were merely an extension of mortality, it would not be nearly as attractive.  Who  would want to gradually atrophy for centuries (although the elves in Lord of the Rings movies looked rather good for being 3,000 years old!)?  Eternity is only wonderful if it is something completely unlike anything we know now.
     And this is the burden.  Eternity is qualitatively different.  As one writer put it, it is the "life after life after death."  Eternity is alone and apart.  Yet it is the beginning and end of all things.  Oddly (and perhaps frustratingly), however, we will not find eternity unless we believe in it, and we must believe in it without seeing it.
     To borrow a phrase from the timeless Star Trek series (television and movie), eternity:  the final frontier.