the sheen on the skin of a face

we were sitting around the kitchen table this afternoon, my roommates and i, and through the window streamed the kindest of afternoon lights, a warmth indistinguishable (if you were to close your eyes) from the birthing light of spring.
after a moment, my roommate, glowing, just engaged, said:

oh, can't we just be here forever?

what is forever, but the timeless passage of light at the speed of 2.9 x 10^8 m/s through a south facing kitchen window? what is eternity or infinity but the hope of being enveloped by such warmth, the kindness of the earth's womb?

eternity is a terrifying concept. thelma proclaimed this in a visit to our yellow house one weekend in october, and i have wondered at it since. it is the truth that i don't understand it, that none of us can understand it, but something of the billions of base pairs of DNA replicating in our bodies at any given moment, the knowledge of our genetic codes, the reprinting of a genome that has at once always existed and has always been different, makes me want to believe it.

in her book of luke, annie dillard questions,

It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find. It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time. Before our eyes we see an unbroken sheath of colors. We live over a bulk of things. We walk amid a congeries of colored things that part before our steps to reveal more colored things. Above us hurtle more things, which fill the universe. There is no crack. Unbreakable seas lie flush on their beds. Under the Greenland icecap lies not so much as a bubble... Where, then, is the gap through which eternity streams? In holes at the roots of forest cedars I find spiders and chips. I have rolled plenty of stones away, to no avail. Under the lily pads on the lake are flatworms and lake water. Materials wrap us seamlessly; time propels us ceaselessly. Muffled and bound we pitch forward from one filled hour to the next, from one filled landscape or house to the next. No rift between one note of the chorus and the next opens on infinity. No spear of eternity interposes itself between work and lunch.

And this is what we love: this human-scented skull, the sheen on the skin of a face, this exhilarating game, this crowded feast, these shifting mountains, the dense water and its piercing suits. And are we called to forsake these vivid and palpable goods for an idea of which we experience not one trace? Am I to believe eternity outranks my child's finger?

we roll at stones, we try to believe it, we think of the idea that "eternity bears time in its side like a hole".
i still am not sure what to think, but i do know this truth: i might not mind bathing in that circle of light with people that i love for as long as i can comprehend it.