I’ve probably said this a zillion times, but it is worth repeating: Myriad is a pretty way to express indeterminate magnitude — uncountably many. Originally, myriad meant ten-thousand, and in pre-digital times ten-thousand was, for all practical purposes, uncountable. Computers have since blown out the limits of countability. We need something much larger, now. For this purpose, I like “zillion” quite a bit. Zillion is technically a fictional number, which pushes it beyond the limits of quantity into a quality of uncountability, and which gives it an attractive goofiness and some substantial functional advantages over myriad.

The widespread use of infinity as a quantity is, metaphysically speaking, incorrect. Infinity is beyond the domain of quantity.

What most people mean when they say “infinite” is indeterminate. But because within their particular enworldment there is no need for metaphysical infinite, it makes no internal difference.

It does, however, close off all thought that might lead beyond this understanding. But that is actually a feature, not a bug.

In third grade, when I was chain-reading every Oz book in the Morrison Elementary Library, I learned that the land of Oz was protected by the Deadly Desert. Set foot on it, you yourself dissolve into sand. Later I learned that Hades is moated by obliviating rivers, each annihilating some aspect of selfhood. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell observed a universal pattern in myths and fairy tales of thresholds at the start and end of the hero’s journey that dissolves and reconstitutes the hero.

The hero’s journey, Campbell’s meta-myth, sheds important light on what these stories are really about: transformational experiences. They involve leaving this world, entering a new world, the hero undergoing ordeals and overcoming profound challenges that fundamentally and inwardly change the hero, and then the hero returning to this world with new insights and gifts for the people still on this side of reality.

Soul and place are intimately connected, and this is because enworldment dissolves the subject-object dichotomy. A new enworldment always entails a reborn subject, and a new subject always reenworlds itself.

But this is not a painless change. “Leaving this world” is always a kind of death and an entry into something inconceivable. Nietzsche said it beautifully, “only where there are graves are there resurrections.”

A rebirth event cannot happen within an enworldment, as a simple change of opinion or moral outlook or life trajectory. They happen across enworldments — in traversal of nihilitude that dissolves self and world together.

Rebirth is preceded by death — nihilitude — and, before that, dread, which is the existential response to intuited nihilitude, by no means limited to death. But if we confront dread and plunge into oblivion, we reemerge on the other side, in the next enworldment… ex nihilo.

Is this myriad vs infinity distinction just is a pedantic hair-split? Yes! And perhaps life as you know it depends on this remaining so. Note the note of unease behind the annyance and boredom. Also, have you checked Instagram today?