Ends...and eternity

In an attempt to get the small load of homework I have over the next few days over with, I was just reading "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man" by James Joyce, and although I'm in the middle of a pretty terrifying (and droning) sermon about hell, I thought the following passage was an interesting capturing of time:

"For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad...imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended." (115)

(referring to being in hell forever; forget the fact that it's about hell)
Sorry about its length (and i cut quite a bunch out)...(ha..ha...an excerpt of "eternal" duration)...But I started to think about eternity...my mind wanders there often. The idea that time is finite by its current definition...but that if anything, an abyss of nothingness will always exist. A black, soundless pit of night that has a life of its own, thus making nothingness eternal and immortal.

So is nothingness equal to nothing? Thus making everything finite?

Every human being is comforted by the idea of an end. The only way we tolerate pain is the knowing that it will end, whether that be when a needle retracts out of our pores, or when we die and the aches that accompany old age finally diminish.

Yet though we desperately need ends and finite-ness (finity?), we mourn them. Are we really mourning the end? Or are we lamenting the change that comes with it? Both?