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"And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.
And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah, and Sabtecha:
and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan.
And Cush begat Nimrod: He began to be a mighty one in the earth."

-- Genesis 10:6-8

Many of the images show a field etc. "stretching to infinity". For people with a certain mind set this is an attractive idea. Some yearn for the "wide open spaces" and what is wider than infinity?

This prompts the question "How about eternity?" How would you show eternity in a picture? Since time doesn't exist in the spatial plane of art, it is necessary to find a symbolic or metaphorical way of showing "eternity". This image is my response to this widely-felt need. It shows eternity by way of generations of humans. If a number of generations beyond count has gone by, we can think of it as "eternity".

Many people like a picture that can be viewed at a glance. "Ah, flowers. Pretty." A picture that tells a story demands more of the viewer's attention.

This is a sequence of individuals in four phases of their lives: infancy, toddlerhood, youth, and adulthood. These follow each other chronologically from left to right, and taking up anew again at each row. The infants are color-coded blue or pink as is usual in our culture, and are randomly male or female with 50-50 odds. The next two figures have the same clothing colors as a code for the fact that they are the same growing individual with the same favorite colors. For the adults the figure on the left has the same clothing color and gender as the growing child, indicating that this is the same person. The adult is embracing a new figure of the opposite gender, with randomly chosen (within a range) clothing color and skin color. He or she has found a mate, and the cycle repeats, infant, toddler, ... . To sum up, this can be thought of as a "movie", with frames about every 6-7 years, of a single branch of a family tree, with individuals being born, growing up, and mating. Years beyond mating are not shown as they are unimportant for our basic biological story.

Each figure has hair and skin colors appropriate for a range of ethnicities. The coloring of each newborn is an average (with some additional random variation) of the coloring for the parents.

At the upper left of the picture as the figures get smaller and smaller they also fade into the white background, suggesting that beyond this point the "mist of time" has obscured history.

Some might view this is a graphic version of the "begat" geneologies of the Bible. With 358 generations shown (trust me!), if this is viewed as looking backward from the 21st century we have about 8900 years at 25 years per generation (roughly, since the dawn of agriculture).

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