I have seen eternity, and yet somehow I am alive to tell about it.
The word eternity means very little to you. Depending on your generation, perhaps you have some Sunday-school idea of “eternity” which is actually just a single, long, unvarying stretch of time; or perhaps if you are younger and interested in science, you have a much more interesting idea — a universe of stars forming over billions of years, hundreds of thousands of species evolving, flourishing, collapsing, and changing again, the earth being swallowed by dying sun, the universe collapsing and then expanding again and the cycle repeating itself.
Every prophet faces the same dilemma. He has seen things for which there are no words, and is compelled to speak about them. So you can see he has a choice: either express the wild grandeur of the vision as faithfully as he can (and make no sense to anyone), or boil it down, dry it out, and cut it up into sentences that anyone can understand — at which point it looks and smells nothing like he saw.
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