It’s interesting how much more potent “a billion years” is than “forever.” In practical terms, it’s basically the same thing. I’ll put it this way. If I had started counting to 1,000,000,000 at the instant of my birth and had not done anything else since, I would be “close” to finishing that count sometime this year. I might have been able to do it before I turned thirty-five. Alas. Just think of what could be. To do something for a billion years is literally countable. About a billion years ago, our planet was getting to the whole algae thing. You commit to doing something for a billion years, and you commit to the period of time between the era of Green Algae and the last few minutes of Humanity.

They really should have just given Amy Adams her Oscar for The Master; Anne Hathaway getting it for Les Miserables instead is item of proof #28 for how screwed up the 85th Academy Awards are. Adams doesn’t always have her clothes on in this movie, she’s playing against type, she plays someone’s wife, she has a couple scenes where she gets angry and snippy. Platitudes and snark aside, it’s genuinely a great performance. It peaks when she jerks off Philip Seymour Hoffman into a sink, but that’s a pretty high bar to clear. This line is a close enough second, spoken ferociously to a man who everyone but her husband got tired of years ago. A billion years or not at all.

People would rather say they’d do something forever than a billion years, I think, and my guess is that it has a lot to do with the principle that The Simpsons exposed back in the mid-’90s. You’ll never believe what Bart does in “Bart Sells His Soul.” Like me, Bart is skeptical about whether there is such a thing as a soul, and to prove it, he sells his soul to Milhouse in the most official form that the boys can think up. It takes very little time for Bart to realize that while he may not think he has a soul 99.9% of the time, that last tenth of a percent really sticks in his craw. To say that one will sell one’s soul, or to say that one will do something for all eternity, is basically vapid. It’s too abstract to credit. To say that one will watch another person flaunt the document of sale, or that one will do something for one billion years, puts things in perspective. And as psychotic as Peggy sounds when she gives Freddie that ultimatum, there’s something admirable about the idea of devoting yourself so completely to an idea that you can count the days until you’re set free from it, a day that is both factual and incomprehensible.