The Blessing of Eternal Reccurence
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment where you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’”[1]
FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE
Could you see this as a blessing? Could you look back at your vast and complex life and truly say to yourself, ‘I would do it all again’? Even with pain and suffering and struggle, do you see life as beautiful enough to endure for perpetuity?
Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence would be a gift! Look down that long road ahead, stretching out forever into nature, into the world, into life, and tell me it is not beautiful. And if you find it terrible, if you find your own life to be terrible, then look closer, and discover that beauty.
[1] Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science: with a prelude in German rhymes and an appendix of songs, ed. by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 194.
Pharos. 