Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
"The Greatest Weight.- What if, one day or night, a daemon were to
slide up after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life, as
you now live and have lived it, you will have to live again and
innumerable times over; and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every pleasure and every thought and sigh and all the
unspeakably small and large things in your life must come back to you,
and all in the same order and sequence - and likewise this spider and
this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself.
The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again -
and you with it, you tiny speck of dust'- Would you not throw yourself
down and gnash your teeth and curse the daemon who talked this way?
Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you
would answer him: 'You are a God and never have I heard anything
more divine!' If this thought were to gain power over you, it would
transform you as you are, and perhaps crush you. The question in each
and every thing, 'Do you want this once more and innumerable times
more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well
disposed to yourself and to life would you be, to long for nothing more
than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"
The Gay Science, 341
Whoever has endeavored with some enigmatic longing, as I have, to
think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it from the half-
Christian, half-German narrowness and simplicity in which it has finally
presented itself to our century, namely, in the form of Schopenhauer's
philosophy; whoever has really, with an Asiatic and supra=Asiatic eye,
looked into, down into the most world-denying of all possible ways of
thinking-- beyond good and evil and no longer, like the Buddha and
Schopenhauer, under the spell and delusion of morality-- may just
thereby, without really meaning to do so, have opened his eyes to the
opposite ideal: the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world
affirming human being who has not only come to terms with whatever
was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all
eternity, shouting insatiably da capo(from the beginning: a musical
direction)-- not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle, and
not only to a spectacle but at the bottom to him who needs precisely this
spectacle-- and who makes it necessary because again and again he
needs himself-- and makes himself necessary-- What? And this wouldn't
be-- circulus vitiosus deus?(A vicious circle made God? or God is a
vicious circle?)
Beyond Good and Evil, 56
"Behold this gateway, dwarf!" I continued. "It has two faces. Two paths
meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane
stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is
another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend
each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come
together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.’ But
whoever would follow one of them on and on, farther and farther – do
you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?"
"All that is straight lies," the dwarf murmured contemptuously. "All truth
is crooked; time itself is a circle."
"You spirit of gravity," I said angrily. "Do not make things too easy for
yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lame-foot;
and it was I that carried you to this height.
"Behold," I continued, "this moment! From this gateway, Moment,
along, eternal lane leads backward: behind us lies an eternity. Must not
whatever can walk have walked on this lane before? Must not whatever
can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before?
And if everything has been there before – what do you think, dwarf, of
this moment? Must not this gateway too have been there before? And
are not all things knotted together so firmly that this moment draws after
it all that is to come? Therefore – itself too? For whatever can walk – in
this long lane out there too, it must walk once more.
"And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight
itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of
eternal things – must not all of us have been there before? And return
and walk in that outer lane, out there, before us, in this long dreadful
lane – must we not eternally return?" (3)
"…O Zarathustra, who you are and must become" behold you are the
teacher of the eternal recurrence – that is your destiny! That you as the
first must teach this doctrine – how could this great destiny not be your
greatest danger and sickness too?
"Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we
ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of
times, and all things with us. You teach that there is a great year of
becoming, a monster of a great year; which must, like an hourglass, turn
over again and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all
these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we
ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is
smallest.
"Now I die and vanish… the soul is as immortal as the body. But the
knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I
myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this
sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent – not to a new life
or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same,
selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the
eternal recurrence of all things…"
-
"O man! Take heed! What saith deep midnight's voice indeed? "I slept
my sleep--, "From deepest dream I've woke, and plead:-- "The world is
deep, "And deeper than the day could read. "Deep is its woe--, "Joy--
deeper still than grief can be: "Woe saith: Hence! Go! "But joys all want
eternity-, "-Want deep, profound eternity!"
Thus Spoke Zarathustra