Eternal recurrence and our sense(s) of time:
It possibilizes a prophetic sense of the future; but isn’t the past also granted a sense of uncertainty, of yet-to-be?
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Once on a walk I asked each and everything: Do you want this once more and innumerable times more? and I was overwhelmed by the spreading of palm leaves in the sun and then smallest and greatest of lives scurrying around me just then. The question, in other words, felt for a moment to be asked of them and not only of me.
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The affirmation of eternal recurrence doesn’t seem (so far) to eliminate the terror of eternal recurrence, the disgust of recurrence, the pettiness dreariness monotony of recurrence, if I have ever once felt any of these.
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There is something unfortunate, even barbaric, about finding the world perfect as another is expressing his sorrow.
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To live a human life can be devastating. To live this life “once more and innumerable times more” can be unbearable. But who am I to say this? When have I said this?
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I suppose the question concerning the self within eternal recurrence is: who am I that will come again, innumerable times? (In a piece of music, e.g. What tone must play here?)
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I want to say: It is especially through moments of leave-taking, moments of heart-wrenching loss and sorrow, that the possibility of eternally returning gains prominence. “How could I bear this again?” or “Enough” is the tone of such moments. But what happens to the character of unspeakable joys and delights when they must be repeated innumerable times?
–There is a distinctive joy that consists in asking, “Come back.”
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Is there a link between wanting the recurrence of all things and wanting recurrence in the everyday? Again and again I return to a distaste of weak habit, routine.
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With one moment, we can be sent into joy or despair. And these, joy and despair, take in our entire lives.
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Love the Dust 