As I wrestled with disorientation on my way back from Ohio, earlier this week, I recalled something that could serve as a counterweight, helping me to keep my balance and so to avoid sliding into regret and dwelling on what could have been.
I first gave serious attention to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche in a graduate seminar with Dave Allison in the early 1990s. Some passages from The Gay Science stuck with me, and my thought wanders back to them, from time to time.
In perhaps the most notorious section of the work, Nietzsche tells of a madman who rushes into a crowded market, bearing a lantern at midday, and declares that he is seeking God.
The people in the market laugh at the madman. He does not take it well.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this?”
I cannot now disentangle what I learned from Dave Allison from my own subsequent reading and reflection, but I have come to understand the murder of God as standing in for the more comprehensive modern rejection of the kind of tradition that might ground us and orient us in the world.
The madman continues:
“How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder?”
What he describes here is a kind of cosmic exile: we have wiped away the horizon, unchained the earth from the sun; we are hurtling through the void with no way to orient ourselves.
It’s horrifying. How are we supposed to live and to find meaning in our lives if we are adrift in the void?
Nietzsche offers a counterpoint a bit later in the book, in a section titled “The Greatest Weight”:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
I’ve read interpretations of this passage which cast it as metaphysical speculation, intended as a literally true account of the way things are.
Partly due to Allison’s interpretation, I have always read this passage instead as a thought experiment or a heuristic: What if you would live every moment of your life over and over, unto eternity? How would that change your outlook on the world, your understanding of yourself?
But think about what this “eternal return” would imply: endlessly repeating every ill-considered choice, every missed opportunity, every pang of regret or of despair, all the grief and misery and pain – all of it, forever.
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 when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
So, what is it to be? Regret and the gnashing of teeth? Or acceptance, even affirmation?
If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
At each of the various points at which I faced a choice that would alter the direction of my life, even the moments at which I chose between going back home and going forward toward Cosmopolis, I had Nietzsche’s heuristic in mind.
I could not know if I was making the correct choice, I could not foresee what might bring rejoicing or regret. I could only choose and, in choosing, determine who and what I would become, what my life would mean.
Without those choices and all their varied consequences, I would not be where I am now, enjoying the autumn sunlight in North Georgia, cultivating whatever meager scraps of wisdom I may have attained along the way to this moment, feeling contented.
So, would I rejoice at the prospect of doing everything over again, exactly as it has been?
Perhaps so.
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 181, 273-4.
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