The eternal return
Nietzsche · The Gay Science · 1882
Imagine that one night, in your loneliest solitude, a demon slips beside you and says: « This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live once more and countless times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain, every pleasure, every thought, and this very moment, will return in the same order. » The hourglass of existence would be turned over endlessly, and you with it. does not ask whether this is true: he makes it a trial. For the question it raises reaches you today: would you want to live your days, as you fill them, over and over forever? is less a cosmology than a test: do you love your life enough to will it, identical, for all time?
Would this thought crush you, or would you welcome it as good news? What you answer says a great deal about the time you are living.