Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence: What If You Had to Live Your Life Over and Over Again?

Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence poses the following question: What if you had to live your life, just as it is and has been, over and over and over again? Would it be heaven or hell or just some lame, lukewarm purgatory?

I wrote the following piece, which consists of variations on the theme of eternal recurrence, while tripping on acid during a particularly tempestuous time in my 20's.

As usual, I used GenCraft AI to create this image.

Let's take Nietzsche's thought experiment one step further. If you could relive one magnificent moment of your life over and over again for eternity, which one would it be? What about if you were forced to relive your most dreadful moment over and over again - which moment would be your Hell?

My initial reaction is that my worst episode of combined opioid, benzo, and barbiturate withdrawal would be my personal Hell, but deep down, I know that this is a cop out; the truth is that there have been many moments in which other people have abused, mocked, and chastised me that have scalded my soul far more painfully and permanently.

Long ago, countless lovers, and at least 80 percent of a liver away, I became enamored of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 -1900), a German intellectual whose critiques of philosophy (particularly moral philosophy), culture, and art had game-changing impacts.

For those of you who wish to pass on my brief introduction to Nietzsche's works, simply skip down to the bolded section below, where the relevant quote from Nietzsche / my journal entry begin!

"God is dead," one of Nietzsche's most famous quotes, established him as one of the leaders of existentialism, a philosophical movement that emphasizes that man is alone in a Godless universe, and that each individual possesses the agency to determine his or her own fate.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche rejected the Christan "slave morality" traditionally used to subjugate the masses.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche further developed the concept of the Übermensch, a sort of superman who would rise above the traditional, self-limiting values of the wider culture and self-actualize based on goals and values that were entirely his own. The Übermensch is the master of his own fate, answerable to no one except himself.

Nietzsche put a lot of thought into how to best harness humanity's manifold talents and powers.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche approached this issue through the lens of Greek mythology.

Apollo, the Greek god of the sun, represents truth, light, logic, and order.

Dionysus, later Bacchus in the Roman pantheon, is the God of emotions, drunkenness, festivals, and madness. Music and mystical revelations arise from the Dionysian state, as well.

Nietzsche advocated for the fusion of these two apparently dichotomous forces, which would allow the frenzied, wildly powerful energy of the Dionysian state to be contained, organized, and applied within the logical Apollonian framework.

He believed that the ancient Greeks understood and occasionally achieved this - thus explaining their timeless philosophical and aesthetic / artistic contributions.

This is a passage from Nietsche's The Gay Science, in which he describes the concept of eternal recurrence:

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 I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down 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 when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” 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?

[This is where my reaction to the above passage begins. Enjoy the flowing, possibly certifiable, most likely cringey, most definitely psychedelic response!]

My blackest seconds have stretched on for eons, have been so whimpering-abysmal that they tore chunks from my soul. 

And yet my numb, mangled soldier-shell marched on. 

What do you do when you get to hell? You keep on walking. 

I’ve suffered through spirit-shrieking, shivering, shimmering, shuddering withdrawal, when every cell and atom cried out for the Substance to no avail. 

I felt the shit and piss weep down my legs as my backbone-less spine arched into a seizure.

I hallucinated baby spiders crawling out of a filthy, overused orifice that opened itself on my bedroom wall, hair sprouting from the moist folds of its accordioned flesh. 

The orifice-oracle spoke to me, shared truths that I never should’ve known about myself and the rest of humanity. 

"Where did the spiders go?" I wondered as that gossamer hole disappeared. 

I’ve quivered broken and bloody, curled up like an aborted fetus inside another wrecked car - my brain bruised, my limb demolished, my knee gashed open to expose the white truth of the bone beneath (the only part of me not capable of lying). 

“I need help; I can’t stop using heroin,” I confessed to the State Trooper who cradled me until the medics came.

I’ve never accepted “no” from Destiny or any lesser leader.

I’ve bashed my bones through brick walls. I laughed lightly, as though I were sashaying through silk curtains. 

I’ve slashed my wrists open to let out the rage and the yearning – my soul swelling with such dreadful voltage that I couldn’t contain it anymore, couldn’t breathe or move or think. 

Is this what it’s like to be crazy? Does it really matter anymore?

I am the junkie archetype: Nodding off on a bench in Thornden park, drooling on myself as passing people spouted concern, disdain, riotous amusement.

I bathed in the forbidden waters of their sadistic judgments, an unholy baptism.

They'd genuflect if they knew what acrid acid ate me from within.

I’ve been the Crazy person talking to himself, blurting blurred prophecies and charred fragments of terrible truths about what might have, would have been.

Somehow these sidewalk prophecies always landed a minute too late, two beats out of sync with the rhythm of the rest of the universe. 

Once, a little boy had to call an ambulance for me as I overdosed beside him on a bus in Philadelphia.

He was calm and brave, one of the few heroes of my sin-soaked story.

“I hope you feel better,” he said as they put me on a stretcher and hauled me away. 

Blessed are the children. They are the only ones among us who are worth saving. 

I’ve been famished and penniless. (Did you stop to imagine what those words mean? Can you even imagine it?).

Prostrate and humiliated. A diminished, contemptible, ravenous revenant. 

You'd be scared when you met me if you stood between me and what I required to get the Substance into those greedy holes in the crooks of my arms.

I went willingly into the involuntary psychiatric hold. (Does it become voluntary when there is no resistance?).

A kind, obese, middle-aged woman told me that everyone called her Mama; she showed me how to wear two hospital gowns at once so that my ass wasn’t hanging out.

Later on, a terse nurse warned me not to call that patient Mama; said she was manic and hypersexual.

But no one else explained how to wear a hospital gown so that I wasn't half-naked.

I couldn’t sit or lie down without the insistent bones poking through in all the wrong places, reminding me of the neglected needs of my festering flesh.

I knew Hell as Hunger. 

Anguished alliteration became prayer by proxy.

I begged for money. I did worse things than beg.

I conned slickly and wantonly. I took and took and took.

I became insatiable, a fundamental force of craven craving.

Under the starborn heat of my futile fury, I compressed all of my shame and madness into a cursed, omni-flawed diamond to cut myself with (for by now it was the only thing harder than me).

I did anything, anything, to keep the high going, to ward off that terminal sickness called reality - those cold, grainy truths of a ruined and wasted life. 

***

But then.

I’ve been not just high, but exalted. 

I took LSD to see clearly for a never-ending now.

I spoke with God. I accepted His tears and His apologies.

It’s not your fault, I assured Him. No one could have planned for this.

My spirit sprouted chains of technicolor Celtic knotwork, twisted double-helices of DNA.

They would around my arms and legs and trunk, shot out from my hands and my heart as though I were a superhero (I am a superhero).

They linked me to every single thing that is and was and will be.

They revealed everything that ought to be and isn’t, everything that pined to exist but doesn't. 

We mourned them together. It seems that God, too, abandons difficult drafts. 

I injected molten speedball pleasure into my veins, the likes of which most people will never even hear an echo of a whisper of. 

Don’t you wonder? When you come to the ends of your lives, won’t you regret?

I laughed in the face of their terror, imagined what it would be like to live without knowing This.

It’s right there in front of them, and yet they fear it and judge it and spurn it. 

This is a high worth dying for, I thought again and again as I chased it into nonexistence. 

I rode bareback the jet-engine thrills of the amphetamine take-offs, waxed laughing-hysterical when three sleepless nights later I was thrown wasted and abraded to the chemical curb, where I spun over and over again until the capricious world collapsed into a kaleidoscopic fantasy. 

I’ve paid the 30-gauge cover fee to pass through the portal into poppy-bright eternity.

Chemically cocooned myself so that the entire universe became a fawning soulmate, collapsed into a loving embrace.

"All is right; your soul is safe,” it lied to me. 

I’ve studied under geniuses, received their compliments as a sun-scorched crop gulps the rain that finally comes.

“You belong here, living the life of the mind," they said to me. “You are one of us.” 

For a time, I found peace in ancient, forgotten books - illuminated manuscripts and their virtuous tales.

Test tubes and cell cultures revealed their secrets to me; data was parsed, was sacred, was the future. 

“I belong in the field, conducting an entirely different type of research,” was my spirit's unspoken answer. 

I spat in the faces of my mentors. They wept for me, forgave me as I drowned myself in decadence. 

I’ve passed by the ancient hutong of Beijing, exchanged pain-laden looks with the withered women who mind the 24-hour shops where weeping relatives come to buy funeral garments for their departed loves.

Their dead could only rest softly, contented, because life is so hard here. Their duties are finally discharged.  

I’ve strolled through the palaces of the Descendants of the Dragon, imagined the lotus-kisses of ethereal princesses who pulled the puppet-strings of empires.

Something in them recognized something in me. That was enough.

I heard echoes of the concubines wailing that their bastard children had been poisoned, ground up, thrown in the well. 

That was the price; it always has been.

Remain here and follow the way of the Tao, my ancestors welcomed me. There is wisdom in pain and peace in sacrifice; your torture purifies you.

You have traveled around the world to come home. Now your soul will shine again.

I’ve slept on sumptuous beds, spread-eagled on sheets with infinite thread counts in five-star hotels where you pull back the curtains to take in the views of the kings and conmen.

The refined air in such places vibrates with coppery dominance, iron ambition. Every blood-stained footstep lands with surety of purpose. 

I raped every senseless boundary, made love to every much-maligned taboo.

I’ve freed myself of the prison of other people’s expectations, judgments, limits. 

I am the prodigal son. I walk between worlds.

I am a rebel. I am a failure. I am the Ubermensch.

A dissolute, deluded, absurdist thing.

I’ve embraced friends who became brothers and sisters, who taught me the language of a love powerful enough to be balm to a soul as wretched as mine.

They loved all of me: The broken, the wrong, the blasphemous. 

I withheld nothing from them as our scarred souls fused together.

We laughed at the chaos and the madness and the great, gravity-bending pain.

I’ve lain with beautiful, powerful men, sleek and hard, supple and angular. Their taut bodies and slick, holy sweat were the most potent prayer-answers that I’ve ever received. 

I worshiped them and glorified them. I used them up, discarded them like come-filled condoms.

I took a lover whose name I never knew.

We didn’t speak a word of each other’s languages; carnal communication was our only tongue. 

His eyes waxed eloquent as he pulled me toward him, thrust himself into another conversation.

You are beautiful, and I will remember this moment on my dying day, those moon-bright eyes vowed. 

He didn't look back before he closed the door behind him.

He joins me often in my dreams.

***

This is my life. 

I wasn’t made to drive the Lamborghini of this expansive, potent, boundary-pushing mind-body at 45 m.p.h.

Forget anyone who would try to persuade me to.

Those who would contain me could not truly love me; they love only a diminished, hog-tied soul-simulacrum, an echo-artifact of me. 

I was built for this, to live at 0 and 10 instead of 4 or 5 or 6. 

The lukewarm and mediocre are anathema to me. My spirit rebels against the suburban and the ordinary. 

I reach and seek and stumble. I weep and shout and win. 

I’ve lived many lives. I contain multitudes upon multitudes. 

I want to see and feel as much as I can before I go. That is my religion. 

If the Fate-makers forced eternal recurrence upon me, I would not throw myself down or gnash my teeth.

I’d straighten my spine and smilingly do it all over again.

I’d sprint through the door to yesterday with a bright grin on my face and the same hungry hole in my soul, my nuclear heart radioactive with that same undiminished yearning. 

That blazing hunger to learn, to connect, and to consume defines me; I am nothing without it. 

Being me, even if I were presented with a choice, no other option but eternal recurrence would be possible.

That is the only true wisdom that I’ve ever gained. 

I was built for this.

Bring it on.