Eternal Hourglass Of Existence
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,
an 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!”
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 341 by Friedrich Nietzsche
A thought experiment is the heart of Nietzsche’s point of view. This scenario may fruitfully be considered from time to time… If one believes there is no respite from cause and effect, — that every sliver of reality has a predecessor, a prior circumstance serving as its cause, even a matrix of causes, then the life I now experience at this moment, is the sole life possible to me.
If a demon were to give me the choice, to start over, to live it all over again, every agony, every ecstasy,
— what would my answer be?
4 thoughts on “Eternal Hourglass Of Existence”
An interesting premise, though the question that immediately comes to mind is: Would we be aware of our previous life, or do we begin anew each time as if that life had never existed before? Being aware of that previous life would predispose us to act differently each time, much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. If we were unaware of that prior iteration, it wouldn’t matter a whit if we repeated an infinite number of times.
Ah, but if Mr. Nietzsche were using this parable to illustrate determinism, that would be a different animal altogether. That our fates we set by the initial flash of the birth of the universe is one that I ascribe to wholeheartedly. There is no escaping cause and effect and we are the sum of our chemical reactions, chemicals that were formed when the vapors of the universe were in constant flux.
So I offer a piece written a number of years back:
The Music of Time
There is a melody that has existed
since the beginning,
since the cosmos opened it gates
and the light of creation
rushed forward against the darkness.
A melody sung by swirls of ancient dust
as galaxies formed and new worlds
danced among the stars.
There is a melody that rides the winds of time,
echoing against the edges of the universe
and reverberating within vast chambered neutrons.
For a moment in its journey
the melody pulls from the strings of a piano
drifts through the air
and settles on the membrane of my ear
before melting from the present.
There is a melody that will last
until the final spark of nature is extinguished.
A melody that has been caught
in the eddies of existence where it cannot escape,
for its indelible notes were, are and will be
written upon the fabric of this seemingly eternal
but far too brief iteration
of all that we will ever know.
A beautiful lyric.
I am confident that Nietzsche was of like mind with you. He revisits this theme a number of times, so there would be no need to ask for further clarification, if he were still around. For me the pivot point of the parable is the prospect of giving a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down” to a repeat of the life one has lived to the present point. There is no correct answer. The answer that is given though reveals a great deal abut one’s attitude toward life.
I think it would actually be refreshing to believe we repeat every nuance of our current time on earth, even if we had to make the identical mistakes and suffer the same pains over and over again. But it would also be nice to think there is some form of consciousness in a post mortem existence. Either possibility is beyond doubtful. My strong sense is that we can apply Occam’s razor to our existence in that the simplest explanation for life is closest to the truth. It is a WYSIWYG world, no magic beans, no deities, no everlasting souls, just a highly dysfunctional species wrecking havoc on its home, fouling its only nest.
No magic beans………..