On Eternity I: The Eternal Return
My first encounter with the concept of Eternal Return was in The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. By imagining a world without Eternal Return, Kundera portrayed life as a performance with no rehearsals and no opportunity for revision. It was precisely this one-time-only nature that made life unbearably light. Unable to fully grasp what he meant, I turned to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science in search of a clearer understanding of what Eternal Return truly was.
Back in August 1881, while strolling along Lake Silvaplana in the Upper Engadine region of Switzerland, Nietzsche was struck by a sudden revelation—a thought towering “6,000 feet beyond man and time”:
What if, one day or night, a demon were to steal 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. Every pain, every joy, every thought, every sigh, and everything—unspeakably small or great—must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.”
The one-time-only nature of life determined the fleetingness and irrecoverability of even the most breathtaking beauty. More terrifyingly, sins and mistakes were effortlessly absolved and forgotten in the current of time. The bloodshed of the French Revolution eventually faded from memory, leaving only the legacy of Robespierre’s rise to power. Even Hitler's photograph evoked Kundera's childhood memories—those tinged with a yellowish glow—rather than images of crime and war. In a world that had discarded Eternal Return, there was no profound happiness, and morality inevitably began to decay. As Kundera suggested, life’s finiteness stripped every action of its weight, while placing oneself within the hypothesis of Eternal Return fabricated both a past life and an afterlife for our fleeting existence. Every decision ceased to belong solely to that moment—it became part of an endless cycle of repetition. In this way, Nietzsche constructed an entirely new worldview that gave weight to life.
And so, I recalled the choices I had made over the past seventeen years. I was brought back to a winter night in 2020, painting on my balcony, when I—someone who usually skipped songs—listened to Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die in its entirety. I remembered how, in May 2023, I had accidentally ended up in a book club I hadn’t even signed up for, and at Lucas’s suggestion, turned the pages of The Garden of Forking Paths and met Borges. I thought of the infinite, unconditional love I had once given within the finite time I had lived. The smallest, most trivial memories suddenly felt weighty, as if they were already echoes of countless repetitions in the past. Though reason told me this could never be possible, the thought that the happiness I once had might reoccur after untold centuries still gladdened my solitude with an elegant hope.