Again and Again

Ever since we talked about Nietzsche’s “Greatest Burden” in class (the one with the demon and life put on endless repeat) I’ve found myself thinking about it more than I had expected. I have to say that I still don’t fully understand the logistics of it, in terms of how and when a life would be completed, and to what extent, of how aware you would be of such things, etc., but that doesn’t really matter. There are a few things that strike me about it. For one thing, the phrase “thy loneliest loneliness.” I’ve heard people say that the worst pain you block out of your memory, so when you try to think back to that time that you broke your arm or were absolutely awfully humiliated or whatever it might be, you can’t remember exactly what that moment felt like in all its horrendous details. I feel that way a bit about loneliness too. Sitting in the MEH classroom, which was filled with sunlight almost at the end of the school day, it was really hard to imagine what “loneliest loneliness” would feel like. I’d just had a cup of coffee (or two?) and was feeling rather forcefully (if falsely) cheerful, so thinking about the demon’s pronouncement, I tried to tell myself that it wouldn’t matter really. In that sort of rebellious way you get when you’re trying to convince yourself that something was your idea in the first place, I told myself that, in that situation, I’d take advantage of the situation. After all, sometimes it’s comforting watching movies and tv shows when you know how they’re going to end. Why couldn’t life be like that? It might be nice to know what was coming, to look forward to the happy parts and brace yourself for the humiliations and heartbreaks.

That’s the happy mind thinking, though. To think about it from the loneliest lonely mind, it would be different, surely. However, and maybe I just think this because I’ve never felt the sort of loneliness that Nietzsche is alluding too, it might be comforting to realize that, no matter how bad things would get, you’d always get a chance to return back to the innocence and dependence of your childhood, which (one would hope) is one of the most comforting things you could hear in that situation. Either way, really what it comes down to, and we discussed this in class briefly, is that you’d be losing control of your own actions, of the choice that you had or at least appeared to have before (depending on your view), and all that would be left to you would be your mind, and your emotions. So, although you might not realize in the awful moment that the demon was informing you of the situation, you would ultimately reach a state in which the facts of your life, the events and the petty details, were so familiar that you had begun to ignore them, that they no longer caused you pain. It would be like playing a song on repeat, I would think: you’d no longer concentrate on the lyrics, simply nodding along to the beat as you let yourself become lost in your thoughts.