quoted passage continues, "every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything unspeakably small and great in your life must come back to you, and in the same order and succession—and even so this spider and this moonlight between the trees, even so this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence is ever again turned, and you with it—dust of dust." It is an almost "spectral" impression we get (to use Professor Riehl's adjective),[1] and the undertone of feeling is manifest. If this is to be called immortality, it is immortality of a new kind, as Riehl observes,[2] for it is only this present life, petty and pitiable as it may be, over again. It is possible to despair at such a prospect. We know that a future life has sometimes been dreaded rather than welcomed—for example, among the Buddhists; and this would seem to be another instance. Mr. Henry L. Mencken pronounces Nietzsche's idea "the most hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated by man."[3]
And yet Nietzsche learned how to right himself in this as in other emergencies. Amor fati! If something had to be, it could be endured—and must be made endurable. And much, he saw, depends upon the nature and character of our life. If the recurrence of it is a forbidding thought, is it not because our life has failed to satisfy us, has been unworthy, or full of pain, or at best commonplace—so that we want no more of it? But if it has been a happy life, or at least if there have been supreme moments of happiness in it, if we have known for however brief a time some great measureless satisfaction of our whole being, the situation changes. While suffering we do not wish again (at least for its own sake), not so with joy. Nietzsche puts the thought in poetic form—it is Zarathustra's song:
"O man! mark well!
What saith deep midnight with its knell?
'I've slept my sleep—
And wakened from the dream's deep spell:
The world is deep
And deeper than the day can tell.
