(Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence — Preface, aph. 3)

Before April two thousand and nineteen, even the author of these lines was not convinced that Eternal Recurrence was truly at work in this world. Having first encountered that—then merely an idea from The Gay Science—twenty-five years earlier, he found it intriguing, yet at the same time too vague and, in the end, implausible. What was the “Master” raving about? How could “everything return”?

Then, in April two thousand and nineteen, something within him broke open — a moment of illumination occurred, perhaps akin to the one Nietzsche experienced beside the rock at Surlej in August 1881. For the first time, he could feel the Eternal Recurrence of the Same as something that truly is, rather than merely think or contemplate it. In a single flash of thought, he grasped that “Holy-Grail-like” finitude of the world in its deepest depth and understood its sole possible implication — that it is compelled to bring back its own states, or, vulgarly put, to “repeat” them.

In that instant, an insight interwoven with feeling was born — which he called an insight-feeling into Eternal Recurrence. Thus the idea of Eternal Recurrence of the Same incarnated itself in his life and became reality. Even today, he is not entirely certain what gave rise to that insight-feeling; he only knows he witnessed it under less exalted circumstances than Nietzsche did when struck by the same revelation — in the bathroom of his apartment, after his usual evening shower. That insight-feeling referred rather to that sense of truth which even Einstein once felt in connection with the theory of relativity — long before he had proved it mathematically — than to pure faith, which, as Pascal showed, takes root in man more readily through habit and upbringing.