NIETZSCHE: LIFE AS ETERNAL RETURN (in words and music)

I.
I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue)

I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of
something horrific — a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of
conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in,
demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite.
(Ecce Homo, Why I am a Destiny)

Richard Wagner – Der Ring des Nibelungen, Götterdämmerung, Trauermusik

II.
― Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high
mountains – a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has
been hitherto excommunicated by morality. From the lengthy experience afforded by such a
wandering in the forbidden I learned to view the origin of moralising and idealising very
differently from what might be desirable: the hidden history of the philosophers, the
psychology of their great names came to light for me.
(Ecce Homo, Foreword)

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a
confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
(Beyond Good and Evil, I, 6)

III.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883), Der Ring des Nibelungen, Siegfried, Erster Aufzug,
Vorspiel

― 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, all in the same succession and sequence ― even this spider and
this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and 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 horrific moment when you would have
answered him: "You are a god, and never had I heard anything more divine!" If this thought
were to gain possession of you it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The
question in each and everything, " Do you desire this once more and innumerable times
more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed you would
have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate
eternal conformation and seal?"
(The Gay Science, IV, 341, The Greatest Weight)