The Gateway

An arch over a mountain road, a dwarf whispering discouragement, and a name carved above the gateway: Moment. Book Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra opens at sea, and Clancy Martin sails with it toward the thought the whole book has been circling: would you take this exact life again, and again, with nothing improved? Along the way he defends Zarathustra's loneliness as a discipline, borrows a scene from the Buddha's night under the tree, and takes a Cat Stevens song to task for the way we all flinch from pain. The classroom version of the eternal return, Martin argues, gets eternity exactly wrong. He ends with a knock at William Blake's door.