Book 3

Book Three of Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra opens with Zarathustra laughing and crying at once, and Clancy Martin wants you to notice how often the prophet of cheerfulness struggles with depression and frustration, just like the rest of us. Then the spirit of gravity arrives, a dwarf-like creature that mocks Zarathustra's teaching until he despairs. Zarathustra's answer is the eternal return, which Martin says Nietzsche himself called his greatest thought experiment and the heart of his teaching.

Rather than paraphrase it, Martin reads the passage from The Gay Science where it first appears: a demon creeps into your loneliest loneliness and tells you that this life, every pain and joy, this spider, this moonlight, must come back innumerable times in the same order. Would you gnash your teeth, or have you had one moment in which you'd call the demon a god? Martin leaves you with the question turned inward: what would you have to become to want nothing in your life changed?