What Is Eternal Recurrence?

Imagine being told that you will live this exact life again, in every detail, forever. Every joy, every humiliation, every ordinary Tuesday, every loss, repeated without end and without change. Could you say yes to that? Could you want it? This is Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence, and Clancy Martin, who has translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra and tested the idea in his own worst moments, says almost everyone misunderstands what it is asking. What it asks, in Martin's reading, is not assent to a theory about the cosmos. Eternal recurrence is a medicine, an idea Nietzsche administers to cure the habit of treating life as a means to an end, and passing its test has a name: amor fati, the love of fate, the affirmation of your life exactly as it is, suffering included.