Work, love, life.
Isolation, starvation, chaos.
2008 is the new 2003.
From an email: "The Weight of the New Year"
Hey Chiik--The other night I mentioned Nietzsche's concept of amor fati, love of fate. I've transcribed here its original articulation in "For the new year" from The Gay Science, as well as its implicit correlation with the idea of eternal recurrence in "The Greatest Weight," from the same book. We'll discuss...You might recognize the similarities between the trope of "weight" in the latter passage with Milan Kundera's play of light and heaviness in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which explicitly cites Nietzsche throughout.
—J.J. Jubblowsky
For the new year. —I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito ergo sum. Today, everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year —what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not wish to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
The Greatest Weight —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 unutterable small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in he same succession and sequence —even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I 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 tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate confirmation and seal?
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