The Socrates Express

11. How to Have No Regrets like Nietzsche

2:48 p.m. Somewhere in the Swiss Alps. On board Swiss Federal Railways, Train No. 921, en route from Zurich to St. Moritz.

My tray table locks into place with a solid and satisfying click. Nice. My window reveals a Heidi vista of soaring peaks and emerald fields. Nice. A few minutes later, a strange thought gate-crashes my reverie: all of this is nice but too nice.

Too nice? Is that possible? Everyone likes nice. Americans in particular. We sprinkle “nice” in our conversations like paprika. Sometimes we elongate it: niiiiiice. We can’t get enough nice. When we say, reflexively, “Have a nice day,” we don’t add, “but not too nice.” Too much niceness is like too much Rocky Road or too much love: theoretically possible but no one has experienced it.

Until now. After several hours of unrelenting nice, I crave grit, roughness. Grime.

Maybe I’ve been traveling too long and have gone a bit “coco-nuts,” as a friend calls this road-induced loopiness. Maybe, I wonder, as the train noses into a nice tunnel (I didn’t know tunnels could be nice), I’ve roused my latent masochism and will soon go full Rousseau, exposing my backside and inviting a good spanking.

There’s another possibility, though, one that occurs to me as the cabin attendant, perfectly coiffed, pushing a perfect cart brimming with perfect pastries and perfectly brewed coffee, asks me if there’s anything she can do to make my journey nicer. Maybe, I think, as I consider her question, suffering is essential to the good life. Maybe suffering is, in its own twisted way, nice.

“Sir? Can I offer you something?”

Yes, you can, I think. You can rough me up a bit, smear me with dirt and muck. Hurt me. Make me suffer, please.

More than a century ago, another traveler riding a Swiss train had similar thoughts. A failed composer and poet, an academic wunderkind who walked away from early success to live in the mountains, an “aeronaut of the spirit” who celebrated laughter and dance and whose motto was “Live dangerously!,” he, too, craved suffering.

Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a mile. I must have watched it dozens of times. Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a mile. I must have watched it dozens of times. Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. By a…

I haven’t merely watched the movie, I’ve communed with it, imbibed its ethos. I loved it when it first came out in 1993. I loved it before it became a cultural meme, before people used the word “meme” in conversation. I still love it. More than ever.

The protagonist is a curmudgeonly TV weatherman named Phil Connors. He is in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual Groundhog Day festival. Again. Phil isn’t happy with this assignment and takes every opportunity to share his unhappiness with his earnest crew. Phil files his report, then goes to sleep. The next morning he wakes to find it is Groundhog Day again. And again and again. Phil is stuck in plebeian Punxsutawney, fated to relive the same day and cover the same insipid story, over and over. He responds to his plight with incredulity, indulgence, anger, deceit, despair, and, ultimately, acceptance.

The movie is classified as a romantic comedy, but Groundhog Day is, I believe, the most philosophical movie ever made. As Phil Connors wrestles with the blessing and the curse that are his eternally recurring day, he also wrestles with philosophy’s major themes: What constitutes moral action? Do we possess free will or are our lives fated? How many blueberry pancakes can a grown man eat without exploding?

I am pleased though not surprised when I learn how closely the movie parallels an enthralling, mind-boggling theory posited more than a century ago by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the bad boy of Western philosophy. The delinquent too smart and prescient to ignore. Much as we’d like to dismiss him as crazy or anti-Semitic or misguided, Nietzsche was none of these. He was, and is, the most seductive, the most inevitable, of philosophers.

I arrive in Sils-Maria 124 years after Nietzsche. I see why he liked it. The gingerbread houses, authentic as they are adorable; the air, sharp and clear; and, everywhere I look, the Alps, stretching skyward. If there is such a thing as Swiss dirt, I see no evidence of it. Even the trash cans are spotless.

I walk the few yards from my hotel to the small house where Nietzsche lived. At the time, a shop selling tea and spices and other staples occupied the ground floor. Nietzsche rented a room on the second floor. It’s been faithfully preserved, furnished simply, as it was in Nietzsche’s day, with a narrow bed, a small writing desk, an Oriental rug, a kerosene lamp.

Simple, as I learned in Japan, need not mean lacking. Simple can be beautiful, and there’s an elegant, aesthetically pleasing quality to the room. Nietzsche chose the wallpaper himself. Like Sei Shōnagon, he found beauty in the small. “We want to be the poets of our life—first of all in the smallest, most everyday matters,” he wrote.

Nietzsche craved routine. He woke early, took a cold bath, and then sat down for a monkish breakfast: raw eggs, tea, an aniseed biscuit. During the day, he wrote and walked. In the evening, between seven and nine, he sat still in the dark. An admirably rigid routine, but hardly heroic. Where, I wonder, is the philosophical daredevil, the aeronaut of the spirit?

Physically, Nietzsche was no superhero, as the black-and-white photos on display here attest. They portray a wisp of a person, more mustache than man. He had large, dark eyes that made an impression on people—none more so than Lou Salomé, the alluring Russian writer and iconoclast who broke Nietzsche’s heart. His eyes, she recalled, “had none of the searching, blinking quality which make so many short-sighted persons look unconsciously intrusive.” Instead, she says, his defective eyesight “lent his features a very special kind of magic, for instead of reflecting changing impressions from outside, all they rendered was what was going on deep down within him.” The mustache, bushy and Bismarckian, enhanced the opacity Nietzsche cultivated. It tricked people into thinking he was someone he was not.

One of the few philosophers to celebrate health as a virtue, Nietzsche enjoyed precious little himself. From age thirteen, Nietzsche suffered from migraine headaches that, along with a panoply of other ailments, plagued him throughout life. His terrible eyesight worsened over the years. He suffered fits of vomiting that lasted hours. Some days he couldn’t get out of bed at all.

He tried many medical interventions and, for someone otherwise so skeptical, was remarkably susceptible to quackery. One doctor prescribed a regiment of nothingness: “no water, no soup, no vegetables, no bread.” Nothing, that is, except the leeches he applied to Nietzsche’s earlobes.

Nietzsche felt death’s shadow keenly. His father died at age thirty-six. “Softening of the brain,” the doctors said. (Cancer, most likely.) Nietzsche feared a similar fate awaited him. References to impending doom pepper his correspondence. His books are written in the urgent prose of a man who knew his days were numbered.

He was almost superhumanly prolific, publishing fourteen books from 1872 to 1889. Without exception, the books sold poorly. Nietzsche paid the printing costs of some himself. The world was not ready to hear what the “hermit of Sils” had to say.

Personally, I would have quit after the third flop. Not Nietzsche. He persisted, not even slowing down, despite the rejection and the physical ailments. How did he do it? What did he know?

The house contains a small library, books by and about Nietzsche, and a few scores, testimony to his aborted musical ambitions. What intrigues me most are the letters. He wrote a lot about the weather and was extremely sensitive to meteorological nuances. Wherever he went, he noted temperature and barometric pressure, recorded rainfall and dew points. Cloudy days depressed him. He craved “a sky that is eternally cheerful.”

He found it in Sils-Maria. If it’s possible for a place to save a life, Sils-Maria saved Nietzsche’s. Yes, he still experienced headaches and stomach upset but these bouts were far milder. The Alpine air calmed his nerves, too. He could breathe again.

He birthed his biggest ideas here. It was in Sils-Maria that he pronounced, “God is dead,” one of philosophy’s most brazen assertions. It was in Sils-Maria that he conjured his dancing prophet and alter ego, Zarathustra, a fictionalized version of the Persian prophet who descends from the mountain to share wisdom with humanity. And it was in Sils-Maria that his greatest thought—“the thought of thoughts”—struck him with a ferocity he did not think possible.

It was August 1881. Nietzsche was on one of his usual walks along the shores of Lake Silvaplana, high above sea level, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” He had just come across “a mighty pyramidal block of stone” when the thought of thoughts arrived unbidden—an earthquake of an idea that led to a rethinking of the universe and our place in it, as well as a major motion picture starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The idea hit him hard and fast, heated and expanded to unimaginable size. Only later did it cool and congeal into these words.

Imagine you are visited in the dead of night by a demon, who says to you: “This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again—and you with it, you dust of dust!

Nietzsche is not speaking of reincarnation. You do not return as the same soul in a different body. It is the “self-same you” that returns, again and again. You do not, like Phil Connors of Groundhog Day, recall your previous iterations. You cannot, like Phil, edit your recurring life. Everything has happened before, and it will happen again, exactly the same way, forever. All of it. Even seventh grade.

How would you respond to the demon? asks Nietzsche. Would you “gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or would you bow down before the demon and say, ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ ”

Nietzsche called his idea Eternal Recurrence of the Same. It enthralled him. It terrified him. He walked, practically ran, back to his simple room in Sils-Maria, and for the next few months, despite excruciating head and eye pain, he could think of little else.

I wake to another day in Sils-Maria. I brush my teeth, just like yesterday, and splash cold water on my face. I shave, nicking my cheek, again, and tumble downstairs to the breakfast room—the same room where Nietzsche dined regularly. I see the same hostess as yesterday and the day before and who, once again, tolerates my garbled guten morgen and seats me at the same table by the same window.

At the buffet station, I find the same choices: the same hunks of Jarlsberg, the same flaky croissants, and the same fruit salad arranged in the same perfect semicircle. I order a coffee just as I did yesterday and the day before and pour precisely the same amount of milk. As I stand to leave, the hostess says, “Have a nice day,” just as she did yesterday and the day before and, once again, I think but do not say, Yes, but not too nice.

I walk past the front desk, again, and say hello to Laura, who today like yesterday and the day before is wearing lederhosen. I step outside to a perfect Swiss day, a day like yesterday and the day before, and I set out on one of the nearby hiking trails. It is a different hiking trail from yesterday and, as Bill Murray’s exasperated character in Groundhog Day says, different is good. I am on a mission. Not from God (we killed Him, Nietzsche reminds me) but from Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s dancing prophet. I am determined to find the mighty stone, the place where the philosopher first imagined Eternal Recurrence. By seeing it, touching it, I hope to think what he thought that day—better yet, to feel what he felt.

I walk like Rousseau, as if I had all the time in the world. It feels good, not only the melodic cadence of my steps but the way sun and shade alternate as I step in and out of the pine trees that line Lake Silvaplana. The ground feels soft and spongy underfoot, as if it were conversing with me.

I walk and walk some more. My legs ache. Still I walk. I walk despite the pain, because of the pain. Nietzsche would approve, noting that I’m exercising my “will-to-power,” overcoming an obstacle, on my way to becoming an Übermensch (literally “overman”), one step at a time.

I’m tempted to stop and read Nietzsche, but the philosopher dissuades me: “How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?”

His poor eyesight was a secret blessing. It liberated him from the tyranny of the book. When he couldn’t read, he walked. He walked hours at a stretch, covering great distances. “Do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement,” he said. We write with our hands. We write well with our feet.

“All truth is crooked,” Nietzsche said. All lives, too. Only in retrospect do we straighten the narrative, assign patterns and meaning. At the time, it’s all zigs and zags. And white space: breaks in the text that cleave our former selves from some incipient future self. These white spaces look like omissions. They are not. They are wordless transitions, points where the currents of our life shift course.

One such bifurcation occurred early in Nietzsche’s life. He was studying theology at Leipzig University when one day he popped into a secondhand bookshop. He felt drawn, he recalled, to one book in particular: Schopenhauer’s masterpiece, The World as Will and Representation. He usually dithered before purchasing a book. Not this time.

Once home, Nietzsche threw himself on the sofa and “let that energetic and gloomy genius operate upon me.” Nietzsche was delighted—and horrified. “Here I saw sickness and health, exile and refuge, Hell and Heaven.” Shortly afterward, he switched his study from theology to philology, the study of language and literature. That may not seem momentous, but for the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, it represented an act of rebellion.

Nietzsche excelled. At the age of twenty-four, he was appointed professor of classical philology at Switzerland’s Basel University. The honeymoon proved brief.

His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, flouted academic norms. No footnotes, no dry, measured prose. An old mentor called it “a piece of pseudo-aesthetic, unscholarly religious mystification produced by a man suffering from paranoia.” The wunderkind’s shine had dulled. The academy likes nothing less than a smart rebel.

The second bifurcation came in 1879. His health had deteriorated. At times he could barely see and asked students to read to him. His attempt to gain a professorship in philosophy, his new passion, had failed. Most people, I imagine, would muddle along, seek better doctors, mend fences with department heads, make peace with the cushioned cage that is academia. No one walks away from a tenured position at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities.

But Nietzsche walked. He set his affairs in order and fired off a brief letter to his publisher. “I am on the verge of desperation and have scarcely any hope left,” he said, signing the letter, in all caps: “A HALF-BLIND MAN.”

And so with that dramatic gesture he traded the settled life of a professor for that of a feral philosopher, answerable to no one but himself, unaffiliated and unbound. It was an incredibly courageous, or knuckleheaded, move. “Perhaps no one,” says the writer Stefan Zweig, “has hurled a former life so far from himself as Nietzsche.”

Like Rousseau, Nietzsche wandered. Unlike Rousseau, his wandering had a pattern, a cadence: Switzerland in the summer, Italy or southern France in the winter. His only property was the clothes he wore, the paper he wrote on, and the large trunk where he kept them.

He traveled by train. He hated trains. He hated the unheated carriages. He hated the rocking motion. He vomited a lot and paid for a single day’s journey with three days of recovery.

Changing trains befuddled him. Sometimes he’d end up heading in the wrong direction. Once, while visiting the composer Richard Wagner, Nietzsche left a bag at a railway station. Inside were a precious volume of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and an autographed copy of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen operas. Nietzsche, like Hemingway and T. E. Lawrence, could point to nothing redeeming about the incident. Sometimes a loss is just a loss.

I’ve yet to find Nietzsche’s “mighty pyramidal block of stone” and decide to stop walking and read, an act of rebellion I’m sure he’d understand. I spot a bench. I sit down and crack open Nietzsche’s book The Gay Science or, as it’s sometimes translated, The Joyful Wisdom. After only a few sentences I realize Nietzsche doesn’t speak to me. He shouts at me! If Socrates was the philosopher of the question mark, Nietzsche is the philosopher of the exclamation mark. He loves them! Sometimes he’ll string two or three together!!!

Nietzsche is both a delight and a burden to read. It’s a delight because his prose rivals that of Schopenhauer for its clarity and refreshing simplicity. He writes with the unabashed exuberance of a teenager with something important to say. He writes as if his life depended on it.

Nietzsche thought philosophy should be fun. He is playful, and funny in a biting way. Every truth, he said, should be accompanied by at least one laugh. He toys with ideas, and with literary devices. He writes in aphorisms, nursery rhymes, songs—and in the faux-biblical voice of his most famous invention, Zarathustra. His short, snappy sentences feel right at home on Twitter.

Nietzsche is a burden because, like Socrates, he demands we question entrenched beliefs, and that’s never pleasant. I’ve always assumed philosophy was powered by hard reason and cold logic. If Rousseau put a dent in that belief, Nietzsche demolishes it. Infusing the pages is a quiet (and often not so quiet) celebration of the impulsive and the irrational. For Nietzsche, emotions are not a distraction, or a detour on the road to logic. They are the destination. The virtuous are irrational, and the most noble of all “succumbs to his impulses, and in his best moments his reason lapses altogether.”

Rousseau embraced the heart. Nietzsche aims lower. He is the philosopher of the viscera—that place, says scholar Robert Solomon, “where doubts and rebellion grow, the parts of the body not easily tamed by merely valid arguments or the authority of professors.”

Nietzsche was no fan of purely abstract thought. Such fuzzy ruminations never inspired anyone to do anything, he argued. “We have to learn to think differently… to feel differently,” he said. He suffered from a kind of affective synesthesia. He thought the way most of us feel: instinctively, and with a ferocity not entirely under his control. Nietzsche didn’t formulate ideas. He birthed them.

I’m immersed in his taut words, possibly on the verge of “flow,” when I sense a presence. I look up and see a butterfly. It has alighted on Nietzsche, its golden-brown wings fluttering atop page 207. I’m not sure what to do. I’m tempted to snap a photo but fear that might spook the butterfly. Besides, recording the moment seems a poor substitute for experiencing it.

The butterfly has landed on a passage called “At the Sight of a Learned Book.” A fine selection. Classic Nietzsche. “Our first question concerning the value of a book, a man, or a piece of music is: Can it walk? Or still better: Can it dance?”

Some philosophers shock. Many argue. A few inspire. Only Nietzsche danced. For him, there was no finer expression of exuberance and amor fati: love of fate. “I would only believe in a God who knows how to dance,” he wrote. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra dances wildly, fervently, with not even a trace of self-consciousness.

The spirit of every good philosopher, Nietzsche said, is that of a dancer. Not necessarily a good dancer. “Better to dance ponderously than to walk lamely,” he said, and did. He couldn’t muster even a few decent steps on the dance floor. So be it. The good philosopher, like the good dancer, is willing to make a fool of himself.

Nietzsche’s philosophy dances superbly. It has rhythm. It skips and sashays across the page, and occasionally moonwalks. Just as dancing has no purpose—the dance is the purpose—so, too, with Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, dancing and thinking move toward similar ends: a celebration of life. He’s not trying to prove anything. He simply wants you to see the world, and yourself, differently.

Like an artist, a philosopher like Nietzsche hands us a pair of glasses and says, “Look at the world through these. Do you see what I see? Isn’t it miraculous?” What we see may or may not be true in a scientific sense, but that is not the point. The philosopher conveys the truth not of the scientist but of the artist or novelist. It is an “as if” approach. View the world as if another level of reality, the noumenon, lies beneath the surface. Live your life as if it repeats endlessly. See what happens. Does looking at the world this way illuminate yours? Good. Then it has value. Viewing the world in a different way—even an “incorrect,” different way, like Thoreau peering between his legs—enriches our lives.

The butterfly departs, its golden-brown wings lifting it skyward, and I resume my walk along the lakeshore. The air is thin and crisp. I see why Nietzsche craved it. Warm air dulls the mind. Cold air sharpens. I’ve covered several miles but, still, no sign of Nietzsche’s mighty stone. I look everywhere. I look where it should be and where it shouldn’t. Nothing. I backtrack, twice, and I hate backtracking. Still nothing. I’m exhausted and consider quitting but, no, I must persevere. Nietzsche’s will to power demands it. He didn’t quit when rejected by lovers and ignored by readers. Neither will I.

Nietzsche wasn’t the first to suggest the universe repeats itself. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras posited a similar idea some 2,500 years ago, and the Indian Vedas even earlier. Nietzsche surely knew of these theories. Like Marcus Aurelius, he was a wisdom scavenger, casting his mind far and wide.

Nietzsche wanted to take the idea further. He wanted to convert Eternal Recurrence from myth to science. For days, weeks, he scribbled possible “proofs” on notepads. In one, he likens the universe to a pair of dice. There are only so many combinations possible. Eventually you’ll roll them all. In tic-tac-toe, there are many more combinations: 26,830 possible games. That’s a big number, but finite. Eventually, every possible game repeats, move for move. In chess, considerably more games are possible: 10 to the 120th power (one followed by 120 zeros). That’s a mind-boggling number but, still, finite. It may take a very long time, but eventually two chess players will exhaust every possible combination of moves, play every possible game. The universe is, in a way, a large and complex game. Eventually everything repeats.

Nietzsche’s belief, though, was just that: supposition propped up by ancient myths and fascinating but dubious statistical probabilities. Nietzsche never felt confident enough to publish his notes. Today most physicists dismiss Eternal Recurrence as more fiction than science.

There’s another possibility, says Nietzsche. Maybe the question of proof doesn’t matter. The lack of scientific evidence renders Eternal Recurrence—the “impossible hypothesis”—no less arresting. “Even the thought of a possibility can shatter and transform us,” he says, pointing to the Christian concept of eternal damnation. Hell may not be real but the idea of it motivates. We need not prove Eternal Recurrence in order to act as if it were true, then see what happens.

Consider the case of Robert Solomon. In the 1960s, he was an “unhappy first-year medical student” at the University of Michigan. On a whim, he decided to take a course called Philosophy in Literature. When the professor introduced Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, Solomon was floored. It stirred a “whirlwind” of emotions and thoughts. Doubts, too. Did he really want to live this unhappy life over and over again, forever? That struck him as an especially fiery hell.

After the class, Solomon dropped out of medical school and pursued a life of philosophy, eventually becoming one of the world’s top Nietzsche scholars. It’s a decision he has not once regretted.

Eternal Recurrence is a thought experiment. An existential stress test. When it comes to life’s pleasurable moments, we pass the test easily. We’d gladly relive eating that ice cream sundae, or sinking that game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer. Despairing over his Punxsutawney plight, Phil Connors, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, muses: “I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank Piña Coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?”

Eternal Recurrence doesn’t work that way. It is all or nothing. A package deal. Your life repeats exactly the same way, “nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity,” says Nietzsche. No editing allowed. You must relive this life, with all its flaws and lengthy dialogue. The director’s cut. Nietzsche knows this scenario makes you squirm. He knows you’d love to revise your life, delete some scenes, add others, airbrush a few more, hire a body double.

I’d love to go back to that day of my first solo flight, only this time close the door before taking off. And I’d give anything to return to one warm Chicago evening. I was traveling with my daughter, six years old at the time. It was late. She was sleepy, and sometimes when children are sleepy, buried fears surface. As we walked, she looked at me and asked: “Are you my real daddy?”

I had a chance, as an adoptive parent, to supply a loving and reassuring answer. Instead, for reasons I still don’t understand, I replied briskly, coldly. “Of course I am,” I snapped. “Why would you even ask such a thing?” Her eyes swelled with tears and hurt. I had blown it. If only I could relive that moment but, this time, answer her question with love.

No, says Nietzsche. No editing. Were you not paying attention? Affirm the entirety of your life, in every detail, or not at all. No exceptions.

No wonder Nietzsche calls Eternal Recurrence “the heaviest burden.” Nothing is weightier than eternity. If everything recurs infinitely, then there are no light moments, no trivial ones. Every moment, no matter how inconsequential, possesses the same weight and mass as others. “All actions are equally great and small.”

Think of Eternal Recurrence as a daily check-in with yourself: Are you living the life you want to live? Are you sure you want to drink that bottle of tequila and endure an infinite hangover? Eternal Recurrence demands we ruthlessly audit our lives and ask: What is worthy of eternity?

One way of wrapping your mind around Eternal Recurrence is by taking what one scholar calls the “Marriage Test.” Imagine you’re recently divorced after a long marriage. Knowing what you know now, would you say “yes” again?

That’s not a bad test, but I’ve devised another: The Teenager Test. Back home, I was having dinner with my daughter. Between talk of science projects and soccer schedules, I explained Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. What did she think? Would she sign up?

Sonya knows what she likes and what she doesn’t and she does not like Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. She promptly declared it “the idea of a sociopath.” No way would she want her life to recur forever. “Think of how miserable that would be. You’re stuck in an infinite loop. Everyone has made one huge mistake in their life—I haven’t yet, but I know it’s going to happen—so imagine reliving that over and over again. Like imagine, you’re murdered by an ax murderer. Do you want to relive that over and over? What if you had cancer? Would you want to relive that?”

“Fair point,” I said, before rallying to Nietzsche’s defense. “But what about the good things in life: concerts and friends and chicken nuggets? Don’t they compensate for the bad?”

“No,” she said without hesitation. “No one’s life is that good. Nothing in my life could make me want to relive any bad things I potentially do.”

I found myself in an unaccustomed state: silence. I had no rejoinder. Life’s bad moments do seem to outweigh the good. The pleasure of Rocky Road dims when compared to the agony of chemo. Or does Nietzsche know something that Sonya—and the rest of us—do not?

If anyone had reason to go full Schopenhauer and conclude we are living in “the worst of all possible worlds,” it was Friedrich Nietzsche. Instead, toward the end of his troubled, too-short life, he declares himself grateful for it all and adds a hearty Da capo! Again.

Suffering is inevitable—you don’t need a philosopher to tell you that—but how we suffer, and about what, matters more than we think. Do we experience “essential suffering,” as Nietzsche called it, or something else, something less? Do we merely tolerate suffering or do we value it for its own sake?

Nietzsche was no masochist. He saw suffering as an ingredient in the good life, a means of learning. “Only suffering leads to knowledge,” he said. Suffering is the call we didn’t solicit but must answer anyway. Do we reply by numbing ourselves or, as Schopenhauer suggests, retreating to art and asceticism? Or do we answer suffering by engaging with the world more deeply? Recklessly, even? Nietzsche called this option the Dionysian way, after the Greek god who loved wine and theater and life. “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful,” he said. Don’t love life despite the suffering, he says, but because of it.

Writing to his sister in 1883, Nietzsche offers what I think is his most honest account of the role suffering played in his life. “The whole meaning of the terrible physical suffering to which I was exposed lies in the fact that, thanks to it alone, I was torn away from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times too low. Some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to myself… an act of self-overcoming of the highest order.”

I love that one phrase in particular: “recall me to myself.” You need not look outside yourself for meaning, says Nietzsche. You needn’t look inside yourself, either. Look up. “Your true being does not lie deeply concealed within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at any rate above what you usually regard as your ‘I.’ ”

Eternal Recurrence strips our illusions bare and gives the lie to our accomplishments. You’ve closed the big deal, finished the book, earned the promotion? Congratulations—except now it’s evaporated and you must start over. Again and again. Forever. We’re all Sisyphus, the poor slob from Greek mythology condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity. I think back to that deck in Montclair, New Jersey, and my friend Jennifer’s question. “What does success look like?” I know how Nietzsche would answer: It looks like radical acceptance of your fate. It looks like Sisyphus happy.

Like many philosophers, Nietzsche was better at dispensing wisdom than acting on it. “Die at the right time,” he said, but didn’t. He died too early—and too late.

He was in Turin, Italy, in 1889, when he saw a man whipping a horse. Nietzsche rushed toward the animal, hugged it—and collapsed. Nietzsche’s last cognizant action was an attempt to ease the suffering of another being. When he gained consciousness, he was insane. He began signing his letters “Dionysus,” and suggested he was God.

Concerned friends intervened and brought Nietzsche home to Germany. Incapacitated, most likely due to syphilis, and only forty-four years old, he would never write another word. For the next decade, family members cared for him—first his mother, then, after she died, his sister. Though now mute, his fame grew with each passing year.

It is this Nietzsche, broken and gone, that, sadly, is the one immortalized in photographs and exploited by his ambitious and anti-Semitic sister. Her misuse of his legacy led to Hitler’s mercenary embrace of Nietzsche.

At the time of his collapse, Nietzsche was working on a book he called The Revaluation of All Values. A clunky title but a profound idea, one that, had he finished, might have offered important insights into Eternal Recurrence. If our life—indeed the entire universe—does repeat, what do we control? Not our actions, Nietzsche thought, but our attitude. His philosophy was, at its heart, “an experiment in reorienting oneself within a world of total uncertainty.” Typically, we run from uncertainty and toward certainty. But that, says Nietzsche, is not an immutable fact. It is a value, and anything we value we can revalue.

We can choose to find joy not in certainty but in its opposite. Once we do that, life—the same life from an outsider’s perspective—feels quite different to us. Find joy in uncertainty and the tumult at the office becomes cause for celebration, not teeth gnashing and an extra glass of wine at the end of the day. Find joy in uncertainty, and even illness, while still physically painful, no longer terrifies. This shift in perspective is subtle but profound. The world looks different. A reorientation like this is not easy, Nietzsche acknowledges, but it is possible—and what is philosophy but an exploration of heretofore undreamt-of possibilities?

My walk ends in failure. Despite much searching, and even more backtracking, I do not find the pyramid-shaped boulder. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow. Then I recall the words of Groundhog Day’s Phil Connors: “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”

In Eternal Recurrence, every tomorrow is today and every today tomorrow. I will walk this same path an infinite number of times. In the Hollywood version, I’m able to make course corrections, adjustments large and small, until I find the boulder and get the girl and all is well. Roll credits.

Nietzsche’s version of Eternal Recurrence supplies no such happy ending. Yes, I will walk the same path, again and again, but without deviation. I will choose the same bench, encounter the same butterfly, and I will seek but not find Nietzsche’s boulder. Every time. Forever.

Can you accept that endless failure? asks Nietzsche. More than that, can you embrace it? Can you love it?

About a missed rock—sure, Friedrich. About life’s larger disappointments—botched job interviews, bungled parenting, fickle friends—I’m less certain. I can resign myself to their existence, accept them even. But love them? That is asking an awful lot. I’m not there yet. Maybe I never will be, no matter how many times the universe and I repeat.

There’s a reason Groundhog Day is a comedy. If we do live the selfsame life over and over again in the selfsame way, forever and ever, then what can we do but laugh?

Better yet: dance. Don’t wait for a reason to dance. Just dance. Dance feverishly and with abandon, as if no one is watching. When life is good, dance. When it hurts, dance. And when your time is up and the dance is over, say—no, shout—Da capo! Again, again.