My dad told me that he and my mother were proud of me today. I told him that I had to drop a class, Spanish. I had been afraid to tell him because I knew he would tell me I was Puerto Rican and that I shouldn’t have a problem with my Spanish class. Instead, I was told that I had made good life decisions up until this point, that when they were my age, they were dealing with having had kids a little too soon. He mused that he had perhaps made numerous mistakes in the process, but that he cannot now regret them.
This is the age in which their first son, my brother, took his own life. Genetically speaking, perhaps I should be worried.
Especially given that I find myself thinking the darkest of thoughts at the loneliest hour, and I wonder if I have made the right decisions up until this point. I wonder, sometimes, if I could do it all over again, would I do it in exactly the same way? Would I like my regrets read at my funeral, my mistakes written on my gravestone?
How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak 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 immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you – all in the 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 over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.”
If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science