Kurgan Gringioni said:
Dumbass -
Like I said, it's only bike racing.
Someday even you will realize that.
take care and have a nice day,
everything depends on perspective though- here is some light weekend
reading for you on the subject. (i still think about this chapter, 15
years after i first read it, when i'm out training and lost in my own head.)
"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often
perplexed other philosophers with it; to think that everything recurs as
we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad
infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life
which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a
shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible,
beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.
We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African
kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the
destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in
excruciating torment.
Will the war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century
itself be altered if it recurs again and again, in eternal return?
It will: it will become a solid mass, permanently protuberant, its
inanity irreparable.
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians
would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something
that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned
into mere word, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than
feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinite difference between a
Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a
perspective from which things appear other than we know them: they
appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature.
This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For
how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the
sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of
nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation.
Leafing through a book on [censored], I was touched by some of his
portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war;
several members of my family perished in [censored]'s concentration camps;
but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period
of my life, a period that would not return?
This reconciliation with [censored] reveals the profound moral perversity of
a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in
this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything
cynically permitted.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are
nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a
terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of the
unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why
Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das
schwerste Gewicht).
If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand
out against it in all their splendid lightness.
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to
the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be
weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore
simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier
the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and
truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter
than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his
earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they
are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
(Milan Kundera, The Incredible Lightness of Being, copyright 1984 by
Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
