You must unlearn the habit of being someone else or nothing at all, of imitating the voices of others and mistaking the faces of others for your own.

[…]

One thing is given to man which makes him into a god, which reminds him that he is a god: to know destiny.

[…]

When destiny comes to a man from outside, it lays him low, just as an arrow lays a deer low. When destiny comes to a man from within, from his innermost being, it makes him strong, it makes him into a god… A man who has recognized his destiny never tries to change it. The endeavor to change destiny is a childish pursuit that makes men quarrel and kill one another… All sorrow, poison, and death are alien, imposed destiny. But every true act, everything that is good and joyful and fruitful on earth, is lived destiny, destiny that has become self.

Might your bitter pain not be the voice of destiny, might that voice not become sweet once you understand it?

[…]

Action and suffering, which together make up our lives, are a whole; they are one. A child suffers its begetting, it suffers its birth, its weaning; it suffers here and suffers there until in the end it suffers death. But all the good in a man, for which he is praised or loved, is merely good suffering, the right kind, the living kind of suffering, a suffering to the full. The ability to suffer well is more than half of life — indeed, it is all life. Birth is suffering, growth is suffering, the seed suffers the earth, the root suffers the rain, the bud suffers its flowering. 

In the same way, my friends, man suffers destiny. Destiny is earth, it is rain and growth. Destiny hurts.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." — Robert A. Heinlein

Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably 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…”

Nietzsche’s demon… is a challenge — or, better, a question — that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more ferventlythan for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

Nietzsche’s demon… is a challenge — or, better, a question — that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more ferventlythan for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” 

Are we, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “content to live it all again”? Being content in this sense is not being distracted from, or lulled to sleep by, or resigning oneself to a fate that cannot be avoided. It is to live to your heart’s content with the knowledge that you will do this, and everything, again, forever. We made our last turn into the Waldhaus driveway and came to rest beneath its canopied entryway. Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself. To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning. The specter of infinite monotony was for Nietzsche the abiding impetus to assume absolute responsibility: if one’s choices are to be replayed endlessly, they’d better be the “right” ones.

It might be tempting to think that the “rightness” of a decision could be affixed by some external moral or religious standard, but Nietzsche wants his readers to resist this temptation. Nietzsche’s demon, after all, comes to us when we are all alone, his question can be heard only in one’s “loneliest loneliness,” and therefore the answer cannot be given by consensus or on behalf of some impersonal institutions. It is, indeed, the most personal of answers — the one that always determines an individual choice. Of course you can choose anything you want, to raise children or get married, but don’t pretend to do it because these things have some sort of intrinsic value — they don’t. Do it solely because you chose them and are willing to own up to them. In the story of our lives, these choices are ours and ours alone, and this is what gives things, all things, value. Only when one realizes this is he or she prepared to face the eternal recurrence, the entire cycle, without the risk of being crushed. Only then is one able to say with Yeats, “[A]nd yet again,” and truly mean it.

Perhaps the hardest part of the eternal return is to own up to the tortures that we create for ourselves and those we create for others. Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.

The World Emperor

I’m sorry. I don’t want to be an Emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want be rule or conquer anyone! I should like to help everyone, if possible. Jew, gentile, blackman, white. We all want help one other.

Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there’s room for everyone. And the good earth is rich, and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned man’s souls. Has barricaded the world with hate. Has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

We have developed speed. But we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel to little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without this qualities life will be violent. And we’ll all be lost.

The airplane and the radio has brought us together. The very nature of this inventions cries out for the goodness in man. Cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of the soul. Even now my voice is reaching millions thought the world. Millions of despairing men, women and children. Victims of the system that makes man torture and imprison innocent people. For those who can hear me I say, do not despair.

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed. The bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of man will pass and dictators die. And power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers don’t give yourselves to these brutes! Men who despise you and slave you! Who regiment your lives. Tell you what to think, what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle! Use you as cannon fire! Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men. Machine-men, with machine-minds and machine-hearts. You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate. Only the unloved hates, and the unnatural.
Soldiers, don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

In the 17th chapter of St. Lucas is written “The Kingdom of God is within men” not with one man, not a group of men! But in all men, in you!

You the people have the power! The power to create machines. The power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful. To make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world. A decent world. That will give man a chance to work. That will give youth a future, and old age a security.
By the promise of these things brutes have risen to power. But they lie, they do not fulfill the promise. They never will. Dictator free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill the promise. Let us fight to free the world. To do away with national barriers, to do away with greed. With hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason. A world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness in to the Light. We are coming into a new world. A kindlier world where men will rise above their hate, their greed and their brutality. Look up Hanna. The soul of men has been given wings. And at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow. Into the light of hope. Into the future. The glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us.

Look up Hannah, look up!

By Charles Chaplin, in The Great Dictator, 1940.

Dear Readers,

Nearly every book has the same architecture — cover, spine, pages — but you open them onto worlds and gifts far beyond what paper and ink are, and on the inside they are every shape and power. Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything.

The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books, learning from books a strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human. Books gave me refuge. Or I built refuge out of them, out of these books that were both bricks and magical spells, protective spells I spun around myself. They can be doorways and ships and fortresses for anyone who loves them.

And I grew up to write books, as I’d hoped, so I know that each of them is a gift a writer made for strangers, a gift I’ve given a few times and received so many times, every day since I was six.

Rebecca Solnit

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.