Eternal Recurrence and the Affirmation of Life

Nietzsche introduces the thought of eternal recurrence (die ewige Wiederkunft) most memorably in The Gay Science §341 (1882), titled 'The Greatest Weight' (Das grösste Schwergewicht), where a demon steals into the reader's loneliest loneliness to announce that this present life, exactly as it has been lived, down to every pain, joy, and thought, however small or great, will recur again and again, innumerable times, in precisely the same sequence. Nietzsche frames the passage as a test: the demon's proclamation would either crush the hearer, who would curse the demon as the deliverer of the most terrible possible news, or transform the hearer, who would greet the demon as a god, if that hearer had, at some point, experienced 'a tremendous moment' capable of making the prospect of infinite repetition desirable rather than horrifying. The passage closes by asking how one would have to live in order to 'long for nothing more fervently' than this ultimate confirmation and seal of one's life exactly as it is.