September

On beginnings and eternal recurrences

A stylized ouroboros

It’s the ninth month of the year but, to me, September feels like the first. Kind of a second January. A new beginning. I’ve always been fascinated by new beginnings and starting over. Some find new beginnings discouraging. I find them salvific, a way to turn the page and write a fresh, new story. The chance to do something anew, with one more year of mistakes under my belt and the awareness and wisdom they bring. 

I like departures, attempts, plunges into the unknown, even though I’m no longer twenty. I believe we should trust ourselves, be brave. Not fearless, as that’s impossible. Fear is present and will always be, but we should learn to deal with it, make a pact with it, turn it into our ally, somehow. Fear makes us do things, if accepted and managed respectfully. It paralyzes us when seen as an enemy to defeat. And so we should go ahead and welcome a year of new mistakes, with an open mind and an open heart. 

Why do you think September feels like a new beginning? a friend asks. I guess for me it has to do with a new energy after the summer break, as here (in Italy) everything stops in August. There’s a magical, positive, optimistic back-to-work, back-to-school, back-to-life feeling. It’s like hitting the reset button. Liberating, refreshing, invigorating. I could move mountains, walk on water, slay dragons, in September. I don’t get the same feeling in January. 

A new beginning doesn’t have to be a revolution. Small, incremental things can do a lot to my mood and general demeanor. And so in September I enroll in a course, make a small change to my diet, learn to play a new song, sort out my closet and give stuff I don’t wear to charity, start a new habit, or kill an old one. Just enough to create a sense of newness and get a little refill to my energy tank. I don’t need much more than that. What’s critical, to me, is knowing with absolute certainty that, every year, September will come along. And I will relive the same magical new beginning feeling, no matter what.

I’m captivated by the idea of circular time. Of time not seen as a straight line, as an unstoppable arrow propelled into the future. Rather, the idea of time as a series of recurring moments -- a circle. In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, a book that I (indeed) cyclically return to, Nietzsche elaborates on the concept of what he calls Eternal Recurrence. He says that the Universe and everything in it, including our lives and experiences, are destined to recur infinitely in an unending cycle. That every moment, every choice, and every event we experience will happen again and again throughout eternity. As daunting (and even nihilistic) as this concept may seem, implying that we are trapped in an eternal loop where we relive our lives with no escape from the past, Nietzsche saw the Eternal Recurrence as a powerful thought experiment and a measure of the quality of one's values and actions. A “litmus test of an individual’s capacity to affirm life.”¹

What if a demon were to visit you and announce that you must relive your life exactly as it is, with all its joys and sorrows, for all eternity? Would you greet this prospect with joy or despair?, he asks as a hypothetical question². If we were to face the Eternal Recurrence with dread, it would suggest that our lives lack meaning and purpose, that we are burdened by regrets and unresolved conflicts. If, on the other hand, we could embrace the idea of living our lives repeatedly, it would compel us to make every choice, every moment count. So for Nietzsche, the Eternal Recurrence is not meant to paralyze individuals with fear but to inspire a profound reevaluation of one's life and live every moment as if we are destined to relive it in eternity.

This contrasts with the idea of living each moment as if it were the last, which I personally don’t like. If I had certainty that a moment is going to be my last, I would not care in the slightest to make it special -- I’m going to die right afterwards! If, on the other hand, I had certainty that a moment is going to be relived in eternity, I’d try my best to make it as awesome as possible (or as bearable and harmless as possible, in case of a bad one -- life has plenty of those as well). I believe Nietzsche’s perspective makes my affinity for new beginnings take on a deeper significance. Each September, as I welcome the "second January," I am, in a way, recommitting to the ongoing cycle of life, to the thrill of starting something new, to the idea that mistakes are part of the journey, and to the opportunity to learn and grow with each repetition. 

I loved it when Mom took us to the stationery store to buy new notebooks and pens and pencils and all the things we needed for the new school year. School started in mid September, so our trip to the store took place the first few days of the month, after the summer and the beach and the ocean had all been forgotten and archived until the next year. I loved the smell of new stationery, and the idea that no one had written on any piece of paper you could buy there. It was all clean and immaculate, ready to be stained with words and doodles and thoughts and colors. Everything was new. Every item in that store symbolized a new beginning. The thought that, by the end of the school year, all that paper would be written on, or colored on, or torn, made me both sad and excited. Then we went home and put the new stuff away, until the afternoon before the first day of school, when Mom sat us all around the kitchen table and, together, we labeled our notebooks with subjects and names. Guys, give me a good pen, Mom would say, when it was time to write on the labels. I loved the way she wrote, I loved her handwriting. I still do. 

I wish I still went to school. But every year I know I can relive that exact same September feeling of a new beginning. And, somewhat pretentiously, I’m thinking that maybe Nietzsche was really onto something. Maybe his was more than a simple thought experiment, more than a simple litmus test. Maybe time is indeed circular, but instead of reliving the exact same actions, we get to relive the exact same feelings in a cyclical fashion. Who knows. 

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“Everything straight lies,” murmured the dwarf disdainfully. “All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.” -- from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, 1883.

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1. As Daniel Came puts it in his essay “The Birth of Tragedy and Beyond” (featured in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche).

2. This is a paraphrase of the original question first appeared in his book “The Gay Science'', which is much more complex and articulated: “What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?”