3 posts tagged “friedrich nietzsche”

The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal 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… 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 again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ 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 lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. 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, s. 341)

Last night, I was at my local coffeehouse tweaking my resumé and reading Augustine,

when someone on the staff put on Joy Division, perhaps my favorite band of all time. I suddenly found myself scribbling frantically in a Kubla Khan-like frenzy about "Augustine and the Unknown Pleasures." Thinking back on it, it made not a single bit of sense and went on and on about how Ian Curtis, living in post-industrial Manchester and Macclesfield, UK, believed he had only internal free will and was bound by the economic and social restraints of working class England that left him isolated and marginalized. Even then, his free will could only be manifested through lamentation. Then, somehow, I wandered into this idea that Joy Division conveys a Romanticism full of the nostalgia akin to Nietzsche's "God is Dead", i.e., that any notion of established and reliable truth has fallen in disillusion and that there is no signifier - only the signs of what was or what was thought to be.

To be honest, it was a fun flurry of bad handwriting and theorizing, but to put Augustine and Ian Curtis together like that is wholly sophomoric. Unless, of course, I did a better job of taking on the collapse of the Church of England as a cultural force in contemporary British society. And I was really just writing for fun, anyway.

Recently, we watched Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers starring Bill Murray. I enjoyed this movie. The plot is simple. A man is told he has a son, but he doesn't know who the mother is. Being a bit of a ladies' man in his younger days, he travels across the country to each of his ex-girlfriends to ask if she is, indeed, the mother.

I tentively put this film in the same category as Groundhog Day, my favorite Bill Murray movie of all time. In both films, Murray plays an unhappy, unsatisfied man who has a nagging itch and who goes through great lengths to scratch it. In both films, Bill Murray is a man who is going through the rigors of atonement.

In Groundhog Day, as a curmudgeon local news reporter, Bill Murray lives Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence until finally realizing his greatest happiness is living in this infinite repetition. His atonement is not to God or even some impartial universe. His atonement is to himself. And when he finds his reconciliation and happiness with his life, his life continues on February 3rd.

In Broken Flowers, as a lone wealthy bachelor, Bill Murray meets with four of his ex-girlfriends twenty years later and asks them if they have a typewriter and a son. Bill Murray's encounters go from strange to worse: He sleeps with one, has an awkward dinner with another and her husband, has a tense conversation with a third, and gets thrown out by the fourth. He visits his fifth, and possibly favorite, at her grave site, where he sits alone for a long time. Her tombstone reads "Beloved sister and daughter." There is no mention of "wife."

His atonement is not with the past women in his life, but with himself. When he believes he has found his son, who asks him for some philosophical advice, Bill Murray says, drawing from his journey, that the past cannot be changed, so what does it matter? The future cannot be changed, so what does it matter? There is only the present. And with those words, we find that Bill Murray has atoned to himself.

He never sought to reconcile with the women in his life, but only to satisfy his own curiosity of potential paternity. In the process of that quest, he learns what the women in his life have become after twenty years. He is already well aware of what he has become - or how he has never changed. When he realizes the permanence and intrangence of the past, he becomes resolved to it and accepts it. When he realizes the unknowability of the future, he becomes resolved to it and accepts it. He only has the present on/with/by which to live. Once he realizes this, he is free to live in the present - and wake up on February 3rd, so to speak.

The twist is that though he has determined to live in the present, the present does not work out for him so well. Here is the missing scene from Groundhog Day, within which everyone lives happily ever after. In Broken Flowers, our protagonist reaches the apex of presence in the present and finds emptiness and lack. More specificly, there are hundreds of young men wearing trackshirts with stripes. Bill Murray has reached his now and is finally at peace with his now, but his now is as empty as his now ever was.

As existential examinations, Broken Flowers serves as a nice bookend begun with Groundhog Day. Both films portray a man wrestling with a past that has become a present that just won't quit. He finds self-discovery and learns what his life could mean in the process of reliving the past over and over again. His enlightenment comes at the realization that there is only the present to live for while one still can. A bouquet of flowers is only pretty in the present. They have been cut from their past and will soon lose their petals and die. Thus, live fully. But Broken Flowers warns us to live fully carefully lest we attach ourselves to something that really isn't us.