eternal return and responsibility

i love those ah-ha moments when i'm reading fiction and i can see some of my favorite philosophers' influence in the 'big thoughts' the characters face. i had a moment yesterday during my reading that made me revisit nietzsche - effectively distracting me for the rest of the day, and most of this morning.

nietzsche's concept of the eternal return is, to me, one of the most profound and terrifying ideas in philosophy. i think it's because, though nietzsche would not consider himself an existentialist, it illustrates very well the notion of taking responsibility for one's self, actions, and life. consider:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in 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 and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to 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 upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!‘”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

what if. what if you had to live this exact same life over and over again? nothing new, no second chances, all the same choices, opportunities, mistakes, heartbreaks, and revelations. why is this so terrifying? because we think our major limitation is time? if i had all the time in the world, would i DO LIFE differently?

this concept puts so much responsibility on the individual (because there is no fate, and, of course, god is dead) to take control - to be the driving force, the sole influence in one's life. this is my favorite (yet still most terrifying) concept in existential philosophy. it takes a lot of pondering to understand what responsibility really means in this sense.

further, it is not just an idea put forth by nietzsche. he puts the 'blame' on some demon, who 'steals' after you in your 'loneliest loneliness.' he does not directly take responsibility for this idea. he places it on a demon - a malevolent force. and it must come to you when you are at your weakest (in nietzsche's eyes): your loneliest loneliness. is it the confrontation of individual alone-ness, of nothingness, the oh-so-existential problem of confronting and understanding the possibility of your own non-existence?

(oh dear, we've gotten into heideggarian territory. it was bound to happen.)

to nietzsche, then, the eternal return is more terrifying than nothingness. in your night of solitude and loneliness, confronting nothingness and non-existence versus, perhaps, dasein, this demon - a being itself - gives you something even heavier to ponder: that your every choice and every action carries infinite weight. even if we don't have to live this life over and over for eternity, isn't it the same that we only get one shot? we do have to live with our choices 'eternally' since all we have is all we have.