Hesse wrote in 1919, in a little-known essay titled “Zarathustra’s Return,” “If you … are in pain, if you are sick in body or soul, if you are afraid and have a foreboding of danger—why not, if only to amuse yourselves … try to put the question in a different way? Why not ask whether the source of your pain might be inside you yourselves?… Might it not be an amusing exercise for each one of you to examine what ails you and try to determine its source?” 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.
