Life is short. We know this. But there is a contradictory thought, which I find every bit as exhilarating and which was central to the writings of the German nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is called ‘eternal recurrence’: an idea that he drew from Indian philosophy. Time is infinite, Nietzsche points out, while the chances of a world appearing exactly like our own is (though very, very small) not quite zero. This means that eventually, as we move through infinite time, a world exactly like ours will appear again. And, given that we have endless time to play with, over
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