‘The horror! The horror!’
Many have speculated about what inspired Colonel Kurtz to utter those famous last words. The answer lies in what he realised just before he let out his last breath. In that moment, he understood that past, present and future were all illusions. No moment in time is ever lost. Everything that happens exists for ever.
That meant his impending death would not be the end. His life, once lived, would always exist. And so, in a sense, the life he had lived would be lived again and again, eternally recurring, each time exactly the same and thus with no hope of learning, of changing, of righting past wrongs.
Had Kurtz made a success of his life he could have borne that realisation. He could have looked upon his work, thought ‘it is good’ and gone to his grave serene in his triumph over death. The fact that he instead reacted with horror testified to his failure to overcome the challenges of mortal existence.
‘The horror! The horror!’ Would you react to the thought of eternal recurrence any differently?
Sources: Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1891); Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
As literary criticism and as metaphysics, this interpretation of Kurtz’s dying words, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is at best complete speculation and at worst pure invention. I am not aware of any textual evidence that this is how we should understand Kurtz’s enigmatic last words. And the idea of eternal recurrence, although seemingly believed in earnest by Nietzsche, is not considered by most commentators to have marked his finest hour.
Nonetheless, the hypothesis of eternal recurrence and how we would react to it is an interesting device for examining ourselves. Even if our lives are not fated to be infinitely repeated, whether or not we can bear the thought that they would be is, for Nietzsche, a test of whether we have ‘overcome’ life. Only the ‘overman’, who has complete self-mastery and control over his fate, could look upon his life with enough satisfaction to accept its eternal recurrence.
It is important to remember that what Nietzsche is talking about is not a kind of Groundhog Day. In that film, Bill Murray found himself in the same day again and again, but each time he had the opportunity to do things differently. Hence he had the possibility of redemption, of escaping the cycle, by finally learning how to love. Nietzsche’s form of recurrence is one in which there is no awareness that one is doing the same thing again, and there is no opportunity to do it differently. It is literally the exact same life, lived again and again.
Nietzsche may have gone too far when he suggested that only the overman, who has never existed, could accept this. Indeed, it is interesting how many people, even those who have gone through hell, say, ‘If I could go back, I would do all the same things again. I wouldn’t change a thing.’ On the face of it, that directly contradicts Nietzsche’s claim about the intolerability of eternal recurrence. Perhaps it is not Nietzsche who is wrong, however, but those who blithely embrace their past mistakes. For when we truly try to imagine the bad experiences of our pasts, the terrible mistakes we made, the hurtful things we did, the indignities we suffered, isn’t it unbearably painful? Isn’t it simply lack of imagination, or at least our ability to suppress painful memories, that prevents us from being overcome by ‘the horror’ of the past? The overman accepts the idea of recurrence without the blinkers and filters that protect us from the pain of remembering. That is why Nietzsche believed the overman was so rare, and why the rest of us would react like Kurtz to the thought of history repeating itself again, and again, and again.
See also
| 20. | Condemned to life |
| 34. | Don’t blame me |
| 65. | Soul power |
| 88. | Total lack of recall |