The other night, idly channel flipping, I caught the last few minutes of the treacly Kevin Spacey vehicle K-Pax and was mildly surprised to discover that they’d borrowed Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence” and given it a Stephen Hawking spin to fit the sci-fi theme. It’s mentioned near the end that in the cosmological debate between those who believe the universe will eventually stop expanding and then contract once more into the singularity that gave rise to the big bang, and those who see us winding down in an entropic fizzle—it’s “those who favor fire” who’ve got it right. (Contemporary physics, as I recall, holds with the partisans of ice, but let that be.) The twist, apparently, is that the cosmic crunch will be followed by another big bang, and another crunch, and so on forever. But each time, everything will go just as it did the previous time around, with earth cooling, man evolving, and your life following the precise same path, with every joy and every stupid blunder replicated in perfect detail.

This (that is to say, Nietzsche’s version) has always struck me as a much more elegant and poetic version of “heaven” and “hell” than the familiar cartoons involving harps tinkling through cloudscapes or pitchfork-wielding demons in firey lakes. There is, of course, a certain element of unfairness—what if you died very young of some painful congential illness? And what about those occasional amoralists who have a grand old time despite being total assholes, with nary a flicker of remorse? Still, there’s a special aptness to it. Much more fine grained than the binary choice between complete bliss and complete torment you get in the usual picture… even if you do add some concentric circles to hell.

Of course, it wouldn’t be quite like the traditional heaven and hell, since you presumably wouldn’t remember it the second or 896th time around, not if it’s to be precisely the same as the first go-round. If you did remember it, I’m sure it would be unambiguously awful, partly because of the feeling of being trapped in a movie you’ve seen to many times already, but mostly because a joy repeated is the same joy over again, while a mistake relived has something tragic about it.

But if you don’t remember, then what’s the difference between the case in which things literally happen twice, and the universe as we know it? I don’t mean this in some sort of epistemically skeptical sense; this is not “if a tree falls in the forest…” What I mean, rather, is that the current thinking, as I understand it, is that time is just one more dimension, like height or width, part of the totality the whitecoats call spacetime. It may not make sense to say that the past “still” exists or that the future “already” exists. To claim that New Jersey is real and exists even when I’m in Washington does not suppose that New Jersey exists here in Washington. Still and all, the past and future are supposed to be “real” in the same sense that propositions are timelessly true.

With that in mind, what exactly does it mean to say, as Nietzsche did, that time is a circle? How would that be any different from it being a straight line? The idea of “recurrence” suggests something travelling around the circle, events starting over. But that can’t be any better than a bad spatial metaphor: traveling and motion and “starting over” happen in time, and if there’s some way they might apply outside time, or to time itself, then I can’t quite get my brain around them. (Any 10 dimensional hyperbeings chuckling at my confusion are invited to enlighten me.)

Maybe “eternal recurrence” is just good ol’ time viewed from a certain angle, a way of calling attention to the permanence of our actions. I think that’s supposed to inspire us to “live every moment” and all that jazz… it tends to just make me want a stiff drink.