As coronavirus shows no signs of going away any time soon, that means that the restrictions of Covid World will remain part of our lives for the foreseeable future. We’ve lived like this for over eight months now, and this new way of life is defined primarily, I think, by how repetitive it is. There are so many fewer things to do now, so many fewer places to go, and so many hidden dangers everywhere, that routines have become more entrenched than ever. The movie Groundhog Day (1993) is a dramatic comedy about a man stuck in the same day, over and over again, and it offers some existential clues of how to find a way out of this repetitive hell we are living, or at least how to make the most of it. Repetition is a problem of how we relate to time—we are getting crushed by an excess of time right now, and we don’t know what to do with it. We are drowning in time, as life and the world has been transformed into one long moment. Finding a way to relate to time differently, so that repetition doesn’t destroy us, but instead makes us more powerful, is what the movie is ultimately about.
Bill Murray, in one of his best roles, plays a small-time TV weatherman named Phil Connors who, even before he gets trapped repeating the same day over and over, is trapped in a cycle of life that he doesn’t like. For four years in a row, he has gone to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to do a fluff piece on the tradition they have of the groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow, or not, as a way to predict whether there will be six more weeks of winter. In the opening scene at his small time TV network, before he goes on location to Punxsutawney, he tells the anchorwoman, who teases him about going to Punxsutawney for the fourth year in a row, that a “major network” is interested in him—to break him out of the lame, low level cycle he is trapped in. But his cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) immediately says, “Yeah, the Home Shopping Network!” Phil is a man trapped in his cycle, and all he can do to get through it is be smug, narcissistic, and ironic. He hates the cycle of his life, so he can only regard it with a kind of ironic detachment. And so that’s how people relate to him, in turn, trapping him in this cycle. This is the approach he brings to Groundhog Day, which repeats and repeats, trapping him in eternity.
In the van on the way to Punxsutawney, Phil tells his new producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) and Larry that this will be his last year doing the story. He’s already trying to move on, to break out of his cycle, moving past his present before it even begins. Phil tells them his concern that “Some day people are going to see me interviewing a groundhog and think I don’t have a future.” He’s worried about his future, and so he rushes through his present. He’s never present anywhere, because his mind is on his future—but his future doesn’t exist yet. What’s the use in rushing to a future that doesn’t exist yet? That’s treating the present like a blur, which means the future will also be—blurry! Contrast this with Rita’s perspective on the groundhog story—she thinks it will be fun, and anyways, people just love it! Phil’s response is “People like blood sausage too! People are morons!” Rita says she likes blood sausage—she says it in a way that suggests she’ll say yes to anything, but not out of ignorance, out of a kind of affirmative approach to life. She says yes to Groundhog Day and to blood sausage. She is a Yes-Saying spirit, in Nietzsche’s terms. Phil, on the other hand, is a No-Saying Spirit—this is why his dominant mode is negative, ironic detachment.
They arrive in town, and Phil isn’t staying at the same crappy hotel as them. He instead gets to stay at a nice bed and breakfast. Rita invites Phil to join her and Larry for dinner, but Phil declines, because the way Larry eats disgusts him too much. He goes to his fancy bed and breakfast, and a minute later it’s the next morning. The first night goes by in a blur. The next thing you know the alarm clock switches to 6 AM and you hear the radio play “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher for the first of countless times. We see nothing of that first night. This first night was intended to be his only night there—he didn’t know he was going to repeat the day an endless number of times. So he took zero advantage of what was going to be his only night in the town. He just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.
The next morning is Groundhog Day! Phil Leaves his bedroom and encounters a man in the hall, who will be the first man he sees every day as long as he is trapped in his cycle of repeating the same day. The man enthusiastically asks him about the groundhog ceremony, and if he thinks it’s going to be an early spring. Phil says he predicts it will be March 21st, which is the official start date of spring. Classic smartass answer. Then he goes downstairs and is greeted by Mrs. Lancaster, who runs the bed and breakfast. He demeans her, tells her she doesn’t know how to spell espresso, and when she mentions the possibility of a blizzard, he launches into an expert analysis of the blizzard, which was intended to go over her head. She looks uncomfortable and ignorant while he is delivering this speech, as intended. Then he rushes off. He either has no time for anyone, or if he does have time for anyone, it is just to belittle them. Needless to say, I could not possibly relate to this any more.
Then he is off to the ceremony, but on his way Ned Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky) greets him. Ned tries to get Phil to remember him and catch up on their old friendship, which is vague—they used to know each other, and it was an important relationship for Ned, but barely on Phil’s radar at all. Ned invites him to dinner and he says no because he has no time for that either. He is just trying to get out of that town as soon as his job duties are over. Phil smiles and says “Ned, I would love to stand here and talk with you, but I’m not going to,” and walks away. This is intended as a statement of freedom—choosing to exit the situation—but in his habit of trying to get out of every situation as quickly as possible, Phil is not showing any real freedom, but rather is being pushed and pulled around by his ambitions and his dissatisfaction with where he’s at. A free man would stand his ground and engage with Ned, not flee from him. Phil’s main quality is that he has no time. This seems like power, but it isn’t. Phil’s name, after all, means love. But what does he love? Himself. He has no time for anyone or anything but himself— but even so, he doesn’t really love himself, and all the time he spends on himself isn’t paying off, because he is returning to the same job four years in a row that he hates.
His lack of time makes him blind, and in a rush to get away from Ned Ryerson he steps right into this horrible puddle, a mistake he repeats over and over—having no sense of time, no presence, means having no sense of what’s around you, and stepping in every puddle.
After rushing through his report at the ceremony, Phil, Rita, and Larry pile into the van to hightail it out of town. But the blizzard that Mrs. Lancaster warned him about, which he arrogantly dismissed, stops them from leaving, so they have to wait another night. Once again Rita invites Phil to join them for dinner, and he turns them down, opting to read Hustler in his hotel. He wakes up the next morning, and it’s Groundhog Day again. This day plays out as mostly just a surreal déjà vu experience. He rushes through everything in the same way, but with a heightened sense of claustrophobia and strangeness. He makes the same mistakes because he is even angrier than he was the first time—he already tolerated this nonsense, and he has to do it again!
He makes it back to his hotel that night, and is still hopeful that it was just an extended experience of déjà vu that will end the next morning. He has the idea to break a pencil in half and leave it on his nightstand—if it is still broken the next morning, then he is out of the time loop, but if it is in one piece, then the loop starts again. When he wakes up the next morning and finds the pencil unbroken, that is the first moment of terror he experiences. The realization hits him that he is trapped.
One of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas is the Eternal Recurrence—the hypothesis that existence, and the cosmos itself, endlessly repeats or recurs, and that all we can do is either accept this, or reject it. Since recurrence is inevitable, in Nietzsche’s view, we ought to do nothing but accept it and affirm life. If we run from this idea of the recurrence, then that means we have failed an ethical test—we have not been living in accordance with eternity, we have not treated every moment with the weight of infinity. Nietzsche is saying that we should only do something if we would do it an endless number of times—we should never do something purely out of duty, but rather because it brings us joy and fills us with ascending life, with power. He first lays this idea out in The Gay Science, a book from his middle period, in aphorism 341, titled “The Heaviest Burden.” In the aphorism, the repetition of the same day, the same moment, is presented as either a heavy burden that crushes us, or, if we have lived our life correctly, it is the greatest liberation. If we regard the eternal recurrence of the same as a blessing, we have passed his ethical test—if we view it as a terrible curse (as Phil Connors does), then we have failed it.
On this third day, filled with terror at the reality of the eternal recurrence, Phil has even less time than he did the first day. He doesn’t engage people at all. He ignores them entirely and rushes around, but this is a different rush than the first day. Now it’s a panicked, fearful rush, not a narcissistic, ironically detached rush. He just runs away from Ned, in a panic, rather than trying to ironically engage him and get him away with his sharp words. He again steps into the big puddle, but he doesn’t even care. He just keeps rushing in panic. He tells his producer Rita that he is too sick to work, so they skip the report on the groundhog ceremony and he confesses his predicament to her in the diner. He wants help. He needs help. It seems like a rare thing for him to admit—that he needs help.
He is so afraid and desperate that he goes to the doctor and then to a psychiatrist, and neither of them can help him because his problem is existential—meaning his problem is how he relates to time. He had no time and now he has too much of it. This is not something that anyone else can solve—it is a problem of your own existential spatiotemporal integrity, how your selfish particularity relates to the infinite totality of time. Reaching out to others can’t help you with problems of your own integrity—reaching out is precisely what breaks your integrity, since integrity comes from the root integer, wholeness.
The doctor (played by the film’s director and fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis, RIP to a true king) examines his head X-ray and finds no problem, and suggests he see a psychiatrist. (Sidenote: filming this movie was notoriously difficult, and at one point Murray and Ramis got into such a bad fight on the set that they didn’t want to work with each other for a long time after, which is likely why Ghostbusters 3 never happened. Which creates another existential dilemma—would it have been better if this movie never existed, and we had another Ghostbusters movie with the original cast instead? This question might be unanswerable).
The psychiatrist can’t help him either because the his main suggestion is just to smile and say “let’s meet again tomorrow.” which Phil can’t do, because his problem can’t be solved tomorrow. Tomorrow is the one thing he doesn’t have. Phil’s problem is reconciling eternity with immediacy—he has to bear the weight of the eternal, and he’s aware of it, he doesn’t like it, it is the heaviest burden. But what is this burden, really? What is it to have such a unique relation to time, that you are cursed (or blessed, depending on your perspective) with too much time, with a new eternity every day, every moment? That is more or less the definition of being God (or at least a god). His problem is that he is a god—he just doesn’t know it, and he isn’t ready to accept it.
This is another core philosophical problem that Nietzsche deals with. His famous parable of “The Madman” (also in The Gay Science, aphorism 125) about the death of God, is not so much just a straightforward statement of the declining religiosity in the modern world. It is more about the significance of this for the world, for the universe, and most of all, for us ourselves. Nietzsche reasons that if God is dead, meaning nobody in the modern world believes in God as much anymore, that means that we must have killed him—who else could have killed God except for us? And if we have managed to kill God, what does that say about us? About this crime of killing god, deicide, Nietzsche says asks: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed…” So the problem is how to become god, a god, not the God (as Phil will later explain to Rita when he is further along in his process of becoming who he is—a god). The madman is mad because his reasoning leads to thinking that you are a god, but you just haven’t realized it yet, and so you have an epistemological problem (problem of knowledge). And you haven’t faced the challenge of becoming a god (ethical problem). This is part of Nietzsche’s inversion of Kant’s ethical system—for Kant, ethics reduces to doing your duty, which really means to diminish yourself in many cases. Duty for Kant is not necessarily duty to oneself—it is duty to universals and objective imperatives. For Nietzsche, duty is rather to oneself, specifically to understanding and then acting upon the knowledge that you are in fact a god. What else is the ubermensch than this?
Phil ends this day, his most existential day yet, by getting in the car with some drunk guys he met at the bar, and driving insanely on the railroad tracks, and gets chased by cops. While driving on the train tracks, he tells his new drunk friends his new existential philosophy, “I’m not going to play by their rules anymore, you make choices and you live with them.” So he makes his reckless choices, he lives dangerously, he thinks they are big meaningful choices, but they’re not, because he doesn’t have to live with them. He knows that the day will just reset tomorrow. So they are fake choices, more impulsive and and based on interests and aesthetics than anything that could be considered a real choice. He spends the night in jail and wakes up the next morning back at his bed and breakfast, ready to hear that Sonny and Cher song yet again.
The fourth day he wakes up extremely excited. He jumps out of bed ready to seize the day, because he’s not in prison. He has a new lease on life. His conversation with Mrs. Lancaster lobby is engaged and present and energized. He asks her if the police had shown up, she says no, so he kisses her and announces that he’s going to stay for an additional day. This is significant—he is literally saying Yes to life. Yes, I will stay another day. He now knows that he can do whatever he wants and there will be no consequences. He has affirmed the eternal return, and he is realized its power—he is on his way to becoming a god, but not quite there yet. So when annoying Ned Ryerson runs up to him, Phil punches him in the face, and he’s present enough to not step in the puddle for the first time. He then goes to the diner and eats a ton of food and lights up a cigarette. Rita asks him if he’s worried about his diet, and what makes him so special. He says he doesn’t have to worry about anything. He doesn’t say he is a god (not yet, he says that later). Then Rita scornfully recites a poem to him, warning him about his self-destructive egocentrism, and she tells him egocentrism is his defining characteristic. So he is not quite a god yet—he is just a hedonist with a big ego.
So Phil doesn’t want to escape the day and no longer worries about anything, he has changed his perspective about his infinite access to time—his overabundance of time is no longer oppressive, but it liberates him. So he decides to lay the groundwork for getting lines to do on Nancy, the cute woman at the diner. He eventually gets to sleep with her, though he refers to her as Rita when they’re making love, which she doesn’t like. But he tells her that they will get married to make her feel better, to put some kind of universality an eternity into this very particular and one off encounter. So he isn’t really a god if he can’t even be fully present when he’s making love, and has to lie, to her and to himself about imagining that she’s Rita—what kind of god is that?
Now that he realizes he can use his power to seduce women, he turns his attention to his real goal—Rita. It’s not clear yet if he really even cares about her that much, let alone loves her. But he is definitely interested in her, existing at the aesthetic stage of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way. Phil embarks on something like the journey of the character of A in the section of Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or” called the Seducer’s Diary. A represents the Aesthetic stage of existence, before the higher ethical and religious stages, that represent more fully self-actualized existence. Phil offers to get Rita a cup of coffee and a donut, and starts asking her tons of personal questions, so he has information to use in his infinite future attempts to win her. But it doesn’t work—he is too direct. He is violating something Nietzsche says in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil: “Suppose that truth as a woman—what then? Isn’t it right to suspect that all philosophers… have had trouble understanding women? That the dreadful earnestness, the bumbling intrusiveness with which they have hitherto tried to approach truth were awkward and unbecoming ways of winning a woman over?” Rita’s response to Phil’s clumsy questioning is the expected one:
Phil is temporarily humbled but persistent—he ends up going on a series of dates with her at the hotel bar, perfecting his line. A seemingly endless number of times they get to a certain point during their date at the bar, and he says something wrong, so he makes a mental note and plays the day back exactly, but with the benefit of knowing which lines to use and which to avoid. He avoids land mines, and finds something better to say as a toast to drink to. It’s all very controlled as he manipulates her step-by-step, because he isn’t playing to win, he’s just playing not to lose. But the breakthrough comes when he sort of lets go of control and lives in the moment, as the snowball fight with the kids breaks out, and he has a lot of fun with it. He shows Rita a different side of himself, and she likes it. Then, after defeating the kids in snowball fight combat, they dance together in the gazebo and she looks at him in a different way than she ever has. Phil has finally won—or so he thinks.
They go back to the hotel, and he tells her he loves her—but she is taken aback, and says “you don’t even know me.” It’s just been one day for her, but it’s been endless days for him, so he feels like he knows her, and he feels like he loves her. But even as perfectly as he calibrated the day, it was still just one day for her, so his eternity didn’t fit with her experience. This is the problem of temporal disjunction and love—love is about the feeling of eternity. If it doesn’t feel in some way like it could last forever, then it isn’t really love. He was ready for eternity, and she wasn’t—she said it was moving too fast for her. To Phil, it hadn’t been fast at all—it had basically been forever. Rita says that she can just see him tomorrow, and she doesn’t want to spoil it, but Phil doesn’t have tomorrow, so he can’t wait. He has all of these little suggestions, like French poetry and so on, that show all of the research and scheming he’s done. Rita says “Has this whole day been some kind of set up? Did you call all my friends to find out all these things about me? Is that what love is to you?” So his manipulation and lack of immediacy also causes him to lose her. She slaps him and leaves.
The next scene is the next day, back to the snowball fight, right before they get to the hotel. The day had played out exactly as before, and they are back to the pivotal moment—the snowball fight. He is kind of too manic, forcing the fun, it isn’t totally authentic, he tries to get too close, and comes on too strong. Because he thinks he can just go through the motions and get back to where he was before when he almost slept with her, only he’ll be able to get it right this time. But it doesn’t work, there’s a montage of her slapping him over and over and over again as he fails night after night. He walks home dejected, as if he’s sort of accustomed to this ritual now of not achieving his goal. Every day he tries and fails to get her to fail in love with him. He is trapped in this cycle, and he knows he can’t get out, and he doesn’t seem to have any intention of stopping his attempts at winning her. So one morning he trudges up to her at the groundhog ceremony and looks at her blankly, emptily, miserably. He has reached the end of his ability to endure his failed attempts to win her love.
The next scene is Phil in his pajamas in the living room of the bed and breakfast, watching Jeopardy! with the old people there. He of course knows every answer (or rather, since it’s Jeopardy!, every question to every answer), and the old people applaud him. This is a quick scene that seems insignificant, but it’s a key step in his transformation—the first time he really applied himself to learning any kind of skill. He has access to eternity—he could become an expert, a genius, in any field, any art, any science. But all he has done so far is despair, recklessness, hedonism, and seduction. Using his powers to improve himself is the positive direction—it’s the way out of the cycle. This is just a flash of it, but it’s a sign of how he eventually wins.
The next scene he is back reporting from the groundhog ceremony, and for the first time we see him bring the full power of his existential cynicism to bear on a present moment. He dispenses with the normal report, and instead offers his own winter prediction: “It’s going to be cold. It’s going to be gray. And it’s going to last you the rest of your life.” Then a montage of him waking up and smashing the alarm clock, again and again, as it plays the Sonny and Cher song. “I Got You Babe” smash! “I Got You Babe” smash! First he pounds it and smashes it, then throws it on the floor and it shatters it into pieces. He has decided to smash time—he wants to destroy time, destroy the cycle, and break out of it that way.
He gets the plan to kill the groundhog, because he thinks that will end the cycle. He is trying to break the cycle, to eject from its linear temporality. He steals the truck with the groundhog in it, and his plan is to drive straight off a cliff. His hope is that killing the groundhog will break the cycle. He is trying to outrun eternity, outsmart it, break away from it, overpower it. But you can’t do that to eternity, you can’t eject from eternity, you have to take eternity with into you, harness it, and use it. You can’t escape from it, because ultimately eternity is all that there is. The groundhog dies in the big explosion with him, but Phil still wakes up the next day.
Now realizing that he can’t escape eternity by killing the groundhog, he goes directly downstairs, ignores Mrs. Lancaster in the lobby, takes the toaster, plugs it in, gets in the bathtub, and drops it in there with him. This doesn’t end the cycle, so there is a montage of him committing suicide in various ways again and again and again.
Then we have a scene with Phil and Rita in the diner, and he has taken a new approach. After facing his death countless times, he is now convinced that he’s a god. A god, not the God.
Rita, of course, doesn’t buy it. So Phil decides to prove to her that he is a god. He takes her around the diner and tells her everything about everyone in the place—knowledge he has gained from living that day an endless number of times, he has talked to everyone there at one point or another. When she is astonished at his godlike knowledge and asks how he is doing this, Phil says “I told you, I know everything.” “How about me Phil, do you know about me too?” And he talks about the most intimate details of her life. This is him bringing the power of eternity and infinity into his relation to her in a matter of fact way, trying to mediate the temporal disjunction more deftly than he did before. His manner is far more casual than it was that night in the hotel with her, when he revealed his godlike knowledge of her—that was from a position of weakness almost, that he needed her. Now he is just revealing his godlike abilities—he is allowing himself to be who he is, a god, not for her, but just because that’s who he is now. He isn’t going to hide it, but he isn’t going to wield it to manipulate either. He tells her that he wakes up every day in Punxsutawney and it’s always Groundhog Day, February 2nd. He predicts so many things that happen in the diner, that she decides to believe him—she takes a kind of leap of faith. She is ready to believe that Phil is a god.
Rita agrees to spend the day with him, to be an objective witness to his godhood. “Sort of like a science experiment,” Phil jokes. They have a wonderful day, and he is carefree and lighthearted. He is not weighed down by his godliness, but wears it lightly. Eternity isn’t the heaviest burden for him anymore—it frees him, he has fun with it. They end up back in his bedroom, but they don’t sleep together, they are just hanging out. Rita says she had a great day and would love to do it again sometime—Phil knows that there won’t be a next time, because everything resets the next day, but he doesn’t let this harsh his mellow. She spends the night with him, and she falls asleep next to him. He tucks her in, and as they’re both falling asleep, he finally tells her how much he loves her, but not in the manic, desperate way he did at her hotel when she ended up slapping him. This is more matter of fact, and about who she is as a person, her qualities like kindness and so on, rather than just appealing to her interests. He isn’t just interested in her anymore—now he really cares about her. After his long, romantic soliloquy, Rita mumbles “Did you say something?” She didn’t hear a word. But that doesn’t bother Phil. He goes to sleep, and the alarm clock goes off at 6AM.
He wakes up in a good mood. Not manic, but happy and present. Instead of just rushing past the homeless man on the way to the groundhog ceremony, he stops and gives him a big wad of cash. Phil has an abundant, overflowing generosity of spirit now. He brings coffee and donuts to his coworkers. He asks Larry if he has kids (apparently he has known him for years and never bothered to ask). He reads poetry in the coffee shop. He begins to take piano lessons. He wakes up the next morning and the first guy he sees every day, who he usually blows off or has a sarcastic remark for, he greets with “Buongiorno signore!” and a hug and a kiss. When the guy asks if it’s gonna be an early spring, Phil offers him an inspiring poem, and says Ciao! The guy is filled with good energy—Phil is so abundant that he lifts up everyone around him.
He focuses on his piano lessons, and he spends his time ice sculpting at an expert level. Every day is seemingly given over to practicing ice sculpting and learning piano. He is making big strides. He encounters Ned Ryerson, and instead of trying to run away from him, or just punching him in the face, or insulting him, he hugs him, says he missed him so much, and asks him if he can call in sick so they can spend the day together. Ned says he has to get going and runs off, and Phil smirks, victorious, and walks away in a calm, confident way—he doesn’t even have to worry about the puddle anymore, because he isn’t crossing the street to get away from Ned—he just calmly walks on the sidewalk. Ned is the one who runs away now—not Phil.
He spends the next few scenes helping the homeless man, who is always in the alley. He is laying on the ground and seemingly near death. Phil takes him to the hospital, and they pronounce him dead. Phil refuses to accept this, and spends the next few days focusing on helping the old homeless man get healthy and get some warm meals. This kind of selflessness, and this proximity to death, along with his dedication to playing piano and learning other skills, gives Phil a kind of depth and gravitas that he never had before. At the groundhog ceremony, he delivers a brilliant meditation on the joys of a long winter, winning the admiration of all who hear it. Rita is blown away by his eloquence, and invites him to get coffee with her.
But Phil has other commitments—errands he has to run. He is on a schedule of doing good deeds, and he can’t be late. A kid falls out of a tree at a certain time every day, and Phil makes it a point to be there. A car full of old ladies breaks down, and he makes it a point to be there to fix their flat tire. The key figure of the groundhog ceremony, Buster Green (played by Bill Murray’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray) is choking on a piece of steak at a restaurant, and Phil is there just in time to save him—and with a witty line: “If you’re going to eat steak, make sure to get some sharper teeth.” Phil is using eternity to learn new skills and talents, to cultivate his character, and by losing himself in service to others. Doing this is curing his existential despair—he is abundant now, overflowing with power and spirit. Every day is a gift for him now, even if it is the same day—or perhaps especially because it is the same day. The the endless repetition of the same day was a crushing burden before, now it has become the ultimate freedom—it is revealed as power itself.
There is a party at the hotel, and Phil is the star of the show. Everyone in town is there. All those piano lessons have paid off, and he is on stage entertaining the crowd with his inspired piano playing, leading the band in a series of improvised songs. Phil is casually, effortlessly existing as a god. He gets off stage and starts dancing with Rita, but he keeps being interrupted by the people who he helped that day. He has cultivated so much virtue, as Nietzsche says in aphorism 290 of The Gay Science: “One thing is needful. — To ‘give style’ to one’s character—a great and rare art!” This kind of existential virtue, this giving “style” to one’s character, is so undeniable, that Phil is the star attraction of the charity auction they have at the party. Women bid on him, and it escalates, but Rita empties her checkbook—”$339.88!” and she wins him. He has gone full circle from trying to win her, to being the one that she tries desperately to win.
They leave the party together, and Phil has her sit there and model for him while he does an ice sculpture of her face. The result is so amazing, impossibly beautiful, so undeniably powerful, that all Rita can do is just ask Phil how he was able to do it. “I know your face so well, I could’ve done it with my eyes closed.” “It’s lovely,” Rita says. “I don’t know what to say.” Phil responds, “I do. No matter what happens tomorrow, or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now, because I love you.” Instead of slapping him, or telling him he doesn’t even know her, Rita responds with a smile, and says “I think I’m happy too.” She believes that he loves her, because he showed her that he did—only someone who loved her could’ve done a sculpture like he did. Then they have their first kiss, and walk back to Phil’s hotel.
When Phil wakes up the next morning and hears “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher at 6AM, for the first time in forever, he isn’t alone—Rita reaches over and turns off the alarm clock. They finally make love. They decide to live in Punxsutawney and start the rest of their lives together. Phil has escaped his own eternity and he can now live a shared eternity with Rita.
I much appreciated your advice to begin with Nietzche’s two essays, On the Uses and Abuses of History and Schopenhauer as Educator. I made the mistake of diving into Thus Spake Zarathustra, which proved enormously difficult, mainly because there are so many metaphors and double rhetoric to hold in mind as Nietzsche makes his point. I've come to understand Nietzsche’s eternal return as analogous to an afterlife. Nietzsche appears to be giving his alternative to the Christian afterlife, which is enormously passive. But to transcend this life knowing well that there is no other side except an eternal recurrence of themes and one’s response to that set of circumstances. Poe said sleep resembles a little death. So, rising and awakening over and over is the closest we get to an afterlife.
Nietzsche sometimes denigrates dialectics, but his claim that the death of God implies that we ourselves must become gods is the most dialectical conclusion you could reach