Читать книгу Thus Spoke Zarathustra - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Friedrich Nietzsche - Страница 22

In this section, Nietzsche first hints at his famous notion of the eternal return. Voyaging on a ship, he relates a story to sailors onboard. It is in the form of a riddle, and Zarathustra suggests that the sailors are in the best position to guess its meaning.

In his parable, Zarathustra strides through a gloomy landscape in defiance of the spirit of gravity. He discovers a dwarf straddling his shoulders. The dwarf jumps off, and Zarathustra confronts him with an elaborate cosmology concerning the nature of time. This enigmatic, cyclical model seems to have features of an eternal return but before he can finish explaining it, Zarathustra is interrupted by a howling dog and notices the dwarf has vanished.

He suddenly catches sight of a reclining shepherd, who has a black snake lodged in his throat. He calls on the shepherd to rip it out, and he bites off its head and spits it out. The shepherd then stands up like a transformed being and laughs. That concludes Zarathustra's enigmatic riddle. It leaves the eternal return tantalizingly vague.