“You’re a groundhog!” the little boys in third grade teased but I just smiled, secure in the knowledge that the day of my birth was the best day ever on which to be born. I mean really, if you have to be born on a minor holiday what better one could there be? Arbor Day? I don’t think so!
Then at some point a pagan friend filled me in on the fact that my birthday is also Imbolc, which celebrates the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox and the return of light to the northern hemisphere. If I can just make it to my birthday, I’d tell myself in the darkest days of winter, then we’re halfway there.
Of course February 2 is also the topic of a film; I felt nothing but a faint revulsion at having my birthday associated with such a worthless piece of pop culture until I learned about eternal recurrence:
What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: ‘This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence – and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again – and you with it, you speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!’ If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: ‘do you want this again and again, times without number?’ would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?
This is my reminder every day and I will ask it of you now: If that demon came to you, would you be happy to relive every day again and again? Would you be filled with joy or horror? If the latter, then what would you have to change so that your answer could be different? Could you, like Billy Pilgrim, come unstuck in time?
Eternal recurrence also shows up in Douglas Adams:
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
All these thoughts have blended in my mind to bring extra significance to the year I turn 42. I’d planned on buying myself a little tattoo1 for my birthday but #Snowmageddon11 will probably postpone that plan at least for a few days.
However, if I go with this plan I’d be stuck explaining it for the rest of my life, and past experience has taught me that people expect the question “What does your tattoo mean” to be answered in fewer than ten words, so maybe I’ll just get a wee dolphin instead?
