Why Love Is The Opposite of Nietzsche’s “Flat Circle”
It took the words of a fictional, drugged up meth cook In HBO’s series True Detective for me to finally be able to define love in writing. "I know what happens next... you'll do this again. Time is a flat circle. This quote was later explained by Matthew McConaughey’s character Rust Cohle: “Time is a flat circle. Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again—forever.” In reality, HBO did not come up with this aphorism – it dates back to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. Time, contended Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is endless. Everything will eventually repeat itself, and therefore, your life will repeat an infinite number of times, exactly the same way each time. I could go on but (1) I rather doubt it and (2) it isn’t remotely the point of this article. Which is the following.
I’ve long struggled to describe what love is, although I have felt it and indeed feel it right now. It’s inside me directed both toward myself and toward a number of others. If I think of one of them I can feel my love for them almost as if it is a tangible thing — an uncuttable string that attaches me to them, as I have written about string theory of love in my second book “We’re All A Bit Messy.” But to that point, this book would already be published if not for this finicky chapter on love and how to describe it with any kind of weight that the actual feeling of love has. But in thinking of time as a flat circle in Nietzshe’s terms, I have rested on a personal definition. Love is the opposite of a flat circle. Love is a grouping – a variable number for us all – of infinite vertical lines.
Think about it like this, and to the above I have been long trying. You have a spouse, two children and a dog. Your love for them is not a pie chart. It isn’t 50% for your wife, 20% for one child, 15% for the other, 10% for the dog and 5% for everything else you have ever loved. To the contrary, it’s a full circle for each, and hopefully numerous, many more full circles. Just because you love someone fully doesn’t mean that you can’t love another equally fully. You can. I have. They are all different and nonrepeating (and thus another example of why they are the opposite of a flat circle). My love for my dog is utterly different from my love for my best friend, which would be completely different from my love of a significant other. But they are as permanent, as I talk about here, as they are unique. In fact, ideally this form of unique love starts with how you love yourself, and then extends to others. Because I believe you will love others in a much healthier and selfless way if you first truly love yourself.
Love, then, can be viewed as the opposite of a flat circle. It is not repeating endlessly over time. It's the same love once over time, but with a finite number of different occurrences. It is unique in every case. And again, there are a finite number of cases. I won’t love a thousand people. But I have loved a number. And I suspect you have too. I suspect more are coming. More vertical lines are in your future. And knowing that, this visual definition of love, provides a great reason for optimism to me. Look at the picture in the title and think of each as pure, forever love, of which more are to come — and I hope that optimism extends to you.
Mike Spivey
We are our own griefs. We are our own happinesses. We are our own remedies.