Eternal recurrence

Eternal recurrence is a term borrowed from Nietzsche. I don't understand what Nietzsche meant by it and so my meaning will probably be different.

My eternal recurrence refers to contemporary tragedies assuming a disproportionate importance in a person's life because of the coincidence in time of a more public event.

For people born a bit earlier than me , a defining event of this kind was the assassination of John F Kennedy.

To this day many people who respected Kennedy compare notes on what they were doing when the fatal shots were fired in Dallas. It's still a topic on radio call-in shows at US Thanksgiving time (when it happened). Time passes and that event is now 44 years in the past, and so more recent events take their place: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the death of Princess Diana, and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Kennedy's death entered the popular consciousness not just as an event but a time marker. For instance Frederick Forsythe's novel The Odessa File opens with a man hearing about it on the radio while travelling on an autobahn in Germany. He pulls to the side of the road and discusses it with a complete stranger.

While many people choose to remember banal things about their actions at the time of Kennedy's death, I focus here on personal events, which are in fact of greater importance, but which public events, especially their exaggerated profiles in the mass media, are imprinted on your personal consciousness, effectively fusing the two in your mind, and causing them to become inseparable. The fatal shots in 1963 occurred at 12:30pm local time, and thus in mid-day for North America. and so people throughout the continent were mostly at work or school, and so the lore is replete with people remembering their time getting a haircut, buying groceries at a store, or for younger kids, an announcement over the school public address system by a school principal with barely restrained emotions. I'm not old enough to have a specific memory of Kennedy's death but the death of Winston Churchill occurred when I was in class, and there was a similar sense of a historic moment in my little schoolroom in northeast B.C.

However, these were minor events of my childhood. For a much more memorable event, consider the example of Aug 31, 2007. Ten years before, I was packing things in shipping boxes, to be placed in storage. This was happening in Hong Kong. This was the end of an era -- nothing an outsider should care about -- but the and of my time in Hong Kong. The British era in Hong Kong had ended two months before and it seemed maybe my time in Asia was over (as it turned out, it dragged on a short time more but ended later in the fall of 1997). By Aug 31, 1997, the pressure was on: I was catching a flight out the next day; I was standing in my flat in Mid Levels packing. I worked all night (intermittently), and it was already Sept 1 (local time) when reports of her accident starting coming in on CNN International. Because of the time difference, a late-night accident in Paris was early morning news in Hong Kong. Two months earlier I had witnessed the royal yacht Britannia depart from Hong Kong with Chris Patten and Prince Charles aboard. Suddenly there was this final link: Diana and Charles, Diana and death today, my own imminent departure.

In the earliest reports, she had not yet died, only fatally injured and rushed to Hotel Dieu and Charles rushed to Paris.

During the flight itself, there was of course no news, but when I landed in Vancouver, I was immersed in two stories: my own preparation for a conference in Boston, and of course Diana's death and its aftermath as related in the recent movie "The Queen". This association is recalled by the present ten-year anniversary of her death.

Similarly, on Sept 10, 2001, I was informed that I was to be laid off my (well-paying) job. On the very same day, received word of possible infection by a deadly disease (I found out months later it was all a false alarm). Sept 11, the events in NYC. I remember eating dinner that day at a hideous sports bar (I don't watch sport events on television), sitting there like my shell-shocked Great Uncle who had been affected (so the story went) by the Second World War.

So these two very public events colliding as they did with private time of intense conflict, have become linked emotionally in my soul. I say in my soul because my mind knows perfectly well that they are quite separate, but the link, once established, however irrationally is there for good.

The effects of this is to mean that whenever, as has happened in the past week, Diana's death is replayed in the public arena, I also replay my last days in Hong Kong. There are other connections with her life and death which took longer for me to appreciate. These are more rational and less irrational. Nevertheless, it's hard to separate them fully.

Since the two very public events mentioned, are periodically revived and replayed at anniversaries, Nietzsche's phrase eternal recurrence seems apt.