294 Nietzsche
extended, but set into a specific space as a specific force, not into a room
that might be 'empty' somewhere, but rather as a force everywhere, as a
play of forces and waves of forces, both one and 'many/ increasing here
while decreasing there, a sea of forces storming and flowing into one
another, eternally changing, eternally flooding back with immense years
of recurrence, with an ebb and flow of its forms, striving outward from
the simplest to the most complex, from the stillest, most rigid, coldest
outward to the glowing-hot, wildest, most self-contradictory and then
returning home once again from this abundance to the simple, from the
play of contradictions back to the pleasure of harmony, continuing to
affirm itself in this uniformity of its courses and years, blessing itself as
what must return eternally, as a becoming that knows of no satiety or dis-
gust or fatigue: this, my Dionysian world of eternal self-creation, eternal
self-destruction, this mystery world of the double voluptuous delights,
this, my beyond good and evil, lacking any goal unless there is a goal in
the happiness of the circle, lacking any will, unless a ring has good will
toward itself—would you like a name for this wodd? A solution for all of
its riddles? A light for you as well, you most concealed, strangest, bravest,
and midnighdy?—This world is the will topower—and nothing besides that! And
you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides that!"
(11,61 Of; IPP§ 1067).
This statement, which resounds with the great music of the spheres,
also establishes a connection to Nietzsche's doctrine of the recurrence
of the same. The principle of a finite quantity of force in infinite time
suggests the recurrence of all possible constellations and uses the image
of the "ebb and flow" of forms as a metaphor. Of course, this is meta-
physical "imagery," as Nietzsche was well aware. He realized that he was
attempting to know the unknowable and think the unthinkable. During
his summer of inspiration in 1881, he noted down: "Only after an imag-
inary counterwodd had arisen in opposition to the absolute flow could
something be discerned on this basis" (9,503f.). The "absolute flow" is
the image representing the unknowable. All thinking and knowledge
exist in an "imaginary counterwork!"; but "because it is possible to