Time After Time

Metempsychosis and its Discontents

Goethe once said—I cannot recall quite where, perhaps Conversations with Eckermann—that he felt quite sure that he had been here thousands of times before he was born and would return thousands of times more after his death. And, if memory serves, he made this pronouncement with a certain relish, or at least serenity. Fair enough, I suppose; if one happens to be a Goethe (an eventuality that has happened at least once in recorded history), the prospect of returning again and again to the scene of such extraordinary triumphs might seem a particularly enchanting one. I do have to wonder, though, whether he was imagining that he would always return as Goethe, or at least as some rough equivalent thereof. After all, who can say? Perhaps he could pull off such a trick; perhaps that singularly grand, invincibly eupeptic, Olympian, indefatigably virile soul would be able to deign as he willed to descend from his misty heights into whatever human frame he chose. He might even now and again elect to appear in one or another satyriatic incognito, like a shower of golden rain. But, given the usual account of these things, it seems an unlikely hope to cherish; and what a cruel fate it would be for some poor animula vagula blandula, having shuffled off the mortal coil of a Goethe, to return to this world only to become an insurance adjuster in Des Moines. The word ‘anticlimax’ could scarcely do justice to so steep a decline. And that does not even begin to take into account the more depressing possibilities suggested by the dharmic creeds and other systems that actually teach reincarnation: rebirth in one or another naraka, or as a worm, or as an ichneumon wasp, or as an online essayist (and so forth).