Listen to me read this post:
I love the Canadian prog-rock band Rush. Why? For oh so many reasons. For 40 years or so, before they retired in 2018, they made the music they wanted to make with passion, precision, and integrity. The drummer Neil Peart, commonly regarded as one of the greatest drummers of all time, wrote the lyrics for the band and during that time used his soap-box to write the most intellectual, philosophically oriented lyrics in rock music. He explored ethics, politics, his own left-libertarian leanings (including a to-my-mind unfortunate dalliance with the thought of Ayn Rand early on), and critical explorations of religion, fate, faith, psychology, technology, media and romantic love, among other things. I only saw them live twice, but both times I experienced what I think many Rush fans do- a high from taking in their incredible level of collaborative harmony and a heart-warming appreciation for their obvious camaraderie and mutual respect.
Last week I published an essay exploring the post-modern Stoicism I see in a great Lou Reed song, Power and The Glory, and the encapsulation in the song, of the Nietzschean attitude of amor fati, “the love of everything that happens to one (literally the love of one’s fate)” epitomized by Reed’s recurring phrase: I want all of it, not just some of it.
A writer and person who I enjoy, Robert Saltzman, posted a video on his Substack yesterday exploring amor fati. Taking up the Nietzchean (and Stoic) idea of eternal recurrence, he asks whether, if given the chance to live one’s life again in just the same way that it occurred, one would choose that over simple death. He offers this not as an idle fireside question but as a provocative, and potentially transformative, contemplation with the potential to change one’s attitude towards one’s life.
While thinking about this I remembered the Rush song Headlong Flight, which happens to contain Neil Peart’s answer to the question of eternal recurrence. This song was on Rush’s last album, which was released in 2012, six years before the band retired due to Peart’s inability to handle the physical rigor of his drumming anymore, and eight years before he died of glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Peart was no stranger to tragedy, having lost both his wife and (then) only daughter to a car crash and cancer in the same year in the late 90s.
I posted Rush’s lyric video to the song below. Spoiler, this is the chorus:
Some days were dark
I wish that I could live it all again
Some nights were bright
I wish that I could live it all again
Robert, if you read this, you mentioned in your video that your sense of fate is more akin to luck- not an embodiment of some grand telos. So is mine. I’m with Spinoza, who said that God, or Nature, acts without purpose, and reality is simply coterminous with what is possible- in other words, Reality is simply what can happen. Whatever can happen, does. I thought you, and others who share this sensibility, might enjoy a Rush song called “Roll The Bones” which embodies this perspective, in which Peart writes “fate is just the weight of circumstances.”
And lastly dear reader if you’ve made it this far in my love letter to Rush, here is concert footage of Peart drumming for Subdivisions, an awe-inspiring model of precision and concentration. The audio is actually the studio recording, and the video footage shows him reproducing that live with amazing fidelity. Anyone who has played live music (as I have) knows how nearly super-human this is. Except it is human, not superhuman, which is beautiful.