Thanks for this great essay! Bob Wilson also said somewhere that he kept re-reading Nietzsche once a year. A book like Zarathustra evolves with you, i.e. you can connect to different aspects of it at different times. The brain tumor vs syphilis thesis was completely new to me. Bob’s musing regarding FW and Eternal Recurrence seems intriguing to me. It is easy to see Vico’s cycles of history as Eternal Recurrence on the macroscopic scale, of course. The other way around (Eternal Recurrence as Vico’s cycle on an individual level) does not fit so well imho. I think Nietzsche devised ER as a way to put pressure on the individual’s mind to reach an effect to disable the auto-pilot… analogous to initiation techniques a la “Every experience is God’s way to deal with you” (Golden Dawn first grade I think). Getting you off auto-pilot is of course a major theme of RAW throughout his work.