Two Hundred and Nineteen

Gaze long enough into the abyss, said Nietzsche, and the abyss will gaze back into you.  What is this abyss, and why would someone gaze into it? What do they hope, or fear, they’ll see? 

The abyss is the world.  We know we’re a part of the world, so we gaze into it, expecting to see ourselves there—a microcosm in that macrocosm—hoping to know ourselves, and our place in it.

But it’s not a mirror that shows us who we are.  The abyss gazes back at us, eyes without a face, because we are its face.