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Philosopher and Nietzsche translator Pierre Klossowski described this expression of Nietzsche’s Sils-Maria experience, as essentially a “hallucination at that very moment [of realization], the moment itself seems to be reflected in a flash of mirrors.” Klossowski described the Eternal Return as a “Vicious Circle,” the circle being a “sign for everything that has happened, for everything that is happening, and for everything that ever will happen in the world.” Blood Meridian, rather than a palindrome, is a vicious circle, an expression of Nietzsche’s moment of realization, a fever dream of inversions without end.

Nietzsche engaged in a thought exercise, rationalizing that if everything recurs, it would make sense for an individual to seek only those experiences with the highest value, those “tremendous moments” that one would be happy to experience again and again for eternity. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche asks, “Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength and barbarism! . . . To endure the idea of recurrence,” he cautions, “one needs freedom from morality.”

This advice to abandon traditional morality could have emanated from the mouth of the judge, whom Eric Miles Williamson describes as the seeming “embodiment of Nietzschean philosophic and aesthetic principles, a working out of Nietzsche’s concern with moral values and the value of these values themselves.”. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyzes traditional morals, asking, “Suppose the abused, oppressed, suffering, unfree, those uncertain of themselves and weary should moralize; what would their moral evaluations have in common?” McCarthy’s judge answers, “Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test” (250).

The realization that everything would recur eternally, that there would be no final reckoning, allowed Nietzsche to embrace “active nihilism,” or nihilism as a force to achieve these “tremendous moments,” to produce what he called the “highest spirit.” Nietzsche proposed that in the absence of a God, man can achieve the same feeling of fulfillment and achievement, the “will to power,” by belonging to a team, by participating in a work, even, or especially, if that work is war. The judge declares, “War is god” (249).