Amor fati affirms the past and the future turning like the topographical course the walker traces on either side of the lake at Silva Plana: ahead and behind, the physical circuit (that is no kind of circle, either perfect or rough)—but the very recursive course of the eternal return. Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return had come to him, so he says, on just such a cyclical route—at the gateway of the pyramidal rock at Surlej. This rock stands like a tower or port at the entrance to a town where the two colliding paths of past and future meet at the stopping point of the paired contours of the tipped points of the cleft rock echoing the double mountain peaks on the other side of the same course across the lake. (Babette E. Babich, Nietzsche’s Imperative as a Friend’s Encomium: On Becoming the One you Are)