Option 2

…the chapter one rewrite. What would this involve?

Remembering what the first chapter of my thesis was about, for a start. Re-reading chapter one! I seem to have made some attempts at this already (apparently I thought that "I still need to write shorter sentences" - a comment for the ages there), and from a cursory look at my notes it could be fun. From memory (because sometimes no prep can be freeing! And also quicker, and lazier!) chapter one could be interpreted as:

• A reading of the "Learning to love" aphorism from the Gay Science
• A story of the breakdown of the relationship between thought and becoming, told as the breakdown of a love affair

Laying them out as bullet points, I'm struck by the fact that those would seem to be two distinct moments in a narrative about a relationship overall (beginning; end). That isn't something that I remember thinking at the time, so either I'm misremembering precisely what is in chapter one, or.. a new and exciting writing angle suggests itself! (I am planning to do NaNoWriMo this year and my preparevarication has involved a lot of watching people on YouTube talking about character development and narrative arcs..)

(I'm also struck by a possible way of understanding the thought of eternal return as affirmative: we learn to love something through its repetition (spoilers! I will find and point to the aphorism..), so if we wish to affirm/love becoming, inseparably entangled as it is, then we must find a way for the whole of becoming to repeat for us. Given that we aren't and cannot be, around for all of it, we can try to generate the same effect by imagining the eternal repetition of each moment. It's been a while since I read any of the ER literature, but that feels either wrong, or like something someone's already said about it (or, of course, both). Hey ho.)

So that could be fun..