God is dead, a madman announces in the marketplace, and the bystanders laugh because they do not yet understand what they have lost. Friedrich Nietzsche published The Gay Science in 1882, and in its aphorisms first articulated ideas that would detonate through the century to come: eternal recurrence, the death of God, the revaluation of all values. The title reclaims the Provençal troubadour phrase for poetry, and Nietzsche writes with a poet's ear, each aphorism a small detonation. He was not celebrating nihilism but diagnosing it, asking whether humanity could create meaning without divine scaffolding. The question has not been answered. It has only grown more urgent, and this is where it was first posed with music, laughter, and terror.