In recent years, there has been a shift from cosmopolitanism in its most familiar form, which is spatial and normative putting.the welfare of those outside the borders of your nation on the same moral plane as the welfare of your fellow citizens.toward a sort of temporal cosmopolitanism: an expansion of the time-scale to make room for the more distant past, including the distant past of distant places. An expansion of timescale, or temporal cosmopolitanism, is an inevitable result of the spatial or geographical cosmopolitanism with which we are more familiar. What effect does this “cosmopolitanism in time” have on ethical judgment? What effect might it tend to have on now unacceptable divisions between “civilization” and “barbarism”? This essay takes up these questions by examining Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence and how it is treated in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. I argue that Milan Kundera, Nietzsche, Margaret Atwood, and David Mitchell illustrate their thesis about temporal cosmopolitanism, and conclude that the “cynical permissiveness” that Kundera deduces from linear, irreversible time might also be detected in the standard operating procedures of the humanities.