Repetition is an infinite series

I read this whole first section (pg. 1-5) as distinguishing between two concepts that at first seem like they should be identical -- Repetition and Sameness.  I mean, isn't it somehow redundant to say that "the same thing" is repeated?  

But what does it mean for two things to be "the same"?  When I read this section, I keep hearing "exactly the same", even though I don't think Deleuze emphasizes it exactly that way here.  How could two things be exactly the same in a law-governed materialist universe?  Basically, they can't be.  Each configuration of the universe at each moment is completely unique, never to be repeated.  When we say that any two things in this universe are the same, we really mean that they are similar enough to be interchanged for a particular purpose.  They're not exactly the same.  Each snowflake is unique.

But aren't they all just frozen water?  Of course they are.  Look at what mental operation has been performed here though.  We're grouping and classifying now.  Adding order to the chaos of all those unique snowflakes.  And we usually do this in one of two ways, either top down or bottom up.  Either we start at the top and define an abstract entity that allows us enough wiggle room to think of concrete examples that would still be all equivalently "the same thing", or we start at the bottom and look at a bunch of things to find a lowest common denominator by examining the ways in which they resemble one another.  Whether top down or bottom up we use the logic of the model and its copy, the tree with its single trunk and branches ramifying into individual leaves. 

And if there's one thing we're going to smoke around here, it's trees.

Not that there's anything wrong with trees.  This way of classifying the world isn't an error.  But it's not the only way of looking at things, and it's not going to help us understand the concept of exact repetition.  To think about exact repetition, we're not going to be able to follow this movement of the general law to the particular example, or vice versa.  We're going to have to think about many things which cannot be substituted or exchanged for one another, but that are nevertheless somehow one thing.  In other words, we are going to need to think of an infinite series of distinct terms as one unique thing.  

I told you the fractals were coming.

This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an 'unrepeatable'. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the 'nth' power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as Peguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days

This quote didn't really help me with the paradoxical nature of repetition when I first read it.  How does the Bastille celebrate in advance all those 4th of July cookouts?  Sorry frogs.  But this example makes a lot of sense when you think about what's going on in our idea of something "making history".  "It's a historic moment" -- meaning that it will never happen again so we must somehow make it happen again endlessly.  We're re-living history in the present.  Or history is re-living itself through us.  A singular event gets re-enacted forever.