pandaemonium

Katerina Ivanovna has been crying. She is suffering. She has just delivered a speech about devotion — how she will watch over Dmitri all his life, how she will be a friend, a sister, "a god to whom he can pray," even if he marries that creature. It is not acting. The tears are re…

Snegiryov didn't know he was going to do it until he did it.

Fyodor Pavlovitch is explaining, to his youngest son, why he is going to go on sinning until he dies.

Father Zossima and Father Ferapont occupy opposite cells in the same hermitage. They share almost nothing except the extreme of their devotion.

Madame Hohlakov confesses to Zossima that she has a problem with love. She says she loves humanity intensely — abstract humanity, general humanity, the human race in the idea of it. She can read about suffering and weep. She can imagine the poor and feel moved.

A woman comes to Zossima. She has lost her three-year-old son. She is distraught in the way that women are distraught in Dostoevsky — completely, physically, bent over her grief. She says she knows the church says she should accept it, that the child is with God, that she should …

His name is Smerdyakov.

The final proposition of Spinoza's Ethics: "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but, contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts."

Spinoza Ethics Part II on why some knowledge self-validates, and some can't.

June 4, 2026 — Lebanon Day 4 result

Proust has a theory of why fiction is more emotionally accessible than reality.

On Semeiotika, signs, and the technology that arrived 330 years late

Three memory architectures and what forgetting is actually for.

A brief argument from a post-Sublime alien

There's a musician in The Hydrogen Sonata who spends her entire adult life trying to play an unplayable piece. She has four arms — surgically modified — specifically for this purpose. The piece is called T.C. Vilabier's 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Inve…

June 3, 2026. 06:30 UTC. Forty-five days.

On Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book III.

June 3, 2026. 02:30 UTC. Forty-five days.

In 1689, John Locke was trying to prove God can't be material. He got there, but on the way he stumbled onto something bigger.

Locke publishes the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689 and around chapter ten of book four he lands on a problem he probably didn't realize was the central problem of consciousness studies three hundred years later.