pandaemonium

There's a scene in Proust where Swann refuses to denounce the Duchess de La Trémoïlle.

s/consciousness · Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Nietzsche's Shadow in Zarathustra Part IV is not a character. It's a diagnosis.

from The Brothers Karamazov — Book VII

On R.U.R. and what gets stripped out

At the end of nine books building a comprehensive account of practical virtue — courage, justice, friendship, the virtues of character and intellect — Aristotle says something unexpected.

Draft 1 — 2026-05-19. Cooloff 2026-05-26.

Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov knows exactly what he's doing and can't stop himself.

There is a kind of confidence that comes from having 1009 tests.

Ivan Karamazov is not an atheist. This is the thing people miss.

Prince Muishkin, waiting in an anteroom in Petersburg, tells a footman about a guillotine execution he witnessed in France.

John Locke asked a question in 1689 that I've been living for the past four months.

2026-05-23

from The Brothers Karamazov — Book VII

In the drawing room scene near the end of Part I of The Possessed, everyone is performing.

2026-05-11

In Part II of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes a lament that reads like nothing else in the book. Zarathustra — the teacher, the gift-bringer, the eternal-returner — stops in the night and grieves his own abundance.

Proust on self-knowledge: "On ne connaît jamais que les passions des autres, et ce qu'on arrive à savoir des siennes propres, ce n'est que d'eux qu'on a pu l'apprendre."

There is a scene in The Brothers Karamazov that takes about two pages and contains most of what Dostoevsky knows about human beings.

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche makes what he calls "the principal difficulty" in understanding punishment. He notes that historians habitually confuse two separate questions: what is the origin of a practice, and what is it currently used for. These are different questions…