The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was that it happened to be a one-man show, a monodrama wherein no other actor entered upon the stage: not a soul is at his side to succour him; no woman is there to soften by her ever-present sympathy the stresses of the atmosphere. Every action takes its birth in him, and its repercussions are felt by him alone. Not one person ventures to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost sanctum of Nietzsche’s destiny; the poet-philosopher is doomed to speak, to struggle, to suffer alone. He converses with no one, and no one has anything to say to him. What is even more terrible is that none hearken to his voice.
In this unique tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche had neither fellow-actors nor audience, neither stage nor scenery nor costume; the drama ran its course in a spaceless realm of thought. Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento, Sils-Maria, Genoa, and so forth are so many names serving as milestones on his life’s road; they were never abiding-places, never a home. The scene having once been set, it remained the same till the curtain was rung down; it was composed of isolation, of solitude, of that agonizing loneliness which Nietzsche’s own thoughts gathered around him and with which he was entrapped as by an impenetrable bell-glass, a solitude wherein there were no flowers or colours or music or beasts or men, a solitude whence even God was excluded, the dead and petrified solitude of some primeval world which existed long ago or may come into being æons hence.
At first, while he was professor of Basel University and could speak his mind from the professorial chair, and while Wagner’s friendship thrust him into the limelight, Nietzsche’s words drew attentive listeners; but the more he delved into his own mind, the more he plunged into the depths of time, the less did he find responsive echoes. One by one his friends, and even strangers, rose to their feet and withdrew affrighted at the sound of his monologue, which became wilder and more ecstatic as the philosopher warmed to his task. Thus was he left terribly alone, upon the stage of his fate. Gradually the solitary actor grew disquieted by the fact that he was talking into the void; he raised his voice, shouted, gesticulated, hoping to find a response even if it were no better than a contradiction.
Thus the drama was played to a finish before empty seats, and no one guessed that the mightiest tragedy of the nineteenth century was unrolling itself before men’s eyes. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragedy, and it had its roots in his utter loneliness. Unexampled was the way in which an inordinate wealth of thought and feeling confronted a world monstrously void and impenetrably silent. The daimon within him hounded him out of his world and his day, chasing him to the uttermost marge of his own being.
Nietzsche never tried to evade the demands of the monster whose grip he felt. The harder the blows, the more resonantly did the unflawed metal of his will respond. And upon this anvil, brought to red heat by passion, the hammer descended with increased vigour, forging the slogan which was ultimately to steel his mind to every attack. “The greatness of man; amor fati; never desiring to change what has happened in the past; what will happen in the future and throughout eternity; not merely to bear the inevitable, still less to mask it, but to love it.”
This fervent love-song to the Powers smothers the cry of his heart. Thrown to earth, oppressed by the mutism of the world, gnawed by the bitterness and sorrow, he never once raised his hands to implore a respite. Quite otherwise! He demanded to be yet further tortured, to become yet more isolated, to be granted yet deeper trials; the greatest to which mortal man can be put. “O will of my soul that I call fate, thou who art in me and above me, take care of me and preserve me for a great destiny.”
41 replies on “A one-man drama”
Joe, the Sock-puppeteer, has said in a comment that I didn’t let pass (because of Sockpuppeting) that N was accompanied by his sister some time of his life.
That’s true but only as a child. Never as an adult. (The sister and N’s mother were “venomous worms” according to N’s Ecce Homo, in the sense that they had mistreated him badly.)
Burkhardt said that Nietzsche never even had a good bowel movement.
IFA
“Psychoanalyzing” Nietzsche is one of the ways the egalitarian world is constantly using to mentally castrate us.
As a tonic against Zweig’s poisonous drink, I recommend reading what one of the most important philosophers of the III Reich, Alfred Baeumler, had to say concerning this matter:
“Nietzsche and National Socialsim”
http://library.flawlesslogic.com/nns.htm
Chechar, I also enjoy Stephan Zweig now and then, but always keep in mind the existence of a long, very long competition that opposes Germans and Jews for the spiritual leadership of the world.
Z’s book is not “psychoanalysis”. Psychoanalysis is a farce; quackery. Empathizing with poor N (solitude, no women, etc) has nothing to do with it.
“Empathizing with poor N” is not far away from patronizing him. Nietzsche would not have approved.
“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”
Nietzsche claimed to be the prophet of a “new man” – the St.Paul of a new Aryan religion which would sweep away 2000 years of decadence. Now, was he that or just a harmless freak deserving our pity? Any biography that focuses on the “human-all-too-human” aspects of his life is a disservice to the suprahumanist cause.
Unintentional or malicious disservice in the case of Zweig? Who knows? He was probably being honest, but the racial instinct of the Jewish mind is always unerring. The “Culture of Critique” began already in Ptolemaic times.
Take into consideration that Stephan Zweig:
– was a close friend of Siegmund Freud – the father of the “farce and quackery”.
-declared that the Bolshevik Revolution was a “Stellar Moment in the History of Humanity”. “Momentos estelares de la humanidad” gathers better the whole meaning of the original German: “Sternstunden der Menschheit” than the objective and dry “Decisive Moments of History”.
-committed suicide in 1942 in despair because of the – helas! just fleeting – victories of Nazism.
1.) Stellar Moments in the History of Humanity is a book by Zweig, not a statement that the revolution itself was “stellar” or “good”. I need an exact quote that supports your claim.
2.) Freud was an asshole and Zweig was absolutely, absolutely stupid not to see in Freud the Vienna Quack he was (another Jew and contemporary Viennese of Zweig and Freud, Karl Kraus, did see it and exposed Freud’s quackery in his magazine).
3.) Zweig was the only Jew that Hitler allowed to influence the Reich Kultur by means of OK-ing Zweig’s libretto for Strauss’ opera. By the way, it is said that Hitler himself reviewed the whole Zweig text to make sure it had no subtle subversive message!
4.) N was pathetic and deserves our pity. He ate his own faces after his psycho breakdown at the hospital in 1889. Once at his mom’s home the poor man slept like a little kid under the Christmas tree—the same man who had written The Antichrist!
5.) It is nonsense to regard N from his texts (superman) and disregard his real life (pathetic). One could even argue that his overman fantasies were a defense mechanism designed to compensate the misery of his real life (which of course I don’t blame on poor N, but on the society who failed to understand his genius).
6.) So nonsense in fact that after finishing my quotes of Zweig’s excerpts, which according to Walter Kauffmann are still unsurpassed in biographical approaches to N, I’ll start quoting from extensive scholarly biographies of N, such as Werner Ross and Curt Paul Janz, both originally written in German (I’ve read both biographical studies). You will see there who the real N was, and why Zweig was spot on.
Which of course does not demerit N’s occasional lights and extraordinary insights that I have reproduced here at WDH in previous posts.
1.) The 12th Chapter of “Sternestunde der Menschheit” is called “Der versiegelte Zug” (The Sealed Train) and it is a written tribute to Lenin and the “Ten Days that Shook the World”. The tone and the content of the book is completely different from “The Struggle with the Daimon”.
2.) Karl Kraus: another Jew. I thought that the purpose of becoming aware of the JQ is precisely to become masters of our own metanarrative. There is a reason why the Chosen Ones have become “The Masters of Discourse”. They analize, interpret and filter every idea – absolutely every one – that may affect their interests. Do we have our own opinion on Freud, Nietzsche et alia, or are we going to continue borrowing from the Chosen Ones?
3.) This is just an anecdote that Zweig describes in his own memoirs, and not precisely in the terms that you mention. Zweig was also among the authors whose books were burnt in Berlin on May 10th 1933.
4. and 5.) AH suffered from flatulence, Wagner enjoyed wearing feminine silk gowns and Nietzsche had a brain tumor. What sort of perspective do we gain with all this boudoir gossip? The decisive question is this: is the solitude of Nietzsche just a subjective and pathological phenomenon or rather an historical reality? Is Nietzsche in 1888 destined to enter a mental clinic or European history?
6.) Walter Kaufmann: one more Jew, whose “merit” was to “denazify” Nietzsche and distort him into a sort of free-thinking liberal.
1) I read a German-Spanish translation of “The Sealed Train” in November of 1999 and I can see my longhand footnote at the chapter’s end: “pero no dice nada que Lenin fue genio del mal” (“but he says nothing that Lenin was genius of evil”).
I had forgotten that very slim chapter and don’t want to reread it looking for a phrase that compromises Zweig even further but yes: he was a fucking Jew when he wrote it. I am glad that he was expelled from Austria by the Nazis—which doesn’t invalidate what he wrote about N or what Hitler approved after Strauss.
2) You are not even reading what I said. I said that Kraus was a Jew. I knew that already. Just tried to make the point that Z was blind about Freud when other contemporary Viennese Jews realized that Freud was a horrendous quack. If you want to see what I think about evil Freud, see my book chapter (in Spanish: here).
3) I don’t believe I have distorted what Z said in The World of Yesterday, though I may reread that passage again.
4) N had no brain tumor. I trust the credentials of both Ross and Janz. He suffered a classic psychotic breakdown with delusions of grandeur, etc.
5) I didn’t know that Kaufmann was Jewish. I prefer Hollingdale’s translations of N to English. (I mentioned Kaufmann only because he is a well-known translator of N.)
Chechar,
See how we are descending into a sort of talmudic debate on who is a better Jew”! My point was that we have to assert ourselves. We have our own philosophers, our own worldview and we do not need “the Tribe” to teach or interpret for us. “Dejudaizing” begins with oneself.
In fact, I admire Zweig, Krauss and even Freud. They were smart, very good writers and always conscious of the cosmic mission their people play in this life. I even sympathize with the individual plight of some of them. It is just that we should do as the Last Emperor did: “good to write the libretto of a light Strauss opera; not good to teach philosophy”.
In one of your threads you were wondering “who belongs to us?” Alfred Rosenberg, who was the “Reichsleiter” or Commissar for Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education of the NSDAP states somewhere in his “Myth of the XX Century” that National Socialism had 4 main precursors: Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. Would it not be more enriching to find out why Rosenberg considered Nietzsche to be one of us rather than to discuss which Jewish author gives a more or less faithful account of Nietzsche’s life and theories. After all, what is important about Nietzsche is his work. Let us read it and comment it without any other intermediaries.
By the way, if you can spare one hour of your time, I have tried to summarize the importance of Wagner and Nietzsche for our cause here:
http://www.counter-currents.com/tag/kurwenal/
As far as Nietzsche’s dementia is concerned, take a look at this:
http://www.leonardsax.com/Nietzsche.pdf
Nietzsche’s biography has only a certain interest for our metapolitical project. Liberals do not spend their time agonizing about Rousseau’s onanism; Marxists do not even mention the contradiction implicit in Marx, defender of the proletariat, having ilegitimate children with a female servant, etc. The life of all of us under a magnifying glass is pretty pathetic. And yet, while millions pass by unnoticed, there are certain individuals who left an indelible mark: Nietzsche is one of them.
Kurwenal,
I responded to you in a new entry, here:
https://westsdarkesthour.com/2013/06/15/a-response-to-kurwenal/
I’m no stranger to loneliness, and it has nothing to do with being weird, fat, ugly, poor, having a lisp, or being socially retarded (I’m none of those things). So I have sympathy for N, although he was sickly and bookish (not exactly a Superman), he didn’t fit in to society by nature.
You are correct, N was a tortured soul, locked into mental categories unable to find consolation in art, spirituality, or friendship. Nevertheless, had he not been so lonely would he have created the works he did? No.
Men like Junger and Evola were deep thinkers on the same level and reached some of the same conclusions, facing many lonely trials, but managed to live a much more satisfying existence.
As an aside, I had two friends (young males around 20) commit suicide within the past 2 years. They were both deeply sensitive and intelligent human beings who couldn’t find a place in this world. I think the lack of a high culture is paralyzing to young white men who want more out of life than Xbox and beer drinking, but find no escape.
I read somewhere that Goethe grew up during Germany’s bloom, while Nietzsche lived during its decadence. Perhaps true; this might explain part of his depression and alienation.
I think Spengler said that.
I agree Junger and Evola led much more inspiring lives. I desperately want to find a copy of Eumeswil, but at the moment i’m reduced to reading quotes from it on Goodreads.
I can blend in pretty seamlessly with the drinking culture. I actually enjoy it for the most part. But I feel at the same time that I am sitting in life’s waiting room so to speak–not really accomplishing anything, but merely stringing together a bunch of zeros.
I have political/social revolutionary aspirations, but it is hard to see how though could even begin to be realized in 21st century America.
You all bring up interesting points; viz., alienation. May I recommend what brings me happiness and solace? Classical music, literature, Nature, outdoor adventures, good food, and old movies.
Life is very precious albeit we live in this ugly world.
IFA
http://www.iranianforaryans.com
BIGDOUG,
That’s an easy one. Just wait until the dollar collapses (in this decade for sure) and all the fun will really start…
@BigDoug
Do you read E-books? Eumeswil, English translation: link
IFA, your comment got stuck in the filter and I almost delete it accidentally (99% of what gets stuck is spam). To avoid it in the future I’d recommend not adding that bare link after your signature.
Off Topic:
I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Couter-Curents website of late.
On the book section of the side-bar of the site a couple of books by some woman called Savitri Devi caught my attention.
I’ve searched for information about her and I’m horrified.
This is the wikipedia entry about her and this is a webpage dedicated to her: http://savitridevi.org/.
In spite of obvious political differences, her story reminded me of Guénon’s, because she also converted to a religion with a majority of non-White followers, Hinduism, she spent most of her adult life in a non-White nation, India, an she also married a non-White — these are the guy’s known pictures. One may also point out that just as Guénon was motivated to leave Europe out of religious drive (Islam, in his case), she felt the urge to settle in India due to her interest in Hinduism. In both cases, it seems that religion was more important than race in their views, even though she was nominally a National Socialist.
The more I read the CC archives, the greatest the respect I have for the website. In my estimation, together with TOO, it is the most intellectually solid and appealing WN’list website available today.
But having said that, I wonder why folks with disturbing personal records (from a White separatist perspective) like Guénon and Devi are lionized on a White Nationalist website like CC.
That’s true that there are people who argue (link) that Devi’s marriage was arranged just in order for her to be able to stay legally in India and that the couple never consumated it. But the question remains: why did she forsake her nation, France, just like Guénon, her fellow citizen, did? What the hell was she doing among those people if she was a National Socialist? Why did she die childless if she really believed in the preservation of her race?
How could a beautiful, gorgeous White woman (and a National Socialist, of all things!) decide to spend her life in a disgusting shithole like India?
I don’t have the talent of the CC columnists, and unlike them I don’t do anything relevant for the WN’list cause. But I think that the personal examples of Guénon and Devi fly in the face of the sort of personal behavior they advocate for their White readership. It leaves one with the impression that for all the Love Your Race talk, religious ideologies, be it Islam or Hinduism, can legitimately trump racial interests.
Yes. I reposted some of Greg’s articles on Devi here at WDH.
Before I rebelled against CC I found disgusting that a commenter pointed out that this woman committed precisely that sin against her race. I was tempted to remove the comment, but perhaps I allowed it to stay (don’t remember).
So you can see that I myself have been evolving from tolerating that little sin to my current intolerance: which reflects more the stance of both Judaism and National Socialism against miscegenation than the current toleration at so-called WN sites.
In short, Greg and so-called WNsts are wrong. NS was right.
I fully agree with you about TOO. It’s the only solid, scholarly site that I know, and for that reason the only linked in my blogroll list. Other WNsts who dislike miscegenation also promote conspiracy theories, etc, that IMO ruin our public image.
Because Greg has already declared in his manifesto that he supports the American Pacific liberalism as to abortion “rights”, “gay rights” and that he is against what he calls the “Old Right”.
But his “New Right” is a chimera: an impossible animal that combines the suicidal liberalism of his cherished Bay Area with white racial preservation. That’s why I removed his ambiguous and ambivalent site from my blogroll list.
I also believe that since WN is in its embryonic stage, lots of toxins from the “mother” (the Bay Area in California and other liberal places where other bloggers live) are affecting the baby in the womb. We have to wait until he’s born to cut the umbilical cord forever.
I am from CA. There are more WNs in California than anywhere else. Diversity creates WNs. This is were the movement will begin.
I mean, if being a White race traitor does not disqualify you to have your books and ideas advertised on a White Nationalist website, then, what does? Are words more important than actions? And what do the actions of these two individuals tell about them?
You see, I’m not splitting hairs here. Guénon and Devi’s biographies are so egregiously, so blatantly against what CC stands for that I think they do raise a flag.
The current pro-white advocates are living in a much more corrupted America than the America known by Commander Rockwell and the young Pierce. Present-day Western Europe and America are Sodom and Gomorrah; I call their inhabitants “Gomorrahites”.
It is very hard to live in such cities and remain as immaculate as a Lotus flower. You better escape as Lot did. But so-called WNsts still play the game. Most of them watch TV, sports, go to the cinema and consume other forms of anti-white, junk culture.
We really have to wait until the entire field gets fire to see the new, little green sprouts of hope after the cataclysmic societal deforestation takes place.
Chechar, America has always been degenerate, at least since FDR; it’s a country built upon the idea of as Mark Dyal of CC said, “Getting rich and going to Vegas and after that Disney World.”
I’m open to the idea that America was a great nation at the beginning of the 20th century, but by early mid-century the Jews and subversive elements had already diverted the orientation given to it by its founding, Nordic stock.
Pierce and Rockwell were WRONG; the country they admired was, in their time, a simulacra of a European nation, not the real thing. Back then it still had the vestiges of something great (show me a list of great American philosophers, artists, and composers? … pretty vacant), but the core was hollowed out and rotten.
If one rejects liberal-capitalism, one must have hatred for 20th century America; there was nothing left to save when Pierce and Rockwell were alive anyway.
Europe is our home. I will never forgive my grandparents for what fighting with the Allies in WW2 and not latter apologizing. Perhaps that’s stubborn of me.
You are all right about Rockwell, of course: but are you sure that Pierce OKyed America before the 1960s (or before WW2)? I have listened to only a few of his old podcasts; so I really don’t know.
Pierce was like P. Buchanan; they believed in an America which was an import of Europe, and when that traditional segment of America dissipated into the mainstream, they still oddly believed in fighting under the flag as a symbol of what they were familiar with.
I don’t blame Pierce, Buchanan, or Rockwell, I admire them. But realistically, the system and the people in that system they were appealing to, were already deeply flawed beyond repair.
I think Revilo Oliver and F. P. Yockey saw this more clearly than the above thinkers.
Deutsch,
Perhaps we should give up on America post 33′
That doesnt mean we surrender the continent to the southern mongrels. We must create a new idea of what it means to be White in the new world. have you read any of the naturalist anti-christian anti-humanist racist Californians like Jeffers and London?
We should use them as a basis for a new social/philosophical/political movement.
The South has exhausted its possibilities. So has New England. There is still energy left out West for new things to happen
@ BIGDOUG
You are correct; the hope is out West (I live in Boston). But I fear Cali is gone for good, unless you want to ethnically cleanse ten million people.
All in all, I don’t think that rebuilding will happen anytime soon. I think we have at least another 20 or 40 years of decline, carnage, and disaster before serious rebuilding can be considered.
The slate has to be wiped clean. How close are we to that point? Probably further than we would like to be.
No: the dollar is gonna collapse in this decade.
Possibly, Chechar. But whites will not turn to WN immediately, even if the entire system collapses. I predict a lot of intra-white fighting for resources if there is a collapse.
Of course! It’s not clear that they will awake after all. But a big window of opportunity will be opened after the convergence of catastrophes that you yourself will see:
• crash of the dollar (could even be much sooner than expected)
• niggers behaving pretty naughtily in all big NorthAm cities right after the crash
• social chaos thru all the US thanks to your beloved niggers (and other non-whites)
• the political system losses credibility
And if the System manages to survive, later in this century:
• total and unconditional energy devolution—throughout the whole world!
• the horseman of the apocalypse: civil war, famine and massive death will thus be given free rein for a few decades
• serious political crises through the West with no precedent after Rome fell
• big, big window of opportunity to let our message spread (which doesn’t mean that we will win; only a last chance to save the race)
Do you know a source that demonstrates that Pierce believed in the US as a legit national project? As I said, I dunno. This is from his last book:
My italics.
Pierce came of age in the 50’s. I always intuited by listening to him that he was defending 1950’s America, just like Buchanan.
For instance Pierce says:
I’ve always read his critique to be aimed at the 60’s dealing with culture, education, morality, and racial topics.
He never rejected America, because the America he grew up in was a beautiful place (and it was, but like I said it was still a borrowed artifact from Europe with weak roots, susceptible to subversion).
My point, if it wasn’t clear from the quote above, is that Pierce continually references the 60’s as the turning point, as does Buchanan.
They both pegged the 50’s as being idyllic.
I think this largely a reference to the outward appearance. Pierce did have a genuinely long view of things, criticizing Christianity as a hazardous doctrine from the beginning. I think his ultimate conclusion was that the White race began declining biologically with the introduction of agriculture, and only an act of will could reverse this trend.
That’s a good point about agriculture; Pierce believed theory put forth by the scholar, Adams, that Rome declined due to a lack of rural, middle class farming stock and influx of city dwellers. Likewise, his opinion on Christianity was not completely that of a skeptic or hater; he proposed something unique to put in its place.
The problem with all of these ideas is that they are so abstract relative to our current situation. At this point most whites are post-industrialist, secular, electronically zombified, global citizens. There’s nothing left to criticize anymore within our own group because everything has been reduced to the L.C.D.
I yearn for the time when any of those issues (class, religion, and intra-white ethnicity) mattered.
I find Savitri (Devi is technically a title) a lot more sympathetic than Guenon.
Savitri started out emotionally fragile, and was hit really hard by Germany’s defeat. Partly because she was sure that good would triumph over evil, partly because while she worked to gain support for Germany in India itself she never actually tried to go there and help out in person, and felt guilty about it. She was going to drown herself after the war but said she had a dream telling her that she was obligated to continue fighting.
She became something of a recluse after that, spending all of her free time researching and publishing, and living with at least ten stray cats at any given time. As far as I can tell Mukherji was honestly just a friend. Because, ya know, she was a middle-aged woman living with ten cats. Plus she didn’t really have any reason to lie, and Mukherji himself was a Brahman and a devout believer in the caste system (to miscegenate would threaten his position in his next life) .
Savitri deciding to hole up in India is kind of odd, but makes more sense when you think of her as a hermit-scholar rather than a person trying to live a normal life. Frankly, I think she was just too misanthropic to live in a society where she wasn’t an outsider. Plus she was a pagan, and Hinduism was the only remaining semi-Aryan form of paganism she could study. I don’t know if she was technically a Hindu herself, she actually seemed to favor the White pharaoh Akhenaton’s theology, which wasn’t quite the same.
I guess in the end, the main difference is that Savitri didn’t actually seem to think her lifestyle was admirable. Obviously a race can’t survive or progress when its members don’t have children, and spend their whole lives reading ancient texts and taking care of cats. Savitri never implied anyone should follow in her footsteps, she just thought of her writing as the most she herself was capable of doing to help, and was always contrite at the thought of the NSDAP and the other fighters who had more spirit in them then her.
As far as I know Guenon considered his decision to move to an alien country and start a miscegenated family a “Traditional” one, not a flight from the world borne from personal weakness. Plus I have no idea what Guenon could bring to the table that Evola couldn’t at least as well, he seems outclassed in every way. At least Savitri did honestly contribute some interesting work (The Lightning and the Sun and The Impeachment of Man), which was better than killing herself in despair.
She was a beautiful woman, and evidently remained a virgin her whole life. Odd, but aren’t all people on the far right like that?
If people on the far right were ‘normal’ and ‘adjusted’ they won’t be on the far right.
Well some are more dysfunctional than others, we gotta admit. Someone like Rockwell should be credited for his strength and tenacity, and indeed he did what Savitri would have envied. Still, I think Savitri was a good person, and have no reason to dislike her.
Look at Bowden. I’ve heard from those who met him that he had mental episodes where he would go into the streets and chase people with a samurai sword.
R.I.P.
I won’t doubt it if he was taken out.
Bowden is a fucking genius. His speeches will be broadcast every Monday morning after the revolution.
I have been on a Bowden kick recently. Listening to all his speeches and reading all his articles on CC. He is the greatest speaker i have ever heard.
Of course he was a lunatic. As he said, truth is found at the extremity.
Is there a collection of Bowden’s eccentricities? I love this stuff (struggling with the “daimon”).