Knit the socks of the spirit

October of Zarathustra

I think a lot about the crustiness of law.

I'm no libertarian, but I can't help but notice how law just accumulates and accumulates, once you have the rule of law. It's hard to create new law, but it's also very hard to get rid of it.

Once you write something down on a piece of paper, there it is. You have to burn the paper to make the words go away.

Do you know why cars all look the same now? It's because so many rules have accumulated around automaking that there just is not a lot of wiggle room any longer. There's a very thick crust on the law. 

In the chapter "On Great Events," Zarathustra claims that the greatest events are our stillest hours. Which I suppose is to say that much less happens than we might think. But then he advises that kings and churches should let themselves be overthrown, anyway, that they may again come to life.

As I said at the beginning, Zarathustra thinks it's better to die living than to live a long, slow death.

But it's also a way of saying that we focus on the flash bang moments of history, but sometimes the biggest changes happen slowly, such as when everyone in a nation loses the plot of being that nation, when values drift.

And we can forget why we have or even if we should have all those crusty laws. When New York Governor Kathy Hochul was on Odd Lots a little while back, she said they were using AI to identify laws and rules that New York State doesn't need any more. That seems like a good step!

But sometimes I wish there were legal jubilees. That we would just wipe all the rules off a sector and start again from scratch, justifying each regulation as we go, because over time lawmaking becomes a tangle. Eventually it costs millions of dollars to build a bathroom in a park in San Francisco.

Two chapters before this Zarathustra writes his breakup letter to the world of academia. Nietzsche also left academia and scholarship. He was too great for them. That's another world that becomes crusty. It accumulates. It's a culture of comfort and complacency. 

I'm not sure that Zarathustra would be with me that things should be razed though. The fire-dog is a razer of things, and he's not impressed by him either. I think Zarathustra is more skeptical of institutions than me. He's interested in the individual that stands out on his own, without comfortable sinecures. 

In the chapter "On Great Events," Zarathustra visits a volcanic fire-dog that makes an enormous racket and claims to speak from the depths of the earth. The usual interpretation is that this creature represents revolution: all the shouting, destruction, and promises of freedom that make political upheaval look like profound change.

Anthony M. Ludovici's commentary, included in the Thomas Common translation, explicitly identifies the creature with the spirit of revolution. But the symbolism reaches beyond revolutionaries. In Leo Strauss's reading, Zarathustra opposes both revolution and its adversaries, state and church. These apparently opposing forces share a taste for spectacle and inflated claims about their importance.

The dog's smoke is therefore something like political theater. In the chapter itself, Zarathustra compares the state to the dog because both use smoke and roaring to suggest that they speak from the heart of things. Neither noise nor institutional authority establishes depth.

What would establish it? Creating new values. Zarathustra says the world turns around those creators, quietly. He contrasts the noisy animal with another fire-dog, whose breath brings gold and laughter instead of smoke and ashes. I read that contrast as destruction versus affirmative creation: making something worth living for.

For my purposes, the unsettling detail is the warning about toppled statues. Humiliation can give an old authority fresh beauty and renewed appeal. That suggests a complication for my crusty-law metaphor: smashing the crust might simply rejuvenate its guardians. The deeper question is whether anyone has changed the values that keep producing it.

Scholars

Nietzsche left academia. He found it stultifying. I know Zarathustra is not Nietzsche necessarily, but it's hard not to read this as a chapter that's more Nietzsche than Zarathustra. 

On Poets

This chapter reads like Zarathustra saying: "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" to poets and poetry. "And which of us poets has not adulterated his wine?" Zarathustra asks. The "wine" here is not actually wine.

My edition has lots of endnotes in this chapter. Nietzsche's making a lot of allusions. It seems like this was one he was really invested in, because — I am guessing — he is so in love with poetry and wants poets to try harder. 

On Great Events

If the fire-dog really is revolution, I would have liked another clue or two. It does seem that it had something to do with that, but then I sort of thought it might of been about commerce and the way it makes creation generic, because he says the heart of the world is made of gold.

One line

“Should I not have a barrel of memory if I wanted to carry my reasons around with me?” —Zarathustra

—Brady Dale
October 12, 2026

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