Write with blood: October of Zarathustra
This bit seems like Nietzsche upending the notion of what is good and what is bad, which he is famous for doing. I’m also never quite sure I really follow how far he means to go with it. See especially “The Pale Criminal."
I need to go on a walk and see if I can come up with something more useful to say about this bit. I’ll do a proper new version if I can.
Here’s some very lame and obvious takes on what each of the four chapters are about. Feel free to mock me viciously. I don’t think my attention was good this morning.
This one seems to deal with how virtues can stifle people and how they can conflict and get people into real trouble, but even I think this is probably a facile read.
A criminal’s whole existence is defined by one thing he did. Maybe. It might also be about a specific criminal who didn’t so much want the thing that supposedly made up his motive. He just actually wanted to kill.
Honestly I think some part of my brain is not letting me access this speech.
This one seems to be less about the act of reading and writing, and more about the state one should enter into in order to do either. That state should be rising and not lamenting, to Zarathustra.
“But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul,” Zarathustra tells a young man who is lamenting the darkness he’s found in himself.
Seeking to rise leads us to evil, but that’s no reason not to try to rise.
One line
"I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage that scares away ghosts creates goblins for itself—courage wants to laugh.”—From VII
When I read this seven years ago, I wrote a little note on this line saying that philosophers should use more supernatural language. I stand by it.
—Brady Dale
October 3, 2026