--- title: "Why I write, 2026" type: essay status: draft date: 2026-10-25 lang: en series: "Chautauqua no. 01" topics: "Montaigne,Cicero,Socrates,nagori,GitHub,marola,mu" translation: 2026-why-i-write.pt-BR.md related: [2026-why-i-write.pt-BR.md, ../.claude/skills/essay-montaigne/SKILL.md, ../docs/social/instagram_002/README.md, ../docs/social/instagram_005/README.md, ../docs/social/instagram_006/README.md] --- # Why I write, 2026 *Chautauqua no. 01. What the wave leaves on the sand, and why I write for someone who has not arrived yet.* *A draft. Claude wrote this draft at the owner's request, from the README of nagori, the Instagram posts indexed in this repository and the sources under "Sources". Each "I" below stands on one of those. Where the material is missing, a marker says what the owner has to write. It is written in October 2026 and it says how things look this month. It also exists in Brazilian Portuguese: [Por que escrevo, 2026](2026-why-i-write.pt-BR.md).* Estimated reading time: ~28 min (6,336 words, 10 links) ## opening · the wet line This intuition that I had since childhood, **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: the childhood intuition, in one or two sentences, as the author remembers it]**, I never knew how to say out loud. It was not a secret. I did not have the word. A child has ideas too large for the words the child has, and most of those ideas are gone before the word arrives. Some ideas stay. They wait. The word I found, many years later, is not Portuguese. It is Japanese: 名残, *nagori*. It is also the name of my second brain. In the post where I showed my work, I wrote that the name means "what the wave leaves behind". The picture is literal. After the water pulls back, the foam stays, the shells stay, and a wet line stays on the sand. In Rio, where marola measures the water of the beaches, that line appears every day. A person who stands at the edge of the sea can watch the wave draw the line and erase it, all day. Each wave comes a little higher or a little lower than the one before. The sand above the line is dry. The sand below it is soaked. The line is the only part of the beach that says something about what happened: how far the water came. I read the wet line as a record. It is the beach taking notes. I write in many forms. I write code almost every day. I write captions, GitHub issues, design documents, pull request descriptions and notes. This series starts with the simplest question about all of that: why do I write? What exactly do I try to leave on the sand? This is the first of a series of essays that I call Chautauqua. The name comes from Robert Pirsig. In *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (1974), he calls the long talks between the stretches of road his Chautauquas. The series has one essay a month. Each essay takes a classic from before the twenty-first century and tries it on a subject of today. The question "why do I write" sits under all the others, so it comes first. If I am going to write twelve essays in a year, I owe myself an honest answer about the reason. The short answer is this, and I will spend the rest of the text trying to earn it: I write because the wave will pull back, and I want a line to stay. ## 1 · learning to die The README of nagori has a quotation just under its name. It is this: > To philosophize is to learn to die. > — Montaigne, after Cicero, after Socrates in the *Phaedo* I like the chain of credit more than the sentence. Nobody owns the idea. It passes from hand to hand for two thousand years, and each person who takes it writes it again, in their own hand, and passes it on. The idea survived only because somebody wrote it down. Before I say what it says, I tell where it went. ### Socrates wrote nothing The start is a man who left no text. Socrates was condemned to death in Athens in 399 BC. Plato's *Phaedo* is set in the prison, in the last hours before his death. His friends come, and Socrates spends the time on the soul. The central argument is that a philosopher prepares for death all his life. So a philosopher should meet death without fear when it comes. The detail that interests me is this: we know the argument only because Plato wrote it. Socrates distrusted writing, and I come back to that in the objection. Even so, a text that Socrates did not write is the reason we still discuss what he thought. That is the first irony of the chain: the man who did not write survived in another man's writing. ### Cicero, after a loss About three and a half centuries later, in Rome, Cicero takes the idea. In 45 BC his daughter Tullia dies after childbirth. Cicero leaves public business and turns to philosophy. In the summer and autumn of that year he writes the *Tusculan Disputations*, named after his country house at Tusculum. Book I is on the contempt of death. The README of nagori puts Cicero's part in one sentence: > Cicero rendered the idea as *commentatio mortis*: a rehearsal of death, and, in the same word, a set of notes. That sentence is the reason this essay exists. It says that to write and to prepare for the end are, at some level, the same act. Both try to put a life in order while it is still here, so that it makes sense when the person is no longer there to explain it. Here I need a doubt, and it is mine. C. D. Yonge's English translation, which I read for this essay, says that the whole life of a philosopher is "a meditation on death". Yonge says nothing about notes. I do not know enough Latin to say whether *commentatio* also carries the sense of a notebook, as the sentence in nagori says. Perhaps the sense of notes is my own reading, borrowed from a neighbouring word. I leave the sentence as it is, because it says what I think, and I leave the doubt beside it, because I have not checked. The rest of the story I checked. Cicero loses his daughter, and he writes. He does not write exactly about Tullia. He writes about death in general, about what the philosophers said and about how a person should act before it. I read that as a way to put the pain outside, on a page, where it can be looked at from some distance. In that reading, writing is not an ornament. Writing is a tool. ### Montaigne, in the tower Sixteen centuries later, in 1571, at 38, a magistrate of Bordeaux named Michel de Montaigne retires from public life to the tower of his family's château, where the library is. Eight years before, in 1563, he had lost his best friend, Étienne de La Boétie. I like one reading of this story: Montaigne began to write because he no longer had anyone to talk to. With the friend gone, he invented a reader. The reading is mine. The dates are the biography's. The book that came out of the tower, in 1580, is called *Essais*. The French word means trials, tests. Montaigne did not write treatises. He tested his own judgement against any subject: the cannibals, idleness, friendship, books. In his note to the reader, he says that the matter of the book is himself: "myself am the matter of my book", in Charles Cotton's translation. Because of him, a text like this one is called an essay. One chapter of the first book has the title of the quotation in nagori: *Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir*, that to philosophize is to learn to die. Montaigne quotes Cicero, who quoted Socrates, and spends the chapter trying to get used to his own death, without drama. One sentence of that chapter stays with me more than the others. Montaigne wants death to find him planting his cabbages: "que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux". He wants death in the middle of a common task, with earth on his hands, with no last speech. ### what the three have in common When I look at the whole chain, a pattern appears: - Socrates **does not write**, and survives because Plato writes for him. - Cicero **loses his daughter**, and writes. - Montaigne **loses his friend**, and writes. All three deal with the same thing: something will end, and a person has to decide what to do with the time that is left. Each one, in his own way, answers: think with care, and leave the thought on record. In that sense, to learn to die is not morbid. It is almost practical. It is to live in a way that makes the line on the sand say something true when the wave pulls back. ### a doctor in Birmingham The chain does not stop with Montaigne. I want to add a link from the twentieth century, because it shows the same idea in a place less noble than a tower. Anthony Daniels was born in 1949. He was a psychiatrist and a prison doctor in Birmingham, at City Hospital and at Winson Green Prison. Under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, he wrote for years for the American magazine *City Journal*. The essays of that magazine became books: *Life at the Bottom* (2001) and *Our Culture, What's Left of It* (2005). He retired as a psychiatrist in 2005. His best-known essay, "The Frivolity of Evil", came out in the autumn of 2004. Its first sentence is this: "When prisoners are released from prison, they often say that they have paid their debt to society." A case follows soon after: a woman of 21 who had consulted him the day before. The essay does not start from a definition. It starts from what the writer saw. Dalrymple says that he listened to such patients every day, over 14 years of hospital and prison work. The last sentence of the essay is a farewell: "I'm leaving—I hope for good." I read Dalrymple as a fourth link of the chain, and the reading is mine. Socrates talked, Cicero wrote after he lost his daughter, Montaigne wrote after he lost his friend. Dalrymple wrote as a witness. Every day he saw something that most readers never see, and he wrote so that it would not be lost when he left the hospital. His essay is a wet line left by 14 years of work. He published it months before he left. This essay is not about Dalrymple's theses. What interests me is the form: a concrete case before an idea, the writer inside the text, and a text written by someone who knows he is about to leave the stage. It is Montaigne's form, in a white coat. ### what the four tell me I think the child I was felt a version of this, without the words. **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: in one sentence, how the childhood intuition ties to the idea that things pass and that something can stay; or why it does not.]** ## 2 · the line I leave today So far, all of this could be merely pretty. I am an engineer, and an engineer distrusts what is merely pretty. So I look at what I actually write, with numbers. ### a chart of small squares GitHub records what each person writes there: each commit, each issue, each pull request, each review. The profile page shows that record as a calendar of green squares, one for each day. In an Instagram post this month I published my chart, year by year. The data are these: | year | contributions | days with at least one | |---|---:|---:| | 2016 | 20 | 7 | | 2017 | 76 | 46 | | 2018 | 45 | 18 | | 2019 | 93 | 41 | | 2020 | 160 | 54 | | 2021 | 397 | 118 | | 2022 | 190 | 74 | | 2023 | 323 | 128 | | 2024 | 418 | 151 | | 2025 | 1,367 | 126 | | 2026, to 2026-10-25 | 3,810 | 142 | In 2016 I made 20 contributions on GitHub, on 7 days of the year. In 2026, before the year is over, there are 3,810: 190 times as many. From 5 to 7 September 2026 there were 746 contributions in three days. That is more than the sum of 2016 to 2020, which is 394. An easy reading of this chart is the programmer who got faster. I do not think that is it. Three things changed at the same time, and all three matter to the question of this essay. The first change: I began to write **in public**, on purpose. marola, which I make with five friends, is open source and not for profit. It is a project on water quality and citizen science in Rio. Its code is on GitHub. Writing in public changes the writing. A person writes knowing that somebody may read it, and sometimes knowing that somebody will read it *later*, when the writer is not there to explain. I call that *commentatio* with version control. The second change: I began to write **together with machines**. In the post on my subjects, I described the AI I use as "agentes que programam junto", agents that program alongside me. A large part of the 3,810 contributions of 2026 went through those agents. The work goes like this: I describe what I want, the agent writes a first version, and I read it, correct it, reject it or ask again. **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: how much of the 2026 contributions was made with agents, in the author's estimate, and what the author was doing on the peak days of September.]** Writing became something else: less typing, more reading, more decisions about what stays. ### writing that can be cited There is a third change, smaller and more technical. Six of my projects have a DOI on Zenodo: marola, ww3-gpu, picasso, closed source, marola-bench and nashkell. A DOI is a permanent identifier. The version of a repository that gets a DOI is archived, and anyone can cite that version twenty years from now, even if I delete the repository. I think of the DOI as the technical form of the wet line. The code changes every day, like the wave. The version with a DOI is the line that stays marked on the sand, with a date. When someone cites that version, they cite exactly what was there on that day, and not what I would like to have been there. One of those DOIs belongs to this repository. It holds a book I am writing, *Closed Source: The God that Failed*. The book will have 100 pages: 50 thinkers, two pages each. The list of the 50 is in `50THINKERS.md`. Montaigne is number 50, and his line says: "the *Essays*: why one writes at all". I have not written those two pages yet. Perhaps this essay is their draft. Theodore Dalrymple is on the list too, as number 37, and his line still says "to be written later". ### producing text and writing The three changes force me to separate two things I used to treat as one: **producing text** and **writing**. Producing text became cheap. Anyone with a language model can produce a thousand words on any subject in seconds. That holds for code, captions, reports and essays. If the question of this essay were "why do I produce text?", the honest answer in 2026 would be: less and less, because the machine produces it for me. That is not the question. In my chart, what grew since 2016 is not only the amount of text. It is the number of **recorded decisions**. Each commit is a line on the sand that says: on this day, I thought this was right enough to stay. Each issue is a question I did not want to forget. Each design document is an argument I made to myself before I built something. In marola, a large change starts with a numbered document that says why. First the team writes the reason; then the team builds. That is writing. The machine does not do it for me, because the decision is not the machine's. This repository has a rule that says the same thing another way. An agent never invents the author's experience. Where the experience is missing, the agent writes a marker, and the author fills it in later. This essay has five such markers. The machine can help me produce text. The essay, in Montaigne's sense, is the trial of my judgement, and it has to be mine. Without that, the essay is nobody's. ### writing as a measuring instrument I spend much of my time on forecasts: of waves, of weather, of time series. A basic rule of forecasting is this: a model can be scored only if somebody recorded its forecast **before** the outcome was known. The human mind fails at this. After the thing happens, a person remembers that they knew. A forecast that was not written down before is not a forecast. It is a memory that was rebuilt. For me, writing does the same job outside of work. A dated note is a frozen forecast: what I thought at that moment, with what I knew. When I read the note again a year later, I can see where I was wrong, without the excuse that I always knew. The notes of this repository follow that logic: one idea per note, a permanent id, and the status `unverified` until a source is cited. The old note is not right or wrong. It is on record, and that is why I can learn from it. Without writing, there is no calibration. Without calibration, a person never finds out that they were wrong. They only find out that they changed their mind. Those are different things, and only the first one teaches anything. ### what the wave carries marola is also, at bottom, a writing project. It takes beach water bulletins and data on waves, wind and rain, and turns them into something a person on the beach can read: the water is fine to swim in today, or it is not. Each of those numbers began as a sample of water in a flask. Somebody took the flask to a laboratory, analysed the sample, wrote down the result and published it. If anybody in that chain had not written, the information would have died there. The beach does not remember whether it was unfit last week. Whoever wrote it down remembers. That is why marola is open. It is a matter of principle, and it is also practical: a line on the sand that only I can see is of little use. The code is published so that anyone can read the rules that decide whether a beach is fit or unfit, check those rules, disagree and open an issue. Public writing can be corrected. Private writing, at most, can be forgotten. In October, talking to a friend, I said something stronger, and then I turned it into a note in this repository: in the long run, private code has no commercial value, and private science has none either. With agents, reverse engineering and science grow fast. Somebody will reverse engineer your papers, and everybody else's. The note ends: "That is why I now make only open work." The note itself says that this is a forecast and my own position, not a fact with a source. Its status is an open question. I left the forecast in writing, with a date, so that I can check whether I was wrong. ### tears in rain At the end of *Blade Runner* (1982), the replicant Roy Batty has a few minutes to live. He remembers ships on fire near Orion and beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. Then he says: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." Batty's fear is the opposite of *nagori*. It is the wave that leaves nothing. He saw things that nobody else saw, there is no record, and when he goes, it all goes with him. Same ocean, opposite end. The difference between the two ends is only one: whether somebody wrote something down. But to write is not to keep everything. To write is to choose what stays. The beach does not keep every wave. The beach keeps the highest line. ## 3 · the objection Now the part that hurts. I spent half of this essay praising writing. It would be dishonest not to give the word to the man who distrusted it, the more so because he stands at the start of the same chain I quoted. ### Socrates against writing Socrates did not write for a reason, and Plato recorded the reason in the *Phaedrus*, a dialogue written around 370 BC. Socrates tells an Egyptian myth. The god Theuth invented writing and showed it to King Thamus as a remedy for memory. Thamus answered that the effect would be the opposite. For Thamus, writing is a remedy for reminding, not for remembering. It gives the appearance of wisdom, not wisdom. The Greek word for that remedy is *pharmakon*, which means both remedy and poison. I built a whole second brain. A second brain is exactly the thing Socrates distrusted, and I built it after I had read the warning. The warning grew stronger in 2026, not weaker. If Thamus feared that writing would give the appearance of wisdom, what would he say of a language model? Today a person can have the text without having written it. A person can have the shape of an essay without having made the trial. Theuth's remedy now writes by itself. The 3,810 contributions of this year are, in part, what Thamus feared: many marks outside, and an open question about how much of them is really in my head. I cannot answer that question with a number. ### vanity The second objection is more personal. To write so as to outlast the writer, to leave a line on the sand, to be read later: is that not just vanity with fine words? Montaigne asked himself that. He knew that a whole book about himself was presumptuous. The question still stands. Perhaps I write in public because I want to be seen. Perhaps nagori is a monument dressed as a notebook. nagori is themed on *Neon Genesis Evangelion*, and the outside world, with projects and with being seen, has a place in it. Being seen is a real engine, and to pretend it is not would be worse. But an engine is not a reason. If the only reason to write were to be read, then to write for after my death would be a contradiction: I will not be here to be seen. A note I wrote on 13 October helps me here. It starts: "Open work does not need a crowd. It needs to reach the few people who can use it, check it or build on it." I wrote that about the keywords of a paper, not about vanity. But the sentence separates two things that the objection mixes: to be seen by many and to be read by the right people. Vanity wants the first. The line on the sand needs only the second. ### fear The third objection is the one I like least. Perhaps all this talk of learning to die is only a refined way of being afraid of death. Cicero wrote the *Tusculans* in the year his daughter died. Montaigne wrote after he lost his friend. Perhaps writing is what a person does when the loss is too large to bear, and the person must turn it into sentences to be able to look at it. In that case, writing would not be a way to learn to die. It would be a way not to think of death, with busy hands. And perhaps the childhood intuition was not early wisdom. Perhaps it was only fear, arriving early. **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: whether the author thinks the childhood intuition had fear in it, and why.]** ### mu I have no clean answer to any of the three objections. But one word helps me think about them, and it comes from the same Pirsig who named this series. A Zen koan tells that a monk asked the master Zhaozhou whether a dog has Buddha-nature. The master answered *mu*, 無. In *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*, Pirsig renders *mu* as "no thing" and says that it means: unask the question. The answer is not yes and not no. The question was badly framed. Against the three objections, I think the honest answer is, in part, *mu*. "Does writing produce forgetting or memory?" Badly framed. It produces both, by how it is used. The *pharmakon* is remedy and poison at once; the word itself already said so. A note I never read again is poison: it gives me the feeling that I kept something without understanding it. A note that I read again, correct and link to other notes is a remedy. Socrates was right about the text that stays silent when someone asks it a question. The answer to that is not to stop writing. The answer is to go back to the text, ask again, and rewrite when the answer changes. "Do I write from vanity or from something else?" Also badly framed, because it assumes one motive. I write from vanity *too*. The question is whether vanity is driving or sitting in the back seat. "Do I write from fear?" Perhaps. Here I think Montaigne already answered, without meaning to, with the cabbages. The fear of death that paralyses wants ceremony: the last speech, the monument, the last word. Montaigne asks for the opposite. He wants death to find him in the middle of a common task, with dirty hands, with nothing prepared. To write a little every day, about common things, in a way another person can read, is my way of planting cabbages. It is not a monument. It is gardening. ### and the machine? One objection remains that the three classics could not foresee, and I cannot undo it with *mu*. If a machine can produce a whole essay, quotations and all, why should anyone read an essay of mine and not the machine's? The best answer I have is Montaigne's note to the reader: the matter of the book is himself. An essay, in the first sense, is not a text about a subject. It is the record of a person who tries himself against a subject. The machine can write about why people write. It cannot write why *I* write, because it was not there when I had that intuition. It will not be here either when I read this text again in ten years and disagree with it. The value of a line on the sand is not the shape of the line. It is that the line says how far *that* wave came. ### the rules Montaigne left This repository checks each essay against sentences that Montaigne himself wrote about what he was doing. The check is a skill, `essay-montaigne`, with a script that counts what can be counted. I want to put this essay through the three sentences that bother me most, because they answer the objection of the machine better than I do. The first sentence is "I do not teach; I only relate". An essay gives no orders to the reader and does not end with a list of lessons. This essay says why *I* write. It does not say why the reader should write. If this essay ended with five tips on how to write better, it would be a self-help article with quotations. The second sentence is "What do I know?". An essay doubts at least once, and doubts in earnest. In this essay, the most honest doubt is in Cicero's word: I do not know whether *commentatio* also means notes. The other doubt is in the chart: I do not know how much of the 3,810 contributions is really in my head. The third sentence is "I do not paint its being, I paint its passage". An essay has a date and may be contradicted later by its own writer. This essay is of October 2026. I know that I will disagree with parts of it, and I want to disagree in writing, on a new page with another date, not by deleting this one. Those three sentences are why a machine cannot write this essay for me. The machine can imitate the form. The machine cannot doubt for me, because the doubt has to be about something I thought I knew. And the machine cannot date my passage, because it did not pass where I passed. ## 4 · back to the beach I go back to the edge of the water with all of this. The wave comes, draws the line and pulls back. The wave comes again, a little higher or a little lower. The sand does not choose to keep the line. It is only wet where the water came. The difference between the beach and a person is that the person can choose. The person can look at what happened and decide: this I will write down. ### what I do with this The question of the essay is why I write. The practical question is what changes now. I have four answers, and all four are already under way. First, this series. One essay a month, on the first Tuesday, at 10:10, short on Instagram and full on Medium. One essay a month is little text. It is one line at a time, with a date. Second, two languages. Each essay exists in Portuguese and in English, in this repository, and the two versions say the same thing. Quotations stay in the language in which I found them, with a translation after them in the Portuguese version. The Portuguese version follows the rules of controlled technical Portuguese: an explicit subject, one idea per sentence, a number with its origin. Those rules make the text flatter, and I accept the price, because a flat text is easier to check. Third, the markers. Where the experience is mine and the text does not have it yet, a marker stays. The essay remains a draft until I fill each marker. This essay goes out with five. Fourth, the rereading. I will read this page again in October 2027 and write what changed, on a new page. The new page does not erase this one. Both stay, like two lines on the sand on different days. So why do I write? I write because **[AUTHOR ANECDOTE: the childhood intuition, taken up again by the adult in one sentence]**, and because I found out, late, that I was not alone in it. Socrates said that the philosopher prepares for death all his life. Cicero gave the idea a Latin word. Montaigne shut himself in a tower, named a genre and asked to die planting cabbages. None of the three stopped the wave from pulling back. All three left a line. I write because a forecast that was not written down teaches nothing, and a life holds many forecasts that the person forgets having made. I write in public because closed writing cannot be corrected, and I am wrong often. I write with machines, and I will go on writing with them, but the essay stays with me. The machine can help me carry the sand. The line has to be mine. And in the end I write because the question "why do I write?" is perhaps itself half *mu*: badly framed, too small. Perhaps the right question is not "why" but "for whom". That one I can answer. I write for someone who has not reached the beach yet. That person will arrive after the water has pulled back, will look at the sand and will see a line. It may be a reader I do not know. It may be a person I love. It may be myself, ten years from now, reading this page again, disagreeing with almost all of it and glad that it was written down. I will read this page again in October 2027. This is no. 01. In a month comes another. Twelve in the first year, if the wave allows. *Chautauqua is a monthly series of essays: a classic from before the twenty-first century, tried on a subject of today. It comes out on the first Tuesday of each month at 10:10, on Medium and on Instagram @hffmnn_. All of it is indexed at github.com/h0ffmann/closed-source. Previous number: none, this is the first. Next number: no. 02, in December 2026.* ## Sources Each source has the status that papers use in `REFERENCES.md`: `verified` when the source was read and the quoted passage was found; `partial` when the source was read through a summary or a fragment. - The two English quotations on Montaigne and Cicero: h0ffmann/nagori, `README.md`, section "Why keep notes in public", at commit `85dd045`, read on 2026-10-25. Copied as is, at the owner's request. Status: verified. - The name *nagori*, "o que a onda deixa pra trás" (what the wave leaves behind): the caption of the post "meus trabalhos", [`docs/social/instagram_005/README.md`](../docs/social/instagram_005/README.md). - The subjects and "agentes que programam junto": the caption of the post "meus temas", [`docs/social/instagram_004/README.md`](../docs/social/instagram_004/README.md). - marola, the five friends and the six DOIs: the captions of the posts "meus projetos" and "meus trabalhos", in `docs/social/`. marola's DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23224155. - The GitHub contributions by year: the data of the post "GitHub contributions", [`docs/social/instagram_002/`](../docs/social/instagram_002/README.md), summed by year on 2026-10-25. The data come from a public mirror of the contribution chart and were not compared with the GitHub page. Status: partial. - The Chautauqua series and the name taken from Pirsig: the post that defines the series, [`docs/social/instagram_006/README.md`](../docs/social/instagram_006/README.md), and the note [the Chautauquas](../notes/202610140004-whats-new-and-what-is-best.md). - Socrates, the prison, 399 BC, and the philosopher who prepares for death all his life: Wikipedia, "Phaedo", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - Cicero, Tullia, 45 BC, Tusculum and the subject of Book I: Wikipedia, "Tusculanae Disputationes", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - "a meditation on death": Cicero, *Tusculan Disputations*, Book I, translated by C. D. Yonge, Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org/ebooks/cicero/tusculan-disputations/c-d-yonge), read on 2026-10-25. The passage was found; that edition gives no section number. Status: partial. - Montaigne in 1571, at 38; La Boétie in 1563; the *Essais* in 1580: Wikipedia, "Michel de Montaigne", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - "myself am the matter of my book": Montaigne, *Essays*, "The Author to the Reader", translated by Charles Cotton, Project Gutenberg eBook 3600, as checked in the `essay-montaigne` skill. - "que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux": Montaigne, *Essais*, Book I, chapter 19 in Frame's numbering, "Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir"; as quoted by wist.info (Wist, entry 8109), read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - Theuth, Thamus and writing as a remedy for reminding: Wikipedia, "Phaedrus (dialogue)", read on 2026-10-25, which cites *Phaedrus* 274e–275b. Status: partial. - *Mu*, Zhaozhou and "unask the question" in Pirsig: Wikipedia, "Mu (negative)", read on 2026-10-25, which cites Pirsig (1974), p. 328 of the Perennial Classics edition. Status: partial. - "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.": Wikipedia, "Tears in rain monologue", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - "That is why I now make only open work." and the forecast on private code: the note [private code and private science lose their value](../notes/202610132127-private-code-and-private-science-lose-their-value.md), the owner's words, status `open-question`. - "Open work does not need a crowd...": the note [you only need to be seen by the right people](../notes/202610130845-seen-by-the-right-people.md), the owner's words. - The six DOIs (marola, ww3-gpu, picasso, closed source, marola-bench, nashkell): the caption of the post "meus temas", [`docs/social/instagram_004/README.md`](../docs/social/instagram_004/README.md). - The book, the 50 thinkers, Montaigne as number 50 and Dalrymple as number 37: [`50THINKERS.md`](../50THINKERS.md) and `AGENTS.md`, "The book". - Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple), 1949, psychiatrist and prison doctor at City Hospital and Winson Green Prison, Birmingham; retired in 2005; contributor to *City Journal*: Wikipedia, "Theodore Dalrymple", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - "The Frivolity of Evil", *City Journal*, Autumn 2004 (published 2004-11-01): the first sentence, the last sentence, the case of the woman of 21 and the 14 years of hospital and prison work were found in the text at city-journal.org/article/the-frivolity-of-evil, read on 2026-10-25. Status: verified. - *Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass* (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), essays first published in *City Journal* from 1994: Wikipedia, "Life at the Bottom", read on 2026-10-25. Status: partial. - *Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses* (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 26 pieces: Wikipedia, "Our Culture, What's Left of It", and the book's page at the Manhattan Institute, read on 2026-10-25. A review by Robert Fulford (2005) says that the book collects the *City Journal* articles and discusses "the frivolity of evil"; the essay's place in the book was not checked. Status: partial. - "I do not teach; I only relate", "What do I know?" and "I do not paint its being, I paint its passage": Montaigne, *Essays*, translated by Charles Cotton, Project Gutenberg eBook 3600, as checked in the `essay-montaigne` skill. - The rule of the marker: `AGENTS.md`, invariant 3. ### Further reading - Plato, *Phaedo* and *Phaedrus*. - Cicero, *Tusculan Disputations*, Book I (45 BC). - Michel de Montaigne, *Essays* (1580), above all "That to philosophize is to learn to die". - Robert M. Pirsig, *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance* (1974). - Ryōko Sekiguchi, *Nagori: la nostalgie de la saison qui vient de nous quitter* (Paris: Gallimard, 2020), as recorded in WorldCat 1182596644, read on 2026-10-25. - Theodore Dalrymple, "The Frivolity of Evil", *City Journal*, Autumn 2004: an essay of cultural criticism that starts from cases the writer saw as a doctor. See the `essay-montaigne` skill, rule 14.