"If I'm out of my mind, that's okay with me." 

Part 1 of our dive into Moses Herzog's breakdown. Like all the best books, Herzog follows a manic academic, freshly dumped by his second wife for his own one-legged best friend, who processes the whole disaster by firing off unsent letters to everyone from his mother to Eisenhower to Spinoza.

We get a peak into the 1964 version of the suffering olympics, which Rich obviously tries to tie back to New Zealand MPs and Nietzschean slave morality. 

Plus: how Christianity's meaning-making project curdled into Romanticism, then Hegelian historicism, then modern secular doomerism. 

Full transcripts are available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search episodes by key ideas, authors, and themes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) how would a wizard signal being gay?
(00:04:11) announcing Herzog: Bellow's "bitch wife" genre and Jewish New York neuroticism
(00:09:30) sampling Herzog's letters and the appeal of saying what you really think
(00:14:22) the kaleidoscopic, disorienting structure of the opening chapters
(00:18:09) is Herzog a reliable narrator of his own infidelities?
(00:23:50) is Madeline really the schemer Herzog paints her as?
(00:27:38) the suffering Olympics: how Gersbach out-victims the man he betrayed
(00:36:56) Herzog's genius delusion, from Kanye West to Nietzsche
(00:48:05) tracing modern doomerism back to Christianity, via Romanticism and Hegel
(00:54:49) Bellow's own Marxist phase, and historicism's swing from hope to doom
(01:00:06) misunderstood genius or deluded narcissist? plus predictions for part 2
(01:04:47) outro: Rich's new site and building an AI oracle from your back catalog

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