“The pupil asked: “What is a woman-hater?” The teacher answered: “I do not know. But the expression is used as a term of reproach by noodles, for those who say what all think. Noodles are those men who cannot come near a woman without losing their heads and becoming faithless. They purchase the woman’s favour by delivering up the heads of their friends on silver chargers; and they absorb so much femininity, that they see with feminine eyes and feel with feminine feelings. There are things which one does not say every day, and one does not tell one’s wife what her sex is composed of. But one has the right to put it on paper sometimes. Schopenhauer has done it the best, Nietzsche not badly, Joséphin Péladan is the master. Thackeray wrote Men’s Wives, but the book was ignored. Balzac unmasked Caroline in Physiologie du Mariage, and Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale; Otto Weininger, having discovered the treachery when he was twenty, did not wait for the revenge but left the scene.” — August Strindberg in A Blue Book (1907 – 1912)

August Strindberg (1849-1912), the Swedish playwright, novelist, poet and painter, wrote A Blue Book towards the end of his life. It came out in four parts, beginning in 1907. Strindberg originally intended it as a kind of universal breviary, with a passage of wisdom for each day of the year. As he wrote the plan changed and the book became a motley collection of thoughts, observations and scientific speculation. Most of the book takes the form of a dialogue between “the Pupil”, Johannes Damascenus, and “the Teacher”. Johannes Damascenus is more or less a pseudonym, in the style of Kierkegaard, for Strindberg and the Teacher appears to be a proxy for Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic and theologian to whom Strindberg dedicated the book. —Consciousness, Literature and the Arts