One can confess both to things one feels guilty about, and things one is ashamed of.

'The images I have cited of the philosophical mood in Socrates and in Descartes are images of isolation, of singling oneself, or being singled, out. And we know there is also such a thing as philosophical dialogue. But then isn't lecturing about philosophy an extraordinary, even bizarre, activity, neither a time of solitude nor of conversation? If we agree that it is bizarre, then do we know how writing philosophy is any the less bizarre? These doubts may usefully raise the question of the audience of philosophy, perhaps in the form of asking how philosophizing is to sound.'

Thoreau fits in the space Bernard Williams makes when he distinguishes ethical thought from what he calls the morality system.

In Celan, sunlessness.

'I must deliberate from what I am. Truthfulness requires trust in that as well, and not the obsessional and doomed drive to eliminate it.'

The deeply obscure locution, at best clear only to initiates into certain mysteries: 'pick out'.

No one story does it.

The imagination ought only ever to free; never compel.

The work done by italicizing 'ought'.