Cioran & estrangement

“God has created nothing more odious to Himself than this world, and from the day He created it. He has not glanced at it again, so much does He loathe it.” The Moslem mystic who wrote that, I don’t know who it was, I shall never know this friend’s name.

*

Whatever puts me at odds with the world is consubstantial with myself. How little I have learned from experience. My disappointments have always preceded me.

*

To rid oneself of life is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of deriding it. (The one possible answer to someone who informs you of his intention to be done with it all.)

*

If the Hour of Disappointment were to sound for everyone at the same time, we should see an entirely new version, either of paradise or of hell.

*

No fate to which I could have adjusted myself. I was made to exist before my birth and after my deaths not during my very existence.

*

I have wasted hour after hour ruminating upon what seemed to me eminently worthy of being explored — upon the vanity of all things, upon what does not deserve a second’s reflection, since one does not see what there is still to be said for or against what is obvious.

*

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

*

“Your truths make it impossible to breathe.”
“Impossible for you,” I immediately replied to this innocent. Yet I might have wanted to add; “And for me, too,” instead of swashbuckling. . . .

*

Nonreality is an obvious matter I forget and rediscover every day. So intimately does this farce become part of my existence that I cannot dissociate them. Why this buffoonery of starting all over again? Yet it is no such thing, for by this means I belong among the livings or appear to do so.

*

To conceive the act of thought as a poison bath, the pastime of an elegaic viper.

*

The clouds passed by. In the silence of the night, you could have heard the noise they were making as they rushed overhead. Why are we here? what meaning can our infinitesimal presence have? Questions without answers, though I reply spontaneously, without the shadow of reflection and without blushing at uttering such a distinguished banality: “It is in order to torment ourselves that we are here, and for no other reason.”

*

Not a moment when I am not incredulous at finding myself in just that moment.

*

At two in the afternoon, rowing on the Étang de Soustons, I was suddenly thunderstruck by the recollection of a phrase: All is of no avail. Had I been alone, I should have flung myself into the water then and there. Never have I felt with such violence the necessity of putting an end to it all.