Cioran and the self

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

*

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man.
And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.

*
Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

*
Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

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If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

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Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, would ring at the door from time to time….

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The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

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We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

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A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

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The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront?
Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

*
Moral disintegration when we spend time in a place that is too beautiful: the self dissolves upon contact with paradise. No doubt it was to avoid this danger that the first man made the choice he did.

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I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels Is ambitious.
Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see its traces on the faces of the dead themselves.

*

When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.

*
Even in God’s company, discontent was brewing, as the revolt of the angels testifies—the first on record.
Apparently on every level of creation, no one is forgiven his superiority. We might even conceive of an envious flower.

*

“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse.
Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

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The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!

*

I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.

*

The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition.
Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.
It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

*

When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self hatred actually strengthens self attachment.

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In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.

*

Two friends, both actresses in a country of eastern Europe. One decamps to the West, becoming rich and famous there; the other remains where she is, poor and obscure. Half a century later, the second woman takes a trip and pays a visit to her fortunate colleague. “She used to be a head taller than me, and now she’s a shrunken old woman, and paralyzed into the bargain.” Other details follow, and in conclusion: “I’m not afraid of death; I’m afraid of death in life.” Nothing like recourse to philosophical reflection to camouflage a belated revenge.

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Friendship has scope and interest only for the young. For an older person, it is apparent that what he dreads most is being survived by his friends.

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As memory weakens, the praise that has been lavished upon us fades, too, to the advantage of the censure. And this is just: the praise has rarely been deserved, whereas the censure sheds a certain light on what we did not know about ourselves.

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We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

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Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity — the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.