Cioran: that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .

“In this our life”—to be in life: suddenly I am struck by the strangeness of such an expression, as if it applied to no one.

*
I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent.
Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, and I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.

*
Haunted, obsessed by abdication, as far back as I can remember. But abdication of what? If I once longed to be “someone,” it was only for the satisfaction of someday being able to say, like Charles V at Yuste: “I am no longer anything.”

*
For an instant, I think I experienced what absorption into Brahma might signify for an adept of the Vedanta. How much I longed for that instant to be extensible—infinitely.

*

If I do not deny my origins, it is because it is ultimately better to be nothing at all than a pretense of something.

*

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself …

*

The early Greeks regarded the psyche as no more than air, wind, or at test smoke, and one readily agrees with them every time one wearies of foraging in one’s own ego or that of others, searching for strange and, if possible, suspect depths.

*

I am distinct from all my sensations. I fail to understand how. I even fail to understand whose they are. Moreover, who is this I initiating the three propositions?

*

Had I been informed that my moments, like all the rest, were going to abandon me, I should have felt neither fear, nor regret, nor joy. Flawless absence. Every personal accent had vanished from what I thought I was still feeling, but in truth I was feeling nothing, I was surviving my own sensations,

*

To trace back to the sovereign zero, out of which emerges that subaltern zero that constitutes ourselves. . . .