Cioran - Nibbida

Are we to execrate our age—or all ages?
Do we think of Buddha withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?
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“You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady.
“You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”
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The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
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If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.
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All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.
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Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
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Not the slightest trace of reality anywhere—except in my sensations of unreality.
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At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”
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Once we step into a cemetery, a feeling of utter mockery does away with any metaphysical concern. Those who look for “mystery” everywhere do not necessarily get to the bottom of things. Most often “mystery,” like “the absolute,” corresponds only to a mannerism of the mind. It is a word we should use only when we cannot do otherwise, in really desperate cases.
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When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal, we begin to survive ourselves, however powerful our vitality, however imperious our instincts. But they are no longer anything but false instincts, and false vitality.
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Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
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Two kinds of mind: daylight and nocturnal. They have neither the same method nor the same morality. In broad daylight, you watch yourself; in the dark, you speak out. The salutary or awkward consequences of what he thinks matter little to the man who questions himself at hours when others are the prey of sleep. Hence he meditates upon the bad luck of being born without concern for the harm he can cause others or himself. After midnight begins the intoxication of pernicious truths.
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As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.
When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.
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My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposing itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.
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My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
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There is no limit-disappointment.
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I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.
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This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
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An existence constantly transfigured by failure.
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Thracians and Bogomils—I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.
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According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, if a monk became proud of or merely satisfied with the task he was performing, he was to forsake it then and there.
One danger not dreaded by the man who has lived in the thirst for unsatisfaction, in an orgy of remorse and disgust.
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Philosophy in the Morgue. “My nephew was obviously a failure. If he had succeeded in making something of himself he would have had a different ending than … this.” “You know, Madame,” I replied to the monumental matron who had addressed me, “whether one succeeds or not comes down to the same thing.” “You’re right,” she said, after a few seconds’ thought. This unexpected acquiescence on the part of such a woman moved me almost as much as the death of my friend.
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Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.”
One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write….
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A film about wild animals: endless cruelty in every latitude. “Nature,” a torturer of genius, steeped in herself and her work, exults with good reason: there is not a moment when what is alive fails to tremble, to make others tremble. Pity is a strange luxury only the most perfidious and the fiercest creature could invent, out of a need to punish and torture itself—out of ferocity, still.
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Being is suspect. Then what is to be said of “life,” which is its deviation and stigma?
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I shall not soon forget the expression of horror on what was his face, the dread, the extreme suffering, and the aggression. No, he was not happy. Never have I seen a man so uncomfortable in his coffin.
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To live is to lose ground.
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If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.
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The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
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Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.
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There is no negator who is not famished for some catastrophic yes.
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We are not afraid to accept the notion of an uninterrupted sleep; on the other hand an eternal awakening (immortality, if it were conceivable, would be just that) plunges us into dread. Unconsciousness is a country, a fatherland; consciousness, an exile.
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Without the notion of a failed universe, the spectacle of injustice in every system would put even an abulic into a straitjacket.
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The Zohar teaches that those who do evil on earth were no better in heaven, that they were impatient to leave it, and, rushing to the mouth of the abyss, that they “arrived ahead of the time when they were to descend into this world.”
One readily discerns the profundity of this vision of the pre-existence of souls, and its usefulness when we are to explain the assurance and the triumph of the “wicked,” their solidity and their competence. Having prepared their endeavors so far ahead, it is not astonishing that they should possess the earth: they conquered it before they were here …, an eternity ago, and for all eternity, as a matter of fact.

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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.
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Seriousness is not involved in the definition of existence; tragedy is, since it implies a notion of risk, of gratuitous disaster, whereas what is serious postulates a goal. Now, the great originality of existence is to have nothing to do with such a thing.
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Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.
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The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so . . .
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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.
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“Being never disappoints,” declares a philosopher. Then what does? Certainly not nonbeing, by definition incapable of disappointing. This advantage, so irritating to our philosopher, must have led him to promulgate so flagrant a countertruth.
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I have abused the word disgust. But what other can I use to indicate a state in which exasperation is continually corrected by lassitude, and lassitude by exasperation?
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Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so.
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Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.
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I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.
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According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.
The more I think of what could not have failed to happen when my own soul’s turn came, the more I realize that if there was one soul which more than the rest must have resisted incarnation, it was mine.
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When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.
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When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the “dream” he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.
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When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.
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One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
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Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.
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To say “Everything is illusory” is to court illusion, to accord it a high degree of reality, the highest in fact, whereas on the contrary one wanted to discredit it. The solution? To stop proclaiming or denouncing it, serving it by thinking about it. The very idea that disqualifies all ideas is a fetter.
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Christ having named Satan “Prince of this world,” Saint Paul, to go one better, struck home: “God of this world.” When such authorities designate our ruler by name, who is entitled to disinherited status?
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Kant waited until the last days of his old age to perceive the dark side of existence and to indicate “the failure of any rational theodicy.” . . . Others have been luckier: to them this occurred even before they began to philosophize.
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“I am a coward, I cannot endure the pain of being happy.” To sound someone out, to know him, it is enough to see how he reacts to Keats’s avowal. If he fails to understand immediately, no use continuing.
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Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life. . . . Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.
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At the Paris-Moscow exhibition, my amazement in front of the portrait of the young Remizov by Ilya Repin. When I knew him, Remizov was eighty-six years old; he lived in a virtually empty apartment his concierge wanted for her daughter and schemed to evict him from, on the pretext that the place was a plague-spot, a rat’s nest. The man Pasternak considered the greatest Russian stylist had come to that. The contrast between the wretched, withered old man, long forgotten by the world, and the image of the brilliant youth in front of me robbed me of any desire to visit the rest of the exhibition.
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Visit a hospital, and in five minutes you become a Buddhist, or become one again if you have left off being such a thing.
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To have read through a work on old age solely because the author’s photograph led me to do so. That mixture of rictus and entreaty, and that expression of grimacing stupor — what hype, what an endorsement!
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“This world was not created according to the will of Life,” it is said in the Ginza, a Gnostic text of a Mandaean sect in Mesopotamia. Remember this whenever you have no better argument to neutralize a disappointment.
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“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.
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If man so readily forgets he is accursed, it is because he has always been so.
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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.
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She had the profile of Cleopatra. Seven years later, she might just as well be begging on the street. Enough to cure you forever of idolatry, of any craving to seek the unfathomable in a pair of eyes, in a smile, etc.
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While he described his projects to me, I listened to him without being able to forget that he would not survive the week. What madness on his part to speak of the future, of his future! But once I had left, once I was outside, how to avoid thinking that after all, the difference was not so great between the mortal and the moribund? The absurdity of making plans is only a little more obvious in the second case.
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The interesting thing about friendship is that it is — almost as much as love — an inexhaustible source of disappointment and outrage, thereby of fruitful surprises it would be madness to try to do without.
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Discouragement, ever at the service of knowledge, hides the other side, the inner shadow, of persons and things — hence the sensation of infallibility it gives.
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The felicity of having frequented a Gascon, an authentic Gascon. The particular Gascon I am thinking of, I have never seen depressed. All his disasters — and they were considerable — he described to me as triumphs. The gap between him and Don Quixote was infinitesimal. Yet he tried, my Gascon, to see clearly from time to time, though his efforts came to nothing. He remained to the end a trifler in disappointment.
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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.

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Despondency. This English word, charged with all the nuances of collapse, will have been the key to my years, the emblem of my moments, of my negative courage, of my invalidation of all tomorrows.

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An acute sense of absurdity makes the merest action unlikely, indeed impossible. Lucky those who lack such a thing! Providence has looked out for them.
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Never having known what I was after in this world, I am still waiting for someone to tell me what he himself pursues.
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I had decided never again to shake hands with anyone healthy. Yet I have had to compromise, for I soon discovered that many of those I suspected of well-being were less subject to it than I had supposed. What was the use of making enemies on the basis of mere suspicions?
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That man in the street — what does he want? Why is he alive? And that child and its mother, and that old man? No one finds favor in my eyes during this accursed promenade. At last I went into a butcher shop, where something like half a calf’s carcass was hanging. At the sight I was quite ready to burst into tears.
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What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!
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The tormented — who are they, if not martyrs embittered by not knowing for whose sake to immolate themselves?
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A middle-aged woman, passing me on the street, took it into her head to announce, without looking at me, “Today I see nothing but walking corpses wherever I look.” Then, still without looking at me, she added, “I’m crazy, aren’t I, Monsieur?”
“Not all that crazy,” I replied, with a glance of complicity.
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At every age of our life, we discover that life is a mistake. Only at fifteen is this a revelation that combines a shudder of fear and a touch of enchantment. With time this revelation, degenerating, turns into to a truism, and thus we come to regret the period when it was a source of the unforeseen.
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The last important poet of Rome, Juvenal, and the last decisive writer of Greece, Lucian, both labored in irony. Two literatures that ended thus — as everything, literature or not, ought to end.
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Astray here on earth, as I would doubtless be astray anywhere.
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Overwhelming joy, if extended, is closer to madness than is the persistent melancholy which justifies itself by reflection and even by mere observation, whereas joy’s excesses derive from some derangement. If it is disconcerting to be happy over the mere fact of being alive, it is quite normal, on the other hand, to be sad even before learning baby talk.
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Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.
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Every life is the story of a collapse. If biographies are so fascinating, it is because the heroes, and the cowards quite as much, strive to innovate in the art of debacle.
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Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.
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Each of us clings as best he can to his unlucky star.
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Original Sin and Transmigration: both identify destiny with an expiation, and it is of no matter whether we are talking about Adam’s sin or those we committed in our previous existences.
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Returning home after a cremation: instant devaluation of Eternity and all the other great words.
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The world is an accident of God, accidens Dei. How right the formula of Albertus Magnus seems!
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In our veins flows the blood of monkeys. If we were to think of it often, we should end by giving up. No more theology, no more metaphysics — which comes down to saying no more divagations, no more arrogance, no more excess, no more anything. . . .
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To have nothing in common with the Universe, and to wonder by virtue of what disorder one belongs to it.
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Devoured by a nostalgia for paradise, without having known a single attack of true faith. . . .
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No one since Benjamin Constant has rediscovered the tone of disappointment.
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Lucid minds, in order to give an official character to their lassitude and impose it upon others, ought to constitute themselves into a League of Disappointment. Thereby they might succeed in attenuating the pressure of history, in rendering history optional.
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My doubts I have acquired painfully; my disappointments, as if they had always been waiting for me, came of their own accord — primordial illuminations.
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It is wrong to claim that man cannot live without gods. At first he needs to create false gods, but later on he endures everything, accustoms himself to everything. He is not noble enough to perish out of disappointment.
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The only profitable conversations are with enthusiasts who have ceased being so—with the ex-naïve . . . Calmed down at last, they have taken, willy-nilly, the decisive step toward Knowledge—that impersonal version of disappointment.
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The role of periods of decline is to lay a civilization bare, to unmask it, to strip it of the glamour and arrogance linked to its achievements. Thereby it can discern what it was worth and is worth now, what was illusory in its efforts and its convulsions. Insofar as it detaches itself from the fictions that guaranteed its fame, it will take a considerable stride toward knowledge . . ., toward disillusion, toward a generalized awakening, that fatal promotion which will project it outside of history....