Cioran on detachment

Having opened an anthology of religious texts, I came straight off upon this remark of the Buddha: “No object is worth being desired.” I closed the book at once, for after that, what else is there to read?

[“Here, ruler of gods, a bhikkhu has heard that nothing is worth adhering to. When a bhikkhu has heard that nothing is worth adhering to, he directly knows everything; having directly known everything, he fully understands everything...MN37]
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Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
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What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.
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That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”
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The monk-errant, the wandering friar—so far, the supreme achievement. To reach the point of no longer having anything to renounce! Such must be the dream of any disabused mind.
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It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
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An Egyptian monk, after fifteen years of complete solitude, received a packet of letters from his family and friends. He did not open them, he flung them into the fire in order to escape the assault of memory. We cannot sustain communion with ourself and our thoughts if we allow ghosts to appear, to prevail. The desert signifies not so much a new life as the death of the past: at last we have escaped our own history. In society, no less than in the Thebaid, the letters we write, and those we receive, testify to the fact that we are in chains, that we have broken none of the bonds, that we are merely slaves and deserve to be so.
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Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm—or toward both at once.
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A stroll through Montparnasse Cemetery. All, young or old, made plans. They make no more. Strengthened by their example, I swear as a good pupil, returning, never to make any myself — ever. Undeniably beneficial outing.
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I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
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Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do, one so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
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The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference.
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If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.
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Withdraw into yourself, perceive there a silence as old as being, even older….
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To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.
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My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.
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To shift from scorn to detachment seems easy enough. Yet this is not so much a transition as a feat, an accomplishment. Scorn is the first victory over the world; detachment the last, the supreme. The interval separating them is identified with the path leading from liberty to liberation.
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He was above all others, and had had nothing to do with it: he had simply forgotten to desire….
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Plotinus befriended a Roman senator who had freed his slaves, renounced his wealth, and who ate and slept at the houses of friends, for he no longer owned anything. This senator, from the “official” point of view, was deranged, and his case would be regarded as distressing, which indeed it was: a saint in the Senate…. His presence, even his possibility—what an omen! The hordes were not far….
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In the Dhammapada, it is suggested that, in order to achieve deliverance, we must be rid of the double yoke of Good and Evil. That Good itself should be one of our fetters we are too spiritually retarded to be able to admit. And so we shall not be delivered.
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One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.
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Why does the Gita rank “renunciation of the fruit of actions” so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia—in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.
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X reproached me for being a spectator, for not getting involved, for loathing the new. “But I don’t want to change anything,” I answered. He did not grasp the meaning of my reply. He took it for modesty.
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Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.
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“My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.
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You should avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”
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Ama nesari, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.
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There was a time when, in order to dispel any impulse of vengeance once I had endured some affront, I would imagine myself quite still in my grave. And I calmed down at once. We must not despise our corpse too much: it can be useful on occasion.
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At the slightest vexation and, a fortiori, at the slightest affliction, hurry to the nearest cemetery, sudden distributor of a peace to be sought elsewhere in vain. A miracle cure, for once.
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Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

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Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence, where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wallowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior to selfhood….
Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!
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I am happy only when I contemplate renunciation and prepare myself for it. The rest is bitterness and agitation. To renounce is no easy thing, yet nothing but striving for it affords some peace. Striving? Merely thinking of it suffices to give me the illusion of being someone else, and this illusion is a victory — the most flattering one, and also the most fallacious.
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Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.
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“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse)
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“A life of intensity is contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one.
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Counterirritant to desolation: close your eyes for a long while in order to forget light and all that it reveals.

Visit from a painter who describes how, calling one evening on a blind man and finding him alone in the dark, he could not keep from pitying him and asking him if existence was endurable without light. “You don’t know what you’re missing,” was the blind man’s answer.
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Detachment serenity—vague, almost empty words, except in those moments when we would have answered by a smile if we had been told we had only a few minutes left to live.
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... detachment from the fruit of action, is of such importance that anyone who had truly possessed himself of it would have nothing more to accomplish, since he would have reached the one valid end, the real truth that annihilates all the others and exposes their emptiness, being empty itself, moreover—but this emptiness is conscious of itself. Imagine a greater awareness, a further step toward awakening, and he who takes it will be no more than a ghost, a phantom.
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Tolstoy’s excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi, The first gave away his possessions; the second had none to give away.
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On this immaculate page, a gnat was making a dash for it, “Why be in such a hurry? Where are you going, what are you looking for? Relax!” I screamed out in the middle of the night. I would have been so pleased to see it obey me. It’s harder than you think to gain disciples.
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Akhmatova, like Gogol, wanted to possess nothing. She gave away the presents given to her, and a few days later they would be found in other people’s houses. This characteristic recalls the behavior of nomads, compelled to the provisional by necessity and by choice. Joseph de Maistre cites the case of a Russian prince and his friends who would sleep anywhere in his palace and had, so to speak, no fixed bed, for they lived with the sentiment of being transitory there, of camping out until it was time to pull up stakes. . . . When Eastern Europe furnishes such models of detachment, why seek them out in India or elsewhere?
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When I see someone fighting for some cause or other, I try to know what is happening in his mind and what can be the source of his obvious lack of maturity. The rejection of resignation is perhaps a sign of “life,” never in any case of perspicacity or simply of reflexion. The sane man never lowers himself to protest. He scarcely consents to indignation. Taking human affairs seriously attests to some secret flaw.
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Epictetus: “Pleasure consists not in acquiring and enjoying but in not desiring.” —If wisdom is defined as opposition to Desire, it is because wisdom is concerned to make us superior to the ordinary disappointments as well as to the dramatic ones, inseparable, on either count, from the phenomenon of desiring, expecting, hoping. It is chiefly from the capital disappointments that wisdom seeks to preserve us, having specialized in the art of confronting or enduring the “blows of fate.” Of all the Ancients, it was the Stoics who carried this art furthest. According to them, the wise man possesses an exceptional status in the universe: the gods are secured from evils; the wise man is above, he is invested with a force that allows him to conquer all his desires. The gods are still subjected to theirs, they live in servitude; he alone escapes them. How does he raise himself to the unwonted, how does he manage to outclass all beings, mortal and divine? Apparently he does not immediately discern the bearing of his status: he is certainly above men and gods, but he must wait a certain while before realizing the fact. We have no difficulty admitting that it is not easy for him to understand his position, especially since we wonder when and where we have seen so prodigious an anomaly, such a specimen of virtue and pride. The wise man, Seneca claims, exceeds Jupiter in being able to scorn the privileges of this world and in refusing to benefit by them, while Jupiter, having no need of them and dismissing them from the start, has neither the occasion nor the merit of triumphing over them.
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No one can do anything for this Polish woman, who is beyond sickness and health, even beyond living and dying. A phantom cannot be cured, still less an enlightened mind. We can cure only those who belong to the earth and still have their roots in it, however superficial.
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The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it, Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?
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I pass without stopping at the grave of that critic whose vitriolic remarks I have so often pondered. Nor at the grave of the poet who spent his life dreaming of his ultimate dissolution. Other names pursue me, alien names linked to a pitiless and pacifying wisdom, to a vision calculated to free the mind from all obsessions, even funereal ones. Nagarjuna, Chandrakirti, Santideva—unparalleled swashbucklers, dialecticians belabored by the obsession of salvation, acrobats and apostles of Vacuity for whom, sages among the sages, the universe was only a word….
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“Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!
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A young German asks me for one franc. I begin a conversation with him and learn that he has traveled round the world, that he has been to India, whose beggars he likes to think he resembles. Yet one does not belong with impunity to a didactic nation. I watch him solicit: he looks as if he had taken courses in mendicancy.
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When you imagine you have reached a certain degree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots, including the founders of religions. But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.
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My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.
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Once the shutters are closed, I stretch out in the dark. The outer world, a fading murmur, dissolves. All that is left is myself and … there’s the rub. Hermits have spent their lives in dialogue with what was most hidden within them. If only, following their example, I could give myself up to that extreme exercise, in which one unites with the intimacy of one’s own being! It is this self-interview, this inward transition which matters, and which has no value unless continually renewed, so that the self is finally absorbed by its essential version.
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When we begin to reflect upon life, to discover in it an infinity of emptiness, our instincts have already turned themselves into guides and middlemen of our acts; they rein in the flight of our inspiration and the pliability of our detachment.
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An oyster, to build up its shell, must pass its weight in seawater through its body fifty thousand times. . . . Where have I turned for my lessons in patience!
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Love’s great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.
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In the heat of success or of failure, remember how we were conceived. Incomparable recipe for triumphing over euphoria or discontent.
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The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.
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I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
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In classical India, the sage and the saint were combined in one and the same person. To have any notion of such a success, we must imagine, if we can, a fusion between resignation and ecstasy, between a cold stoic and a disheveled mystic.
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Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.
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“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?” —That’s what I’d like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

*According to Nagarjuna—a subtle mind, if ever there was one, and who transcended even nihilism-Buddha offered the world the “nectar of vacuity.” At the limits of the most abstract and the most destructive analysis, to evoke a draught, even of the gods—is this not a weakness, a concession? —However far one may have advanced, one still drags along the indignity of being—or of having been—human.

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Thirty years of ecstasy at the altar of the Cigarette. Now, when I see others sacrifice to my former idol, I do not understand them, I regard them as unhinged or defective. If a “vice” we have conquered becomes alien to us to such a degree, how can we fail to be astounded by those we have not practiced?
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“I cannot do without the things I care nothing for,” the Duchess du Maine liked to say. Frivolity, to this degree, is a prelude to renunciation.
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...too favored by fate to know modesty or resignation, as unsuited to observe proportion in the face of the inevitable as of the unexpected.
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I acknowledge the advantage of ... living without a background, with the unconcern of a tumbler, an idiot or a saint, or with the detachment of that serpent which, coiled around itself, survives without food for years on end, as if it were some god of inanition or else concealed, beneath the suavity of its hebetude, some hideous sun.
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There are among us daylight ghosts, devoured by their absence, for whom life is one long aside. They walk our streets with muffled steps, and look at no one. No anxiety can be discovered in their eyes, no haste in their gestures. For them an outside world has ceased to exist, and they submit to every solitude. Careful to keep their distance, solicitous of their detachment, they inhabit an undeclared universe situated somewhere between the memory of the unimaginable and the imminence of certainty. Their smile suggests a thousand vanquished fears, the grace that triumphs over all things terrible: such beings can pass through matter itself. Have they overtaken their own origins? Discovered in themselves the very sources of light? No defeat, no victory dis turbs them. Independent of the sun, they are self-sufficient: illuminated by Death.
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Resignation, had it become compulsory, would have taught us to endure our misfortunes with dignity, to contemplate our nullity in silence. Would poetry have evaporated from our world? So much the worse for poetry! In exchange, we should have captured the faculty of suffering our destinies without a murmur: accusing no one, condescending to neither melancholy nor mirth nor regret, reducing our relations with the universe to a harmonious system of defeats, living as condemned men may live—not imploring divinity but offering it a warning …
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The repugnance which an animal begets is provisional; it never ripens in thought, whereas our kind obsesses our reflections, infiltrates the mechanism of our detachment from the world in order to confirm us in our system of refusal and non-adherence. After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology?
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The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational-—that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair. Or otherwise, invent another genre of solitude, expatriate himself in the void, and pursue—by means of one exile or another—the stages of uprootedness. Released from all prejudices, he becomes the unusable man par excellence, to whom no one turns and whom no one fears because he admits and repudiates everything with the same detachment. Less dangerous than a heedless insect, he is nonetheless a scourge for Life, for it has vanished from his vocabulary, with the seven days of the Creation. And Life would forgive him, if at least he relished Chaos, which is where Life began. But he denies the feverish origins, beginning with his own, and preserves, with regard to the world, only a cold memory, a polite regret.
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Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself; he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit; the species appalls him; he is a monster—and monsters do not beget.
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A too-recent disaster has the disadvantage of keeping us from perceiving its good sides.
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To perish! — that verb which is my favorite and which, oddly enough, suggests nothing irreparable.