Cioran - Solitude

 A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on, in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community.

*
Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not.
*
What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster Is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.
*
Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar.
*
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
*
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
*
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 oursclf 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.
*
There are certain moments when, remote as we are from any faith, we can conceive of only God as our interlocutor. To address ourselves elsewhere seems an impossibility, a madness. Solitude, in its extreme reaches, requires a form of conversation, also extreme.
*
Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.
*
After fifteen years of absolute solitude, Saint Seraphinus of Sarow would exclaim, in the presence of any visitor at all, “O my joy!” Who, continually rubbing up against his kind, would be so extravagant as to greet them thus?”
*
To fathom this separate man, we should focus on the phrase “to hold oneself apart,” the tacit motto of his every moment, on its implication of solitude and subterranean stubbornness, on the essence of a withdrawn being who pursues an endless and implacable labor.
*
If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?
*
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
*
When, out of the appetite for solitude, we have sundered our bonds, the Void seizes us: nothing, no one … Whom to liquidate now? Where to unearth a durable victim? — Such perplexities open us to God: at least with Him we’re sure of being able to break indefinitely…
*
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
*
The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer.
*
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful. Such as the novel’s. Let us salute it, then, even celebrate it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions and our limits, the futility of having a life, of becoming a character or of creating one.
*
... hatred of learning and of the solitude which is its condition.
*
Solitude is a mission, not a donnée; to rise to its level and assume it means renouncing the vulgarity that insures success, religious or otherwise. Recapitulate the history of ideas, acts, attitudes and you find that the future was always on the side of the rabble. One does not preach in the name of Marcus Aurelius: since he spoke only to himself, he had neither disciples nor votaries; on the other hand, temples are still being built where certain Epistles are cited to satiety. As long as this goes on, I shall persecute this saint so adept at interesting us in his torments.
*
Abstinence—voluntary or forced—sets the individual both above and below the Species, makes him into an alloy of Saint and Imbecile that intrigues and abashes us. Whence our equivocal hatred for the Monk, as for any man who has renounced woman, who has renounced being like us. We shall never forgive him his solitude: it degrades as much as it disgusts us; it is a provocation. O the strange ascendancy of flaws! Gogol once confessed that love, had he yielded to it, would have “instantaneously reduced me to dust.” Such an admission, as fascinating as it is dreadful, reminds us of Kierkegaard and his “thorn in the flesh.” Yet the Danish philosopher’s nature was an erotic one: his broken engagement, his debacle as a lover, tormented him all his life and tainted even his theological works. Can we then compare Gogol to Swift, that other “blasted” man? This would be to forget that the Dean, if he lacked the luck to love, possessed at least that of breaking hearts. To “place” Gogol, we must imagine a Swift with neither Stella nor Vanessa.
*
As lonely as Swift, that pamphleteer of another age, that pamphleteer anterior to man. When everything leaves me, when I leave myself, I think of them both, I cling to their disgusts and to their cruelty, support myself on their vertigo. When I leave myself, yes, I turn to them: nothing then could separate me from their solitude.
*
According to Cassian, Evagrus, and Nilus of Ancyra, no demon is more redoubtable than the demon of acedia. The monk who succumbs to it will be its victim to the end of his days. Glued to the window, he will stare outside, will await visits, any visits, in order to palaver, to forget himself.
To strip oneself of everything and then discover one had taken the wrong path, to cool one’s heels in solitude and be unable to leave it! For every hermit who has succeeded, there are a thousand who have failed. These defeated men, these failures steeped in the ineffectiveness of their prayers —the Church sought to revive them by song, imposed upon them exultation, the discipline of joy. Victims of the demon, how could they have raised their voices, and to whom? As remote from Grace as from the age, they spent hours comparing their sterility to that of the desert, to the material image of their void.

Glued to my window, to what would I compare my sterility if not to that of the City? Yet the other desert, the real one, haunts me. If only I could go there and forget the odor of men! As God’s neighbor, I should inhale His desolation and His eternity that I dream of at the moments there awakens in me the memory of a distant cell. In a previous life, what monastery did I abandon or betray? My incompleted prayers, broken off then, pursue me now, while in my brain some heaven or other appears and disappears.
*
The desert, in fact, provides the image of duration translated into coexistence: a motionless flow, a metamorphosis bewitched by space. The solitary retires there less to expand his solitude and enrich his absence than to produce within himself the tonality of death.

*

At this moment, I am alone. What more can I want? A more intense happiness does not exist. Yes: that of hearing, by dint of silence, my solitude enlarge.
*
The assent to death is the greatest one of all. It can be expressed in several ways …
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.
*
The other does not exist - this is an obvious and comforting conclusion. To be alone, horribly alone, is the only imperative, and it must be obeyed at any price. The universe is solitary space, and all its creations do nothing but reinforce its solitude. I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.
*
To send someone a book is to commit a burglary—a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.
*
... solitary, omnipresent, he is always there . . . , forever inseparable from what counts in an existence.
*
It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. 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.”
*
Turning to the monks meditating night and day on their seclusion, I imagined them mulling over crimes and outrages that were more or less aborted. Every solitary, I told myself, is suspect: a pure being does not isolate himself. To seek the intimacy of a cell, one must have a heavy conscience; one must be afraid of one’s conscience. I regretted bitterly that the history of monasticism had been undertaken by straightforward minds, as incapable of conceiving the need to be odious to oneself as of experiencing that melancholy which moves mountains …
*
Tears do not burn except in solitude. Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they die do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone. They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don't they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits? We are so isolated form everything! But isn't everything equally inaccessible to us? The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
*
TRUE SOLITUDE is the feeling of being absolutely isolated between the earth and the sky. Nothing should detract attention from these phenomena of absolute isolation: a fearfully lucid intuition will reveal the entire drama of man's finite nature facing the infinite nothingness of the world. Solitary walks—extremely fertile and dangerous at the same time, for the inner life—must take place in such a way that nothing will obscure the solitary's meditation on man's isolation in the world. Solitary walks are propitious to an intense process of interiorization especially in the evening, when none of the usual seductions can steal one's interest. Then revelations about the world spring from the deepest corner of the spirit, from the place where it has detached itself from life, from the wound of life. To achieve spirituality, one must be very lonely. So much death-in-life and so many inner conflagrations! Loneliness negates so much of life that the spirit's blooming in vital dislocations becomes almost insufferable.
*
Real solitude implies a painful intermission in man's life, a lonely struggle with the angel of death. To live in solitude means to relinquish all expectations about life. The only surprise in solitude is death. The great solitaries retreated from the world not to prepare themselves for life but, rather, to await with resignation its end. No messages about life ever issue forth from deserts and caves. Haven't we proscribed all religions that began in the desert? All the illuminations and dreams of the great solitaries reveal an apocalyptic vision of downfall and the end rather than a crown of lights and triumphs.The solitude of the melancholic man is less profound.
*
I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.
*
The absolute remains un- lovable. I see a form of madness, not of knowledge, in the ecstasy of life's ultimate origins. You cannot experience it except in solitude, when you feel as if you were floating above the world. Solitude is the proper milieu for madness. It is noteworthy that even the skeptic can experience this kind of ecstasy.
*
Many are haunted by the vision of an abandoned world encased in glacial solitude, untouched by even the pale reflections of a crepuscular light. Who is more unhappy? He who feels his own loneliness or he who feels the loneliness of the world? Impossible to tell, and besides, why should I bother with a classification of loneliness? Is it not enough that one is alone?
*
Men value solitude so little! They condemn the sterility of all that it has produced and give praise exclusively to social values, for they cherish the illusion that they have all contributed to their creation. They all aspire to great achievements through which they hope to attain immortality. As if they will not crumble into dust!
*
Were I to withdraw into the most fearsome desert, renounce everything, and live in absolute solitude, still I would never dream of despising men and their pleasure. Since I cannot really enter eternity through renunciation and solitude, since I shall die like the rest, why despise them, why call my way the only true one?
*
An outcast in the world, indifferent to its being dazzling or dismal, self-consumed with triumphs and failures, engrossed in inner drama—such is the fate of the solitary.
*
Let the pathos and drama of infinity come to us once more in the loneliness of death so that our passing away into nothingness will resemble an illumination amplifying the mystery and the meaninglessness of this world.
*
The only explanation for the creation of world is God's fear of solitude. In other words, our role is to amuse Our Maker. Poor clowns of the absolute we forgot that we act out of tragedy to enliven the burden of one spectator whose applause has never reached a mortal ear. Solitude weights on God so much that he invented saints as partners in dialogue.
I can stand up to God only by confronting him with another solitude. I would be nothing more than another clown.
*
Modern acedia is no longer monastic solitude - though our souls are our cloisters - but a void, and the dread of an inefficient, derelict God.
*
"Solitude has made me contemporary with the dead". (Barres) There is no life, only eternity, in solitude.
*

The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move…. What was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there was still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert.
*
I never tire of reading about the hermits, preferably about those said to be “weary of seeking God.” I am dazzled by the failures of the Desert.
*
And it is to seek a true, purer sentiment of this kind that the hermits took refuge in the desert, that negation of history which they rightly compared to the angels, since—they maintained—both were unaware of sin and the Fall into the realm of time. The desert, in fact, provides the image of duration translated into coexistence: a motionless flow, a metamorphosis bewitched by space. The solitary retires there less to expand his solitude and enrich his absence than to produce within himself the tonality of death.
In order to hear this tonality we must institute a desert within ourselves …
*
However serious our fall, it may nevertheless be useful to us if we turn it into a discipline that can induce us to reconquer the privileges of delirium. The hermits of the first centuries of Christianity will serve us again as an example. They will teach us how, in order to raise our psychic level, we must join a permanent combat with ourselves. It is with singular appropriateness that one Father of the Church has called them “athletes of the desert.” They were warriors whose state of tension, whose relentless struggles against themselves we can scarcely imagine. There were some who recited up to seven hundred prayers a day; they kept track by dropping a pebble after each one … A mad arithmetic which made me admire them all the more for their matchless pride. They were not weaklings, these obsessed saints at grips with the dearest of all their possessions: their temptations. Living only in their behalf, they exacerbated these temptations to have still more to struggle against. Their descriptions of “desire” display such violence of tone that they scrape our senses raw and give us shudders no libertine author succeeds in inspiring. They were ingenious at glorifying “the flesh” in reverse. If it fascinated them to such a degree, what merit in having fought against its attractions! They were titans, more frenzied, more perverse than those of mythology; for the latter would never have been able, in their simplicity of mind, to conceive, for the accumulation of energy, all the advantages of self-loathing.
*
How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains!
*
Renounce? But how? Where should you go in order not to renounce it all at once although that is the only genuine renunciation? Actual deserts are not readily available to us in our lands and our climate; we lack the adequate milieu. Not living under the fierce desert sun, with just that one thought about eternity, are we to become saints with roofs over our heads? Not to be able to renounce except through suicide is a strictly modern drama.
*
Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He was made much of. He had no posterity, he was truly the last.
Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to….
*
Those nights when you convince yourself that everyone has evacuated this universe, even the dead, and that you are the last living being here, the last ghost.
*
In order to reach compassion, you must carry self-concern to the saturation point, to nausea, such paroxysms of disgust being a symptom of healthy a necessary condition for looking beyond one’s own trials and tribulations.
*
Whenever I have to meet someone, I am overcome with such a craving for isolation that when I am about to speak". I lose all control over my words, and their somersaulting is taken for . . . verve!
*
The eminent virtue of calumny is that it produces a vacuum around you without your having to raise a finger.
*
Desperate disgust in the presence of a crowd, whether high-spirited or sullen.
*
There comes a moment when one imitates nothing more than oneself.