Cioran - Tears and saints

 

Tears did not enter this world through saints; but without them we would have never known that we cry because long for a lost paradise.
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Only when we awaken the tears sleeping in our depths and know through them, do we come to understand how someone could renounce being a man.
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What shall we tell the blind woman in Rilke's poem who lamented that "I no longer live with the sky upon me?" Would it comfort her if we told her we can no longer live with the earth underneath our feet?
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Shall I ever be so pure, that only saint's tears could be my mirror?
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In these times, people cultivated their secrets. You could speak to God at any time, and he would bury your sighs in his nothingness. Now we are inconsolable because we have no one to speak to. We have been reduced to confessing our loneliness to mortals.
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History divides itself in two: a former time when people felt pulled towards the vibrant nothingness of divinity and now, when the nothingness of the world is empty of the divine spirit.
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To the extent that we resist saintliness, we prove the health of our instincts.
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How does one negate life? Through uninterrupted lucidity. Hence the saint's total suppression of sleep.
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How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death.
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Ecstasy is an infinite leap beyond the body.
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"The feeling of being everything and the certitude of being nothing". (Paul Valery) A poet's conclusion obligatory for those who have kept company with the saints.
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The ancients knew how to die. Contempt for death was born with them. But their contempt came from knowledge. Their ideal was to rise spiritually above death. For us, death is a painful and frightening surprise.
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The saints' existence is a continuous suspension of time. That's why we can understand them only through our predilection for eternity.
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All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life's meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.
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The more time has disappeared from one's memory, the closer one is to mysticism.
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Saints are completely out of-date, and only one who despises Becoming can still be interested in them.
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The philosopher's sole merit is that they sometimes felt ashamed of being men. Plato and Nietzsche are exceptions: they were always ashamed. The former wanted to take us out of this world, the latter out of ourselves. Even the saints could learn something from them. Thus the honour of philosophy was saved!
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Life in God is the death of being.
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In fact there is only God and me. His silence invalidates us both.
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Since Renaissance, nobody has known resignation. Lack of resignation is modern man man's tragic aura. The ancients submitted to their fate. No modern man is humble enough to be resigned. Now we are familiar with contempt for life. We are not wise enough not to love it with infinite agony.
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I must have lived other lives. If not, whence so much dread? Previous lives are the only explanation for dread.
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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.
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No saint could find eternity in the world. Crossing the inner desert constitutes the first step toward saintliness.
God nestles in spiritual void. He covets inner deserts...
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The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing.
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Saintliness is the overcoming of our condition as "creatures". The desire to be in God does not go with life near or under him, the lot of fallen creatures.
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The road to ecstasy and the experience of the void presupposes a will to make the soul a tabula rasa, a striving towards psychogical blankness. Once it has totally rejected the world, the soul is ripe for a long-term and fecund emptiness.
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The failed mostof is the one who cannot cast off all temporal ties.
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Baudelaire rivals St.John of the Cross. Rilke is burgeoning saint. Poetic genius and saintliness share a secret penchant for self-destruction.
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All memories are symptoms of illnesses. Life in its pure state is absolute actuality.
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Eternity is not just another attribute of becoming, it is its negation. Human nature is equally divided between eternity and becoming. This division encompasses our tragedy.
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I am sorry sometimes that God no longer fills us with dread. If only we could feel again the primordial quiver of dread in front of unknown!
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... theology is the atheist's mode of believing. The most obscure mystical mumbo-jumbo is closer to God than Summa theologiae, and child's simple prayer offers greater ontological guarantee than all ecumenical synods.
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Nothing more exquisite or more disturbing than to have the thought of God occur while one lies in the arms of whore! It is easy to think of him after a page from the Bible or after an oratorio, but God's presence manifested in the midst of vulgar debauchery has an infinitely greater impact: it brings loneliness and the dread of nothingness back to mind with full force.
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I wish my heart were an organ-pipe, and I the translator of God's silences.
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The obsession with God dislodges earthy love. One cannot love both God and a woman at the same time without being torn between them: they are incompatible with each other. One woman is enough to rid us of God, and God can rid us of all women.
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There is no easy therapy against consciousness.
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Full of loathing for the world, we feel that we must rid ourselves of feelings. They are the cause of all our pointless commitments, prompting us to say cowardly "yes" to reality.
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The task of solitary man is to be even more solitary.
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Modern acedia is no longer monastic solitude - though our souls are our cloisters - but a void, and the dread of an inefficient, derelict God.
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Tell me haw you want to die and I'll tell you who you are. In other words, how do you fill out empty life? With women, books, or wordly ambitions? No matter what you do, the starting point is boredom, and the end self-destruction. The emblem of our life: the sky teeming with worms. Baudelaire taught me that life is the ecstasy of worms in the sun, and happiness the dance of worms.
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Boredom is the simplest way to abolish time, ecstasy the most complex. The more bored one is, the more self-conscious.
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The English are a nation of pirates who got bored once they had robbed the world. The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom. Once they began to have unlimited free time, they did not know how to employ it. Free time is bearable for a thinker, but for a people it is pure torture. What does free time mean, if not duration without content?
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All nihilists have wrestled with God. One more proof of his kinship with nothingness. After you have trampled everything under foot, his is the last bastion of nothingness left.
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Each time weariness with the world takes on religions form, God appears like a sea of forgetfulness. Drowning in God is a refuge from our own individuality.
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Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
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The world is nothing but a place where we exercise our sadness.
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"I live on what makes other people die" (Michelangelo). There is no better definition of loneliness.
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... But your fellow creatures are so cruel that they deny you the freedom to die of hunger. Promoted by an indiscreet pity, they moisten your lips in time to rob you of your liberation. Society takes everything from you but it prevents you from dying.
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