Cioran on Borges

 Letter to Fernando Savater

Paris, December 10, 1976

Dear Friend.

In November, during your visit to Paris, you asked me to collaborate on a volume of tributes to Borges- My first reaction was negative; my second . . . as well. What is the use of celebrating him when the universities themselves are doing so? The misfortune of being recognized has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home. Consecration is the worst of punishments — for a writer in general, and particularly for a writer of his kind. Once everyone starts quoting him, you must leave off; if you do not, you feel you are merely swelling the ranks of his “admirers,” of his enemies. Those who want to do him justice at all costs are merely hastening his downfall. I shall stop here, for if I continue in this style I shall end by pitying his fate. And there is every reason to suppose he can do that on his own.

I think I have already told you that if I was so interested in him, it was because he represented a vanishing specimen of humanity: he embodies the paradox of a sedentary man without an intellectual patrie, a stay-at-home adventurer at ease in several civilizations and literatures, a splendid and doomed monster. In Europe, as a kindred example, we may cite that friend of Rilke’s, Rudolf Kassner, who early in this century published a work of the very first order about English poetry (it was after reading that book during the last war that I began to learn English . . .) and who spoke with admirable acuity of Sterne, of Gogol, of Kierkegaard, as well as of the Maghreb or of India. Normally depth and erudition do not go together but he somehow reconciled them: a universal mind, lacking only grace, only seduction. It is here that Borges’s superiority appears: incomparably seductive, he has managed to put a touch of the impalpable, the aerial, a wisp of lace, on everything, even on the most arduous reasoning. For in Borges everything is transfigured by the spirit of play, by a dance of dazzling trouvailles and delicious sophistries.

I have never been attracted by minds confined to a single form of culture. “Not to take root, not to belong to any community”: such has been and such is my motto. Oriented toward other horizons, I have always wanted to know what was happening elsewhere; by the time I was twenty, the Balkan skyline had nothing more to offer me. This is the drama, and also the advantage, of being born in a minor “cultural” space. The foreign had become my god — whence that thirst to travel through literatures and philosophies, to devour them with a morbid ardor. What is happening in Eastern Europe must inevitably happen in the countries of Latin America, and I have noticed that its representatives are infinitely better informed, more “cultivated,” than the incurably provincial Westerners. Neither in France nor in England do I see anyone who has a curiosity comparable to Borges’s, a curiosity hypertrophied to the point of mania, to vice — I say “vice.” for in matters of art and reflection, whatever does not turn into a somewhat perverse fervor is superficial, hence unreal.

As a student, I was led to investigate the disciples of Schopenhauer. Among them was a certain Philipp Mainlander, who particularly attracted me. Author of a Philosophy of Deliverance, he enjoyed the additional distinction, in my eyes, of having committed suicide. This completely forgotten philosopher, I flattered myself belonged to me alone — not that there was any particular merit in my preoccupation: my studies had inevitably brought me to him. But imagine my astonishment when, much later, I came across a text by Borges that plucked him, precisely, out of oblivion! If I cite this example, it is because from that moment I began thinking more seriously than before about the condition of Borges, fated — reduced — to universality, constrained to exercise his mind in all directions, if only to escape the Argentine asphyxia. It is the South American void that makes the writers of an entire continent more open, more alive, and more diverse than those of Western Europe, paralyzed by their traditions and incapable of shaking off their prestigious sclerosis.

Since you ask what I like most about Borges, I have no hesitation in answering that it is his freedom in the most varied realms, his faculty of speaking with an equal subtlety of the Eternal Return and the Tango. For him everything is equally worthwhile, from the moment he is the center of everything. Universal curiosity is a sign of vitality only if it bears the absolute mark of a self, a self from which everything emanates and where everything ends up: sovereignty of the arbitrary, beginning and end that can be interpreted according to the most capricious criteria. Where is reality in all this? The Self — that supreme farce. . . . Borges’s playfulness reminds me of a certain romantic irony, the metaphysical exploration of illusion juggling with the Infinite. Friedrich Schlegel, today, has his back to Patagonia. . . .

Once again, one can only deplore that an Encyclopédie smile and a vision so refined should provoke general approbation, with all that implies. . . . But after all, Borges might become the symbol of a humanity without dogmas or systems, and if there is a utopia to which I should gladly subscribe, it would be the one where we all model ourselves on him — on one of the least ponderous minds that ever was, the last to give its true meaning to the word select.

From  Anathemas and Admirations