Cioran - Exasperations

 

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

Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.

I run into X. I would have given anything in the world never to encounter him again. To have to endure such specimens! While he talked, I was inconsolable not to possess a supernatural power that could annihilate both of us on the spot

This body — what use is it, if not to make us understand the meaning of the word torturer?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.

At an exhibit of Oriental art, a many-headed Brahma, irritated, sullen, besotted to the last degree. It is in this attitude that I enjoy seeing representations of the god of gods.

Out of patience with them all. But I like to laugh. And I cannot laugh alone.

Never having known what I was after in this world, I am still waiting for someone to tell me what he himself pursues.

Asked why the monks who followed him were so . . . radiant, Buddha answered that it was because they thought neither of the past nor of the future. We turn gloomy, in fact, whenever we contemplate either one, and worse than gloomy whenever we contemplate both.

Counterirritant to desolation: close your eyes for a long while in order to forget light and all that it reveals.

When a writer passes himself off as a philosopher, you can be sure he does so in order to camouflage any number of deficiencies. Ideas: a screen that hides nothing.

In admiration as in envy, the eyes suddenly light up. How to distinguish one from the other in those we are uncertain about?

He calls me in the middle of the night to tell me he can’t sleep. I give him a good lecture on this variety of disaster which is, in reality, disaster itself. At the end I am so pleased with my performance that I go back to bed feeling like a hero, proud to confront the hours separating me from daylight.

The publication of a book involves the same kinds of problems as a marriage or a funeral

Never write about anyone. I am so convinced of this that each time I am inclined to do so, my first thought is to attach even if I admire him, the person of whom I am to speak.

“And God saw that the light was good”: such is the opinion of mortals, with the exception of the sleepless, for whom it is an aggression, a new inferno more pitiless than the night’s.

There comes a moment when negation itself loses its luster and, much deteriorated, goes down the drain with appearances.

According to Louis de Broglie, there is a relation between “faire de l’esprit” and making scientific discoveries, esprit here signifying the capacity “spontaneously to establish unexpected comparisons.” If this were so, the Germans would be incapable of innovating with regard to the sciences. Swift himself was amazed that a nation of dullards should have so great a number of inventions to its credit; but invention does not suppose agility so much as perseverance — the capacity to explore, to penetrate, to persist. . . . The spark is struck by obstinacy.

Nothing is tiresome for a man swept on by the craving for investigation. Proof against boredom, he will expatiate endlessly about anything, without sparing, if he is a writer, his readers; without even deigning, if he is a philosopher, to take them into consideration.

I tell an American psychoanalyst that while on a friend’s property, I happened to take a bad fall while I was doing some of my inveterate pruning, struggling with the dry branches of a sequoia. “You were ‘struggling’ with that tree not to prune it, but to punish it for outliving you.. Your secret desire was to take revenge by stripping it of its branches.” Enough to disgust one forever with any deep explanation.

Another Yankee, this time a professor, was complaining that he didn’t know what he would discuss in his next year’s lectures,

“Why not chaos and its charms?”

“I don’t know about that — I’ve never been subject to that kind of spell,” he replied. Easier to reach an understanding with a monster than with the contrary of a monster.

I was reading Rimbaud — Le Bateau ivre — to someone who didn’t know the poem and who, moreover, was a stranger to poetry itself. “It sounds as if it came from the tertiary age” was his comment, once I had finished reading. As judgments go, not bad.

P. Tz.: a genius if ever there was one. Oral frenzy, out of a horror or an impossibility of writing. Scattered through the Balkans, thousands and thousands of quips, lost forever. How to give a notion of his verve, his passion, his madness? “You’re a mixture of God and Quixote.” I told him once. At the time he was flattered, but the next morning, very early, he came to tell me, “I don’t like that business about Don Quixote.”

From the age of ten to the age of fourteen, I lived in a boarding house. Every morning on my way to school, passing a bookstore, I would glance at the books, which were changed relatively often, even in this provincial Rumanian town. Only one, in the corner of the shop window, seemed to have been forgotten for months: Bestia umana (Zola’s Human Beast). Of those four years, the only memory that haunts me is that title.

My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.

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?

Nothing so hampers continuity of thought as to feel the mind’s insistent pressure. Perhaps this is why the mad think only in flashes.

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.

In my fits of rage I feel vexatiously close to Saint Paul. My affinities with the frantic — with all whom I detest . . . who has ever so resembled his antipodes?

Looming up out of a sort of primordial Ineffectually. . . . Just now, trying to contend with a serious subject and failing altogether, I went to bed. How frequently have my plans led me to this predestined term of all my ambitions!

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

To perish! — that verb which is my favorite and which, oddly enough, suggests nothing irreparable.

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!

This universe, so magisterially miscarried — as one keeps telling onself when one happens to be in a concessive mood.

Braggadocio and physical pain do not go together. As soon as our carcass makes itself known, we are brought back to our normal dimensions, to the most mortifying", the most devastating certitude.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.

Anyone who quotes us from memory — and incorrectly— is a saboteur who should be taken to court. A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice all the more serious in that the intention was to do us a favor.

The tormented — who are they, if not martyrs embittered by not knowing for whose sake to immolate themselves?

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

Having begun my day with Meister Eckhart, I then turned to Epicurus. And the day is not yet over; with whom shall I end it?

Once I emerge from the “I,” I put myself to sleep.

Who does not believe in Fate proves he has not lived.

If I should ever happen to die one of these days . . .

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.

To see in every baby a future Richard III . . .

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.

In the spring of 1937, as I was walking on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital of Sibiu, in Transylvania, a “pensioner” approached me. We exchanged a few words, and then I said to him, “It’s pleasant here.”

“I know — it’s worth the trouble of being crazy,” he replied.

“But still, you are in a sort of prison.”

“If you like, but we live here quite without anxiety. Besides, there’s a war coming; you know that as well as I do. And this is a safe place. We won’t be called up, and they never bomb insane asylums. If I were you, I’d get myself committed right away.” Troubled, amazed, I left him and tried to find out something more about my interlocutor. I was assured that he was genuinely mad. Mad or not, no one has ever given me more reasonable advice.

It is flawed humanity that constitutes the substance of literature. The writer congratulates himself upon Adam’s perversity and prospers only to the degree that each of us assumes and renews it.

As for biological patrimony, the merest innovation is, it would seem, a disaster. Life is conservative and flourishes only through repetition, through cliché, through formula. Just the contrary of art.

Ghenghis Khan took along the greatest Taoist sage of his time on all of his expeditions. Extreme cruelty is rarely vulgar; it always has something strange and refined about it that inspires fear and respect. William the Conqueror, as pitiless to his allies as he was to his enemies, liked only wild beasts and dark forests where he would always walk alone.

I was about to go out when, in order to tie my scarf, I glanced at myself in the mirror. Suddenly an unspeakable terror: who is that? Impossible to recognize myself. Though I had no trouble identifying my overcoat, my necktie, my hat, I couldn’t make out who I was, for I was not myself— that was not me. This lasted a certain number of seconds: twenty, thirty, forty? When I managed to come to my senses, the terror persisted. I had to wait for it to consent to disappear.

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!

Read somewhere the statement “God speaks only of Himself.” On this specific pointy the Almighty has more than one rival.

To be or not to be.

. . . Neither one nor the other.

Each time I happen upon even the merest sentence of Buddhist lore, I am overcome by a desire to return to that wisdom, which I have tried to absorb for quite a long period of time and which, inexplicably, I have partially forsaken. In that wisdom abides not so much truth as something better still . . . and it is by that wisdom we accede to the state where we are purified of all things, of illusions first of all. No longer to have any such things yet not to risk ruin, to sink into disillusion while avoiding bitterness, to be a little more emancipated every day from the obnubilation in which these living hordes languish. . . .

To die is to change genre, to renew oneself. . . .

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

If relations between men are so difficulty it is because men have been created to knock each other down and not to have “relations.”

Conversation with him was as conventional as with a dying man.

Ceasing to exist signifies nothings can signify nothing. What is the use of being concerned with what survives a nonreality, with a semblance that succeeds another semblance? Death is in fact nothing, it is at most a simulacrum of mystery, like life itself. Antimetaphysical propaganda of the graveyards.

In my childhood, there was one figure I could never forget, a peasant who, having just inherited some money, went from tavern to tavern, followed by a “musician.” A splendid summer day: the whole village was in the fields; he alone, accompanied by his violinist, wandered the empty streets, humming some tune. After two years, he was as poor as before. But the gods were kind: he died soon after. Without knowing why, I was fascinated, and rightly so. When I think of him now, I still believe he was really someone; of all the inhabitants of the village, he alone had enough imagination to ruin his life.

Longing to yell, to spit in people’s faces, to drag them along the ground, to trample them ... I have trained myself to decency in order, to humble my rage, and my rage takes revenge as often as it can.

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive!

Doubt creeps in everywhere, with, however, a signal exception: there is no skeptical music.

Demosthenes copied out Thucydides eight times. That is how you learn a language. One ought to have the courage to transcribe all the books one loves.

That someone should detest what we do, we tolerate, more or less. But if someone disdains a book we have recommended to him, that is much more serious, and it wounds us like an underhanded attack. For then it is our taste that is called into question, and even our discernment!

When I observe how I slide into sleep, I have the impression of sinking into a providential abyss, of falling into it for eternity, without ever being able to escape. Moreover no desire to escape even touches me. What I desire in such moments is to perceive them as clearly as possible, to lose nothing of them, and to enjoy them until the last, before unconsciousness, before beatitude.

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.

This return to the inorganic ought not to affect us in any fashion. Yet so lamentable, not to say so laughable a phenomenon makes cowards of us all. It is time to rethink death, to imagine a less mediocre downfall.

Astray here on earth, as I would doubtless be astray anywhere.

There cannot be pure sentiments between those who follow similar paths. One need merely recall the glances we cast at each other when we share the same sidewalk.

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

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.

I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?

Any maggot to regard itself as first among its peers would immediately assume the status of man.

If everything were to be erased from my mind except the traces of what I have known as unique, where would these come from if not from the thirst for nonexistence?

How many missed opportunities to compromise myself with God!

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.

The luck of the novelist or the playwright: to express himself by disguising himself, to release himself from his conflicts and, still more, from all those characters brawling within himself! Things turn out otherwise for the essayist, faced with a problematic genre into which he projects his own incompatibilities only by contradicting himself at every step. One is freer in the aphorism — triumph of a disintegrated ego. . . .

I am thinking at this moment of someone whom I used to admire unreservedly, who kept none of his promises and who, by disappointing all those who believed in him, died in a virtual paroxysm of satisfaction.

Language compensates for the inadequacy of remedies and cures most of our diseases. The chatterbox does not haunt pharmacies.

Stupefying lack of necessity: life, improvisation, fantasy of matter, ephemeral chemistry. . . .

Love’s great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

Letters, letters to write. This one, for instance . . . but I cannot do it: I suddenly feel myself incapable of lying.

On this estate dedicated, like its manor house, to the crackbrained enterprises of charity, everywhere one looks there are old women kept alive by virtue of surgical operations. There was a time when one died at home, in the dignity of solitude and desertion; now the moribund are collected, crammed, and their indecent throes extended as long as possible.

No sooner have we lost one defect than another presses forward to take its place. Such is the price of our equilibrium.

Words have become so external to me that making contact with them assumes the proportions of a feat. We have nothing more to say to one another, and if I employ them still, it is to denounce them, while secretly deploring an ever-imminent rupture.

At the Luxembourg, a woman of about forty, almost elegant but with a certain bizarre look about her, was speaking in an affectionate, even impassioned tone to someone who was not to be seen. As I caught up with her, I noticed that she was clutching a marmoset to her bosom. She then sat down on a bench, where she continued her monologue with the same intensity. The first words I heard as I passed her were: “You know, I’ve had about enough.” I walked on, not knowing whom to pity more: her or her confidant.

That man is going to disappear has been, heretofore, my firm conviction. But now I’ve changed my mind: he must disappear.

Aversion to all that is human is compatible with pity; I should even say that these reactions are interdependent but not simultaneous. Only someone who knows the former is capable of intensely experiencing the latter.

Just now, the sensation of being the last version of the Universe: worlds revolved around me, yet I felt not the slightest trace of disequilibrium, only something far above what it is licit to experience.

Waking with a start, wondering if the word sense has any meaning, then astounded not to be able to fall asleep again!

It is characteristic of pain not to be ashamed of repeating itself.

To that very old friend who informs me of his decision to put an end to his days, I reply that he mustn’t be in any hurry, that the game’s ending is not without a charm of its own, and that one can even come to terms with the Intolerable, provided one never forgets that everything is a bluff, a bluff that generates torments. . . .

He worked and produced, he flung himself into massive generalizations, astonished by his own fecundity. He was quite ignorant, fortunately for him, of the nightmare of nuance.

To exist is a deviation so patent that it acquires thereby the prestige of a longed-for infirmity.

To recognize in oneself all the vile instincts of which one is ashamed. . . . If they are so energetic in someone who strives to be rid of them, how much more virulent must they be in those who, lacking a minimum of lucidity, will never manage to be on their guard, and still less to loathe themselves!

In the heat of success or of failure, remember how we were conceived. Incomparable recipe for triumphing over euphoria or discontent.

Only the plant approaches “wisdom”; the animal is un-suited to it. As for man . . . Nature should have stopped with the vegetable kingdom, instead of disqualifying herself by a craving for the extraordinary.

The young and the old, and the others too — all odious, they can be brought to heel only by flattery, which ends by making them more odious still.

“Heaven is open to no one . . . it will open only after the disappearance of the world” (Tertullian). One is speechless that after such a warning, we have continued our agitation. Of what obstinancy is history the fruit!

Dorotea von Rodde-Schloezer, accompanying her husband, the mayor of Lübeck, to Napoleon’s coronation, wrote, “There are so many madmen on earth, and especially in France, that it is child’s play for this Corsican prestidigitator to make them dance like marionettes to the sound of his pipe. They all fling themselves after this rat charmer, and no one asks where he is leading them.” Periods of expansion are periods of delirium; periods of decadence and recession are by comparison reasonable, even too reasonable, and that is why they are almost as deadly as the others.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

We are all the more attached to someone when his instinct for self-preservation is ambivalent, not to say obliterated.

Lucretius: we know nothing specific about his life. Specific? Not even vague. An enviable destiny.

Nothing comparable to the onset of depression at the moment of waking. It takes one back billions of years, back to the first signs, to the prodromes of Being — indeed, back to the very principle of depression.

“You have no need to end up on the Cross, for you were born crucified” (December 11, 1963). What would I not give to recall what could have provoked a despair so overweening!

We recall Pascal’s frenzy, in The Provincial Letters, over the casuist Escobar, who, according to a French traveler visiting him on the Iberian peninsula, knew nothing of these attacks. Further, Pascal was scarcely known in his own country. Misunderstanding and unreality, wherever one looks.

So many friends and enemies, who showed an equal interest in us, vanished one after the next. What a relief! To be able to let oneself go at last, no longer having to fear their censure or their disappointment.

To pass irreconcilable judgments upon anything, including death, is the sole manner of not cheating.

According to Asanga and his school, the triumph of good over evil is merely a victory of maya over maya; similarly, putting an end to transmigration by illumination is like “a king of illusion vanquishing a king of illusion” (Mahayanasutralamkara).

These Hindus have had the audacity to set illusion so high, to make it a substitute for self and world, and to convert it into the supreme given. Remarkable conversion, ultimate and inescapable stage. What is to be done? Every extremity, even liberation, being an impasse, how to escape in order to catch up with the Possible? Perhaps one must lower the terms of the debate, endow things with a shadow of reality, restrain the hegemony of clear-sightedness, dare to maintain that everything that seems to exist does exist in its way, and then, weary of wandering off the pointy change the subject. . . .

ANATHEMAS andADMIRATIONS

Translated from the French by

 RICHARD HOWARD