Cioran - Strangled Thoughts II

 II

A work cannot rise up out of indifference nor even out of serenity, that sifted, fulfilled, victorious indifference. At the height of an ordeal, we are surprised to find so few works that can calm and comfort us. How could they, when they themselves are the product of disturbance and discomfort?.   .   .

Every beginning of an idea corresponds to an imperceptible lesion of the mind.

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On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extremes, between man’s pre- and transfiguration.

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Not the excess but the absence of fear is morbid. I think of that friend whom nothing ever frightened, a woman who couldn’t even imagine a danger, of any kind. So much freedom, so much safety, was one day to lead her straight to a straight-jacket.

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In our certainty of not being understood, there is as much pride as shame. Whence the equivocal character of any failure. We are proud of it on the one hand, mortified on the other. How impure any defeat!

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Incurable—an honorific that should be applied to only one disease, the most terrible of all: desire.

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It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and of our health.

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Every neophyte being a spoilsport, once someone gets excited over anything, even my own vagaries, I prepare for a rift—and my revenge..   .   .

Inclined toward resentment, I often give in to it and brood over it, and stop only when I recall that I have envied one sage or another—that I have even thought I resembled him.

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Those moments when you want to be absolutely alone because you’re sure that, face to face with yourself, you will be able to discover rare, unique, unheard-of truths—then disappointment and thereafter bitterness, when you find that once this solitude is achieved at last, nothing comes out, nothing could come. . . .

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At certain times, instead of the brain, the very exact sensation of usurping nothingness, that steppe which has substituted itself for ideas.

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To suffer is to produce knowledge.

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Thought is destruction in its essence. More precisely: in its principle. You think, you begin to think, in order to break bonds, to dissolve affinities, to compromise the scaffolding of the “real.” Only later, when the sapper’s work is well under way, does thought recover itself and rebel against its natural movement.

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Whereas sadness is justified as much by reasoning as by observation, joy rests on nothing, it derives from divagation. Impossible to be joyous by the pure fact of living; we are sad on the other hand as soon as we open our eyes. Perception as such produces melancholy, witness the animals. Only mice seem to be gay without effort.

.   .   .On the spiritual level, all pain is an opportunity; on the spiritual level alone.

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I can undertake nothing without setting aside what I know. Once I envisage that, once I think of that, even if only for a second, I lose courage, I undo myself.

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Since things continue to get worse from generation to generation, to predict catastrophes is a normal activity, a duty of the mind. Talleyrand’s remark about the Old Regime suits any period, except the one in which you are living, and the one in which you are going to live. The “sweetness” in question is continually diminishing; one day it will have vanished altogether. In history, we are always on the threshold of the worse. . . . That is what makes history interesting, what makes us hate it, and be unable to detach ourselves from it.

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We may be sure that the twenty-first century, more advanced than ours, will regard Hitler and Stalin as choirboys.

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Basilides the Gnostic is one of the rare minds to have understood, early in our era, what now constitutes a commonplace, i.e., that humanity, if it wants to be saved, must return within its natural limits by a return to ignorance, true sign of redemption. This commonplace, we hasten to say, is still a clandestine one: each of us murmurs it, but is careful not to declare it aloud. When it becomes a slogan, a considerable step forward will have been taken.

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In everyday life, men act out of calculation; in their decisive choices, they please themselves, and we understand nothing of either individual or collective dramas if we lose sight of this unexpected behavior. No one should concern himself with history if he fails to realize how rarely the instinct of self-preservation is manifested in it. Everything occurs as if the defense-mechanisms functioned only in the presence of everyday dangers and failed in the face of a major disaster.

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Consider the face of the man who has succeeded, who has struggled, in any realm. You will not find there the slightest trace of pity. He has the stuff out of which enemies are made.

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For days at a time, the longing to perpetrate an attack against the five continents, without a moment’s thought as to the means.

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My energy awakens only outside of time, and I feel myself a veritable Hercules as soon as I transplant myself in imagination to a universe where the very conditions of action are suppressed.

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“The horror and the ecstasy of life”—experienced simultaneously, as though within the same moment, within each instant.

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The quantity of exhaustion that rests in my brain!

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What I have in common with the Devil is bad humor—I am, like him, crabby by divine decree.

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The books I read with most interest concern mysticism and dietetics. Might there be some relation between them? Yes, doubtless, insofar as mysticism implies ascesis, which is to say a regimen, more precisely a diet..   .   .

“Eat nothing you have not sown and harvested with your own hand”—this recommendation of Vedic wisdom is so legitimate and so convincing that, in one’s rage over being unable to abide by it, one would like to let oneself starve to death.

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Stretching out, I close my eyes. Suddenly an abyss yawns, like a well that, in search of water, perforates the ground with a dizzying speed. Swept into this frenzy, into this void endlessly begetting itself, I identify myself with the generating principle of the abyss and—unhoped—for happiness—I thereby find an occupation and even a mission.

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When Pyrrho conversed, if his interlocutor left he continued talking as if nothing had occurred. This power of indifference, this discipline of disdain I dream of with all the impatience of derangement.

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What a friend expects are accommodations, deceptions, consolations, all things which imply effort, the labor of reflection, self-control. The permanent preoccupation with delicacy which friendship supposes is antinatural. Give me enmity or indifference, so I can breathe a little!

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By all the emphasis I lay on my miseries, past and future, I have neglected those of the present: which has permitted me to endure them more readily than if I had spent my reserves of attention upon them.

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Sleep would be good for something if each time we dropped off we tried to see ourselves die; after a few years’ training, death would lose all its prestige and would seem no more than a formality or a pinprick.

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In the career of a mind which has liquidated prejudice after prejudice, there comes a moment when it is quite as easy to become a saint as a swindler in any line.

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Cruelty—our oldest characteristic—is rarely described as borrowed, simulated, apparent; labels proper, on the other hand, to kindness, which, being recent, acquired, has no deep roots: It is a belated invention, and an intransmissible one. Each of us struggles to reinvent it, and succeeds only by fits and starts in those moments when his nature is eclipsed, when he triumphs over his ancestors and himself.

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Often I imagine myself climbing up on the roof, getting dizzy, and then, on the point of falling, letting out a scream. “Imagine” is not the word, for I am obliged to imagine this. The thought of murder must come in the same way.

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If you want never to forget someone, to think of him constantly, to attach yourself to him forever, you must not set about loving him, but hating. According to a Hindu belief, certain demons are the fruit of a vow, made in a previous life, to be incarnated in a being dead set against God, in order to be able to meditate upon Him the better and to have Him ceaselessly present to the mind.

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Death is the aroma of existence. Death alone lends savor to the moments, alone combats their insipidity. We owe death almost everything. This debt of recognition which we now and then consent to pay is what is most comforting here on earth..   .   .

It is during our insomnias that pain fulfills its mission, that it materializes, blossoms. Then pain is as limitless as the night, which it imitates.

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We should suffer no sort of anxiety so long as we have the notion of bad luck. As soon as we invoke it, we are comforted, we endure anything, we are almost content to suffer injustices and infirmities. Since anything becomes intelligible thereby, we must not be surprised that idiot and illuminated alike resort to it. This is because bad luck is not an explanation, it is the explanation, which is reinforced by the inevitable failure of all the others.

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Once we scrutinize the merest memory, we are ready to burst with rage.

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What is the source of that monotonous vision of ours, when the ills which have provoked and sustained it are so unaccountably diverse? The fact is that this vision has assimilated them and preserved only their essence, which is common to them all.

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Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.

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Midnight. Tension bordering on epilepsy. Craving to make everything blow up, efforts not to explode in fragments. Imminent chaos. You can be worth nothing by yourself, and be someone by what you feel. But you can also not be worthy of your sensations.

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In theory, it matters as little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

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Animals, birds, insects have resolved everything long since. Why try to do better? Nature loathes originality, nature rejects, execrates man.

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Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. Everywhere they feel diminished, except in hell.

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In the blood an inexhaustible drop of vinegar: to what fairy do I owe it?

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An envious man forgives you nothing, he will envy even your embarrassments, even your shames.

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The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.

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You are obsessed by detachment, purity, nirvana, and yet someone in you whispers: “If you had the courage to formulate your most secret wish, you would say: ‘I’d like to have invented all the vices.’”

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There is no point in being a monster if you are not also a theoretician of the “monstrous.”

.   .   .You have let what was best in you die. More careful, you would not have betrayed your true vocation, which was that of the tyrant or the hermit.

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To turn against yourself at every opportunity is to give evidence of a great concern for truth and justice; it is to indict and to strike the real criminal. Unfortunately it is also to intimidate and paralyze him, and thereby to make him unlikely to improve.

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These rages which strip you of skin and flesh, reducing you to the state of a trembling skeleton!

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After certain nights, we should change names, since we are also no longer the same man.

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Who are you? I am an alien to the police, to God, to myself.

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For years, I have gone into ecstasies over the virtues of impassibility, and a day doesn’t pass that I don’t suffer a fit of violence which, unrepressed, would justify the asylum. These convulsions generally occur without witnesses but, in fact, almost always on account of someone. My rages lack breeding: They are too plebeian, too earthy, to be able to emancipate themselves from a cause.

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Impossible for me to deal with anything external, objective, impersonal, unless it should be ills, i.e., what in others makes me think of myself.

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The desolation expressed by a gorilla’s eyes. A funereal mammal. I am descended from that gaze..   .   .

Whether we consider the individual or humanity as a whole, we must not identify to advance with to progress, unless we admit that going toward death is progress.

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The earth is apparently five billion years old—life, two or three. These figures contain every consolation we could hope for. We should remember them in the moments when we take ourselves seriously, when we dare suffer.

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The more we stammer, the more we struggle to write better. Thus we take revenge for not having been able to be an orator. The stutterer is a born stylist.

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What is difficult to understand are fruitful, generous natures, always content to be working, to be producing. Their energy seems excessive, and yet one does not quite envy them. They can be anything, because at bottom they are nothing: dynamic puppets, nullities with inexhaustible gifts.

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What keeps me from going down into the arena is that I see too many minds there I admire but do not esteem, so naive do they seem to me. Why provoke them, why measure myself against them on the same track? My lassitude grants me such a superiority that it seems (to me) quite impossible they should ever catch up.

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We can think of death every day and yet persevere quite cheerfully in being. This is not the case if we think unceasingly of the moment of our death; the man who had only that in view would be committing an outrage against all his other moments..   .   .

People are astonished that France, a frivolous nation, should have produced a Rancé, founder of the austerest order of all; perhaps they should be even more astonished that Italy, more frivolous still, should have given the world a Leopardi, the most serious of all poets.

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Germany’s drama is not to have had a Montaigne. What luck for France to have begun with a skeptic!

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Disgusted by the nations, I turn to Mongolia, where it must be good to live, where there are more horses than men, where the Yahoo has not yet triumphed.

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Every fruitful idea turns into a pseudo-idea, degenerates into a belief. Only a sterile idea preserves its status as an idea.

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I imagined myself more exempt from vanity than others: A recent dream was to disabuse me. I had just died. A coffin of planks was brought. “You could have put a little varnish on it, even so!” I exclaimed before belaboring the undertakers with my fists. An uproar ensued. Then came the awakening, and shame.

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This fever which leads to no discovery, which bears no idea, but which gives you a feeling of quasidivine power, power which fades once you try to define it—what does it correspond to, and what can it be worth? Perhaps it has no relation to anything, perhaps it goes further than any metaphysical experience.

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Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better.

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During my insomnia I tell myself, as a kind of consolation, that these hours I am so conscious of I am wresting from nothingness, and that if I were asleep they would never have belonged to me, they would never even have existed.

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“To lose oneself in God”—this believer’s cliché assumes a revelatory value for the nonbeliever, who in it discerns a longed-for and impracticable adventure, despairing as he does of being unable to stray, he too, into something or, preferably, someone.

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Who is superficial? Who is profound? To go very far into frivolity is to cease being frivolous; to reach a limit, even in farce, is to approach extremities of which, in his line, any metaphysician is quite incapable.

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An elephant would succumb to these fits of depression that is indistinguishable from a cruelty on the point of dissolving and which, dissolving, would sweep away flesh and blood. Every organ is involved: visceral calamity, sensation of gastric surfeit, of impotence to digest this world.

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Man, that exterminator, has designs on everything that lives, everything that moves: soon we shall be talking about the last louse.

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In the Trojan War, as many gods on one side as the other. A just and elegant view of which the moderns, too impassioned or too vulgar, are incapable, insisting that the right be partisan at any price. Homer, at the start of our civilization, granted himself the luxury of objectivity; at the antipodes, in a belated period like ours, there is no longer room for anything but attitude..   .   .

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

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So long as you envy another’s success, even if it is a god’s, you are a vile slave like everyone else.

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Each being is a broken hymn.

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According to Tolstoy, we should desire only death, since this desire, unfailingly realized, will not be a deception like all the rest. Yet is it not desire’s essence to tend toward anything, except death? To desire is to want not to die. If then we begin wanting death, it is because desire is diverted from its proper function; it is a deviated desire, raised up against the other desires, all committed to disappoint, whereas this one always keeps its promises. To bet on this one is to be sure of winning, no matter what: This desire does not, cannot deceive. But what we expect of a desire is precisely that it deceive us. Whether or not it is realized, that is secondary; the important thing is that it hides the truth from us. If it reveals the truth it fails in its duty, it compromises and abjures itself and consequently must be struck from the list of desires.

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Attracted though I am by Buddhism, or Catharism, or any system or dogma, I preserve a core of skepticism which nothing can ever penetrate and to which I always return after each of my enthusiasms. Whether this skepticism is congenital or acquired, it seems to me no less of a certitude, even a liberation, when every other form of salvation blurs or rejects me.

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Other people do not have the feeling that they are charlatans, and they are; I . . . I am one as much as they but I know it and suffer from that.

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That I should continue to sabotage my powers—is it not childish to chide myself for that? Yet instead of flattering me, the evidence of my lack of accomplishment discourages me, shatters me. To be intoxicated with lucidity and be no further than this! I drag vestiges of dignity which dishonor me.

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Only a writer without a public can allow himself the luxury of being sincere. He addresses no one: at most, himself.

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A full life is, in the best of cases, merely an equilibrium of drawbacks.

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When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

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Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

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Everything, in the end, comes down to desire or to the absence of desire. The rest is nuance.

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I have maligned life so much that, wanting for once to do it justice, I find no word that fails to ring false.

The New Gods

E. M. Cioran

Translated from the French by

RICHARD HOWARD