If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one

 I read him for the shipwrecked feeling I get from anything he writes. At first you follow, then you start going in circles, then you are caught up in a kind of mild unmenacing whirlpool, and you tell yourself you’re sinking, and then you do sink. But you don’t really drown—that would be too easy! You come back up to the surface, you follow all over again, amazed to see he seems to be saying something and to understand what it is, and then you start going round and round again, and you sink once more…. All of which is meant to be profound, and seems so. But once you come to your senses you realize it’s only abstruse, obscure, and that the distance between real profundity and the willed kind is as great as between a revelation and a whim.

Anyone who gives himself up to writing believes—without realizing the fact—that his work will survive the years, the ages, time itself. … If he felt, while he was at work on it, that it was perishable, he would leave off where he was, he could never finish. Activity and credulity are correlative terms.

“Laughter ceased, and after laughter smiles.” This apparently naive remark by a biographer of Alexsandr Blok defines to perfection the program of any and every downfall.

No easy matter, to speak of God when one is neither, a believer nor an atheist: and it is undoubtedly the drama we all share, theologians included—no longer capable of being either one or the other.

For a writer, progress toward detachment and deliverance is an unprecedented disaster. He, more than anyone else, needs his defects: if he triumphs over them, he is lost He must be careful, then, not to improve, for if he succeeds, he will regret it bitterly.

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.

Tertullian tells us that in order to be cured, epileptics would go “and greedily suck the blood of criminals slaughtered in the arena.” If I were to heed my instinct, this would be the one type of medication, no matter what the disease, which I would adopt.

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.

Two enemies—the same man divided.

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself.

Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.

Anyone who bestirs himself commits one injustice after the next, without a trace of remorse. Just bad humor. —Remorse is for those who do nothing, who cannot act. It replaces action for them, consoles them for their inefiectuality.

Most of our troubles come from our first impulses. The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.

Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others—the lucky ones—have a life, of course, but not the memory of a life.

What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.

I’d like to pray with dagger-words. Unfortunately, if you pray at all, you have to pray like everyone else. Wherein abides one of the greatest difficulties of faith.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Neither Bossuet, nor Malebranche, nor Fénelon deigned to mention the Pensées: apparently Pascal didn’t strike them as sufficiently serious.

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

If only I could reach the level of the man I would have liked to be! But some power, increasing year by year, draws me down. Even to get back up to my surface, I have to employ stratagems I cannot think of without blushing.

There was a time when, in order to dispel any impulse of vengeance once I had endured some affront, I would imagine myself quite still in my grave. And I calmed down at once. We must not despise our corpse too much: it can be useful on occasion.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

The only way to reach another person at any depth is to move toward what is deepest in yourself. In other words, to take the opposite path from the one followed by so-called generous minds.

If only I could say with that Hasidic rabbi: “The blessing of my life is that I have never needed a thing before I possessed it!”

In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.

Fear creates consciousness—not natural fear but morbid fear. Otherwise animals would have achieved a level of consciousness higher than ours.

As orangutang in the strict sense of the word, man is old; as historical orangutang, he is comparatively recent: a parvenu who has not had time to learn how to behave in life.

After certain experiences, we should change names, since we ourselves are no longer the same. Everything assumes another aspect, starting with death. Which seems close and desirable: we are reconciled to it, and we reach the point of calling it “man’s best friend,” as Mozart does in a letter to his dying father.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.

Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar.

“You were wrong to count on me.” Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure.

Everything we achieve, everything that comes out of us, aspires to forget its origins, and succeeds only by opposing us. Hence the negative sign that marks all our successes.

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction. It is not misfortune but happiness—insolent happiness, it is true—which leads to rancor and sarcasm.

“An enemy is as useful as a Buddha.” Exactly, for our enemy watches over us, keeps us from letting ourselves go. By indicating, by divulging our least weakness, he leads us straight to our salvation, moves heaven and earth to keep us from being unworthy of his image of us. Hence our gratitude to him should be boundless.

We get a better hold of ourselves and of being when we have reacted against negating, dissolving books—against their noxious power. Fortifying books, actually, since they provoke the very energy which denies them. The more poison they contain, the more salutary their effect, provided we read them against the grain, as we should read any book, starting with the catechism.

The greatest favor we can do an author is to forbid him to work during a certain period. Short-term tyrannies are necessary—prohibitions which would suspend all intellectual activity. Uninterrupted freedom of expression exposes talent to a deadly danger, forces it beyond its means and keeps it from stockpiling sensations and experiences. Unlimited freedom is a crime against the mind.

Self-pity is not so sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker’s attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront? Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.

To save the word “grandeur” from officialdom, we should use it only apropos of insomnia or heresy.

In classical India, the sage and the saint were combined in one and the same person. To have any notion of such a success, we must imagine, if we can, a fusion between resignation and ecstasy, between a cold stoic and a disheveled mystic.

Being is suspect. Then what is to be said of “life,” which is its deviation and stigma?

When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we have spoken of others, and realize that it is only justice that as much should be said of ourselves. Ironically, no one is more vulnerable, more susceptible, and less likely to acknowledge his own defects than the backbiter. Merely tell him about the slightest reservation someone has made in his regard, and he will lose countenance, lose his temper, and drown in his own bile.

Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

The least conversion is experienced as an advance. Fortunately there exist exceptions.

One of my favorites is that eighteenth-century Jewish sect in which men went over to Christianity in order to debase themselves; and another is that South American Indian who, upon conversion, lamented that he must now become the prey of worms instead of being eaten by his children, an honor he would have enjoyed had he not abjured his tribe’s beliefs.

Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse.

When we recapitulate the stages of our career, it is humiliating to realize that we have not had the disasters we deserved, the ones we were entitled to expect.

In some men, the prospect of a more or less imminent end excites energy, good or bad, and plunges them into a frenzy of activity. Artless enough to try to perpetuate themselves by their endeavor, by their work, they move heaven and earth to finish, to conclude it: not a moment to lose.

The same perspective invites others to founder in what’s-the-use, in a stagnant clear-sightedness, in the unimpeachable truths of despond.

“My curse on the man who, in future editions of my works, knowingly changes anything—a sentence, or only a word, a syllable, a letter, a punctuation mark!” Is it the philosopher or the writer in Schopenhauer who speaks this way? Both at once, and this conjunction (when we think of the awful style of any philosophical work) is extremely rare. It is not a Hegel who would have uttered such a curse. Nor any other major philosopher, except Plato.

Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being inconspicuous, occasional, is massive, automatic, at the antipodes of its essentially delicate nature. Which in any case is how it is used in Germany, a nation which, having meditated upon it the most, is least capable of wielding it.

Anxiety is not provoked: it tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to do so seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clings once it has invented them. A reality which precedes its particular expressions, its varieties, anxiety provokes itself, engenders itself, it is “infinite creation,” and as such is more likely to suggest the workings of the divinity than those of the psyche.

Automatic melancholy: an elegiac robot.

At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”

I shall not soon forget the expression of horror on what was his face, the dread, the extreme suffering, and the aggression. No, he was not happy. Never have I seen a man so uncomfortable in his coffin.

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.

Inelegant to reproach a man for his sterility, when that is his postulate, his mode of achievement, his dream….

Nights when we have slept are as if they had never been. The only ones that remain in our memory are the ones when we couldn’t close our eyes: night means sleepless night.

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last….

To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve….”

I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.

Marcus Aurelius Is much closer to me. Not a moment’s hesitation between the lyricism of frenzy and the prose of acceptance: I find more comfort, more hope even, in the weary emperor than in the thundering prophet.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born

Lady Hester Stanhope, the queen of the desert

  HESTER STANHOPE paid dearly for her satirical talent, although one might also say that she owed both her legend and her reputation to it. The most satisfying period of her life were the years when she lived in and managed the house owned by her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister under George III. Apparently, she proved indispensable, with her arguable beauty, her brilliant, albeit exhausting conversation, and her ability to organise important political supper parties and make them enjoyable. However, her penchant for satire made her so many enemies that when Pitt died in 1806, she found herself surrounded by a great void, though with a full purse: the State gave her a generous life pension, presumably to reward the niece for her extremely loyal uncle’s patriotic efforts.

William Pitt wasn’t the only man, whether related by blood or not, to have been subjugated by Lady Hester. Although, for her time, she was a giant (she was nearly five foot nine tall), her vitality and talent made her irresistible in her young and not-so-young years, to the extent that it allowed her not to get married. She denied that she was beautiful and claimed that she was possessed, rather, of “a homogeneous ugliness”, She was unfortunate in the love of her life, for the famous general, John Moore—upon whom, on the death of her benefactor, her nights and days came to depend—perished in La Coruña during the Peninsular War, or what we Spaniards call the War of Independence.

It was partly this and partly the unbearable loss of power and politicking that drove her to leave England when she was thirty-three, an age which, for a single woman two centuries ago, meant resignation and withdrawal. From that moment on, however, she began to forge the legend of an extremely wealthy woman who travelled incessantly throughout the Middle East with an extravagant and ever-growing entourage—a genuine caravan at certain particularly fruitful periods of her life—with no set goal or aim. Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria saw her pass or stay, dressed in Eastern fashion and as a man, surrounded by servants, secretaries, lady companions, hangers-on, French generals fascinated by her personality, or by Dr Meryon who recorded her escapades, and by her various lovers who were almost always younger and better-looking. Her prestige among the sheikhs and emirs allowed her to travel as far as Palmyra, a place entirely inaccessible to Westerners at the time. She settled down among the Druses in Mount Lebanon and there, by her own means, exercised the kind of influence which, in her own country, she had failed to inherit from her relations.

It is true that in her witty letters—the main record of her adventures, along with the biographical volumes written by the devoted Meryon—Lady Stanhope was not at all modest or, perhaps, reliable. In one letter, she proclaimed: “I am the oracle of the Arabs and the darling of all the troops who seem to think I am a deity because I can ride.” And she rode ceaselessly, travelling non-stop and without any apparent objective, plus she sat astride, a style not normally permitted for women in those lands. Lady Hester, however, was a special case, and, in time, she became in part what she claimed to be, for there is nothing like being convinced of something to persuade other people of it too. In her latter years, she was considered to be a fortune-teller or a soothsayer, and her neutrality was immediately sought in any conflict, the adversaries knowing that if she took sides, she could easily take with her many as yet undecided tribes.

In Djoun she had a kind of labyrinthine fortress built, full of pavilions and rooms intended to shelter the illustrious fugitives who would, sooner or later, come asking for asylum, fleeing from the numerous revolutions which she believed were taking place in Europe. She did, in fact, receive a lot of refugees, but none was particularly illustrious or even European: the place became a protective roof for the disinherited and the persecuted of the region.

Lady Hester Stanhope could be charming, but, more often than not, she was quick-tempered and tyrannical, even when being solicitous: she would oblige her visitors to take strange potions and salts to protect them from disease and fever, and sometimes she handed these doses out seven at a time. She smoked a pipe constantly and, during the final months of her life, when she barely left her rooms, it is said that a permanent cloud of smoke emanated from them and that there was not a single object or item of furniture that had not been singed by sparks and cinders. She did not get on well with other women; she boasted that she could tell the character of a man at a single glance; and her indefatigable talk touched on every subject: astrology, the zodiac, philosophy, politics, morality, religion or literature. She was feared for her mocking burlesques, in particular her imitation of the terrible lisp that afflicted Lord Byron, whom she had met in Athens.

In the final days of her existence, as she lay helpless on her deathbed, she watched as her servants filched everything they could, waiting only for her finally to expire in order to make off with the rest. This was in 1839 when she was sixty-three years old. When her body was found by two Westerners who had come to visit her, they discovered the corpse alone in the fortress: her thirty-seven servants had disappeared and there was nothing left, not even in her bedroom, only the things she was wearing, for no one had dared to touch her. So perhaps she was not lying when she said in another letter: “I am not joking: beneath the triumphal arch of Palmyra, I have been crowned Queen of the Desert.”

Javier Marias 

Written Lives

Toy stories: puppets, dolls and horror stories

 “In many horror stories there is an assortment of figures that appear as walk-ons or extras whose purpose is to lend their spooky presence to a narrative for atmosphere alone, while the real bogey is something else altogether. Puppets, dolls, and other caricatures of the human often make cameo appearances as shapes sagging in the corner of a child’s bedroom or lolling on the shelves of a toy store […] As backdrops or bit-players, imitations of the human form have a symbolic value because they seem connected to another world, one that is all harm and disorder- the kind of place we sometimes feel is a model for our own home ground, which we must believe is passably sound and secure, or at least not an environment where we might mistake a counterfeit person for the real thing.”

 — Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race 2So writes the horror author Thomas Ligotti in his recently published book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The book is not a work of fiction — it is, instead, a work of amateur philosophy in the best possible sense, driven by a metaphysical hunger that is so often lacking in the work of professional philosophers. Ligotti is unembarrassed to return to those questions which academic philosophers typically disdain in favour of an entanglement in scholarly minutiae. Why is there something rather than nothing? Should we be glad to be alive? Ligotti’s answer to this latter question is emphatically in the negative. Possessed of a cold, sober seriousness that couldn’t be more at odds with the atmosphere of cheery vitalism and inane lightness that prevails in early twenty-first-century culture, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race has the feel of a nineteenth-century tract.

Puppets are one of the leitmotifs of Ligotti’s work, but the terror that they cause does not primarily arise from any malicious intentions on their part, or from the suspicion that they might secretly move when we do not watch them. Rather, the puppet is an emissary of what Ligotti repeatedly characterises in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race as the “malignantly useless” nature of the cosmos itself. The painted-faced marionette is a symbol of the horror of consciousness, the instrument which, for Ligotti, allows that “malignant uselessness” to be perceived, and which brings all suffering into the world.

The puppet is a figure which belongs equally as much to the children’s story as to the weird tale. Ian Penman has written of how the most famous puppet story, Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883),

contains scarcely credible levels of cruelty and pain […] Accusations of abuse. Thrown hammers. Burned-off feet. Children used as firewood: innocence kindling. Curiosity rewarded with concussion and kidnap. Hanging, amputation, suffocation. A snake laughs so hard at Pinocchio’s fear he bursts an artery and dies. On his way to school Pinocchio sells his schoolbooks to join a Street Theatre: forget education, become a marionette. A dancing fool. Apprentice Golem. Malignant clown. Neuter, castrato.

(Penman’s remarks were made in the piece that he contributed to a book on Michael Jackson I edited last year — and Jackson’s own story is one in which kitsch and Gothic, puppet and master manipulator, frequently reversed into one another. 3)

On his blog on memory and technology, Bat, Bean, Beam, the theorist Giovanni Tiso recently noted the echoes of Pinocchio in the Toy Story films. 4 For the Marxist Richard Seymour,

Toy Story 3 is a story of how freedom is achieved through commodification, and how “the consent of the governed” roughly equals the willing embrace of bondage […] Everyone, and everything, has its place in the Toy Story scheme of things. That scheme is a hierarchy of commodities with toys near the bottom, subordinate and devoted to their owners. 5Yet, at an ontological level, the Toy Story films constitute something of a “tangled hierarchy”. The toys that are depicted in the films do not only exist at the “ontologically inferior” level of the film’s fiction; they are real in the sense that you can buy them outside the cinema. In Ligotti, puppets and puppetry frequently symbolise this tangling of ontological hierarchy: what should be at the “inferior” level of the manipulated manikin suddenly achieves agency, and, even more horrifyingly, what is at the supposedly “superior” level of the puppet master suddenly finds itself drawn into the marionette theatre. Ligotti writes that it is a terrible fate indeed

when a human being becomes objectified as a puppet and enters a world that he or she thought was just a creepy place inside of ours. What a jolt to find oneself a prisoner in this sinister sphere, reduced to a composite mechanism looking out on the land of the human, or that which we believe to be human by any definition of it, and yet be exiled from it.

With Ligotti, it is not clear which is the more terrifying prospect — an ultimate puppet master pulling the strings or the strings fraying off into blind senseless chaos.

Tiso noticed something peculiar about the desire of the toys in the Toy Story series: “what they like best is to be played with by children. But it so happens that at those times they are limp and inanimate; as is the case whenever they are in the presence of people, their spark abandons them, their eyes become vacant.” 6 It’s as if the message of the Toy Story films rhymes with that of Ligotti’s pessimistic tract: consciousness is not a blessing bestowed on us by a kindly toymaker standing in for a beneficent God, but a loathsome curse.

Zer0 books statement 1Contemporary culture has eliminated both the concept of the public and the figure of the intellectual. Former public spaces — both physical and cultural — are now either derelict or colonised by advertising. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheered by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor. The informal censorship internalised and propagated by the cultural workers of late capitalism generates a banal conformity that the propaganda chiefs of Stalinism could only have dreamt of imposing. Zer0 books knows that another kind of discourse — intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist — is not only possible: it is already flourishing, in the regions beyond the striplit malls of so-called mass media and the neurotically bureaucratic halls of the academy. Zer0 is committed to the idea of publishing as a making public of the intellectual. It is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

Toy Stories: Puppets, Dolls and Horror Stories

 1.Frieze, (1 September 2010), https://frieze.com/article/toy-stories

2.  Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, (Hippocampus, 2011)

 3. Ian Penman, “Notes Towards a Ritual Exorcism of the Dead King” in Mark Fisher (ed.), The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson, (Zer0, 2009)

 4.  Giovanni Tiso, “The Unmaking of Pinocchio”, Bat, Bean, Beam, (3 August 2010), https://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/unmaking-of-pinocchio.html

 5.  Richard Seymour, “Chattel Story”, Lenin’s Tomb, (8 August 2010), http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/08/chattel-story.html

6.  Giovanni Tiso, “Useful Life”, Bat, Bean, Beam, (19 July 2010), https://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/useful-life.html

Zer0 Books Statement

1.  This is the mission statement written by Mark Fisher at the inception of the radical publisher Zer0 Books which he co-founded with his friend Tariq Goddard in 2009. It was reprinted in each of the books published by Zer0, through their leaving to form Repeater in 2014, until January 2018 when a modified version was adopted by the new management. In addition to all of his writing, it is important to remember the vital role Mark played in helping to revolutionise the existing British publishing industry, and theoretical writing in particular, that was in the absolute doldrums leading up to the formation of Zer0.

k-punk

The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)

No Longer the Pleasures: Joy Division

 

Adapted from k–punk post, January 9, 2005

If Joy Division matter now more than ever, it’s because they capture the depressed spirit of our times. Listen to JD now, and you have the inescapable impression that the group were cataton-ically channelling our present, their future. From the start their work was overshadowed by a deep foreboding, a sense of a future foreclosed, all certainties dissolved, only growing gloom ahead. It has become increasingly clear that 1979-80, the years with which the group will always be identified, was a threshold moment – the time when a whole world (social democratic, Fordist, industrial) became obsolete, and the contours of a new world (neoliberal, consumerist, informatic) began to show themselves. This is of course a retrospective judgement; breaks are rarely experienced as such at the time. But the 70s exert a particular fascination now that we are locked into the new world – a world that Deleuze, using a word that would become associated with Joy Division, called the ‘Society of Control’. The 70s is the time before the switch, a time at once kinder and harsher than now. Forms of (social) security then taken for granted have long since been destroyed, but vicious prejudices that were then freely aired have become unacceptable. The conditions that allowed a group like Joy Division to exist have evapo-rated; but so has a certain grey, grim texture of everyday life in Britain, a country that seemed to have given up rationing only reluctantly.

By the early 2000s, the 70s was long enough ago to have become a period setting for drama, and Joy Division were part of the scenery. This was how they featured in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002). The group were little more than a cameo here, the first chapter in the story of Factory records and its buffoon-genius impresario Tony Wilson. Joy Division assumed centre stage in Anton Corbijn’s Control (2007), but the film didn’t really connect. For those who knew the story, it was a familiar trip; for those not already initiated, however, the film didn’t do enough to convey the group’s sorcerous power. We were taken through the story, but never drawn into the maelstrom, never made to feel why any of it mattered. Perhaps this was inevitable. Rock depends crucially on a particular body and a particular voice and the mysterious relationship between the two. Control could never make good the loss of Ian Curtis’s voice and body, and so ended up as arthouse karaoke naturalism; the actors could simulate the chords, could ape Curtis’s moves, but they couldn’t forge the vortical charisma, couldn’t muster the unwitting necromantic art that transformed the simple musical structures into a ferocious expressionism, a portal to the outside. For that you need the footage of the group performing, the sound of the records. Which is why, of the three films featuring the group, Grant Gee’s 2007 documentary, Joy Division, patched together from super-8 fragments, TV appearances, new interviews and old images of postwar Manchester, was most effective at transporting us back to those disappeared times. Gee’s film begins with an epigraph from Marshall Berman’s All That Is SolidMelts Into Air: The Experience Of Modernity: ‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’ Where Control tried to conjure the presence of the group, but left us only with a tracing, an outline, Joy Division is organised around a vivid sense of loss. It is selfconsciously a study of a time and a place, both of which are now gone. Joy Division is a roll call of disappeared places and people – so many dead, already: not only Curtis, but also the group’s manager Rob Gretton, their producer Martin Hannett and of course Tony Wilson. The film’s coup, its most electric moment, the sound of a dead man wandering in the land of the dead: a scratchy old cassette recording of Ian Curtis being hypnotised into ‘a past life regression’. I travelled far and wide through many different times. A slow, slurred voice channelling something cold and remote. ‘How old are you?’ ‘28’, an exchange made all the more chilling because we know that Curtis would die at the age of 23.

Asylums with doors open wide

I didn’t hear Joy Division until 1982, so, for me, Curtis was always-already dead. When I first heard them, aged 14, it was like that moment in John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyper-fiction, in which he is already immersed: my whole future life, intensely compacted into those sound images – Ballard, Burroughs, dub, disco, Gothic, antidepressants, psych wards, overdoses, slashed wrists. Way too much stim to even begin to assimilate. Even they didn’t understand what they were doing. How on earth could I, then?

New Order, more than anyone else, were in flight from the mausoleum edifice of Joy Division, and they had finally achieved severance by 1990. The England world cup song, cavorting around with beery, leery Keith Allen, a man who more than any other personifies the quotidian masculinism of overground Brit bloke culture in the late 80s and 90s, was a consummate act of desublimation. This, in the end, was what Kodwo Eshun called the ‘price of escaping the anxiety of influence (the influence of themselves)’. On Movement the group were still in post-traumatic stress, frozen into a barely communicative trance (‘The noise that surrounds me/ so loud in my head…’)

It was clear, in the best interviews the band ever gave – to Jon Savage, a decade and a half after Curtis’s death – that they had no idea what they were doing, and no desire to learn. Of Curtis’ disturbing-compelling hyper-charged stage trance spasms and of his disturbing-compelling catatonic downer words, they said nothing and asked nothing, for fear of destroying the magic. They were unwitting necromancers who had stumbled on a formula for channelling voices, apprentices without a sorcerer. They saw themselves as mindless golems animated by Curtis’ vision(s). (Thus, when he died, they said that they felt they had lost their eyes…)

Above all – and even if only because of audience reception – they were more than a pop group, more than entertainment, that much is obvious. We know all the words as if we wrote them ourselves, we followed stray hints in the lyrics out to all sorts of darker chambers, and listening to the albums now is like putting on a comfortable and familiar set of clothes…. But who is this ‘we’? Well, it might have been the last ‘we’ that a whole generation of not-quite-men could feel a part of. There was an odd universality available to Joy Division’s devotees (provided you were male of course).

Provided you were male of course… The Joy Division religion was, self-consciously, a boys’ thing. Deborah Curtis: ‘Whether it was intentional or not, the wives and girlfriends had gradually been banished from all but the most local of gigs and a curious male bonding had taken place. The boys seemed to derive their fun from each other.’ (Deborah Curtis, Touching from a Distance, 77) No girls allowed…

As Curtis’s wife, Deborah was barred from rock’s pleasure garden, and could not pass into the cult of death that lay beyond the pleasure principle. She was just left to clear up the mess.

If Joy Division were very much a boys’ group, their signature song, ‘She’s Lost Control’ saw Ian Curtis abjecting his own disease, the ‘holy sickness’ of epilepsy, onto a female Other. Freud includes epileptic fits – along, incidentally, with a body in the grip of sexual passion – as examples of the unheimlich, the unhomely, the strangely familiar. Here the organic is slaved to the mechanical rhythms of the inorganic; the inanimate calls the tune, as it always does with Joy Division. ‘She’s Lost Control’ is one of rock’s most explicit encounters with the mineral lure of the inanimate. Joy Division’s icy-spined undeath disco sounds like it has been recorded inside the damaged synaptic pathways of a brain of someone undergoing a seizure, Curtis’ sepulchral, anhedonic vocals sent back to him – as if they were the voice of an Other, or Others – in long, leering expressionistic echoes that linger like acrid acid fog. ‘She’s Lost Control’ traverses Poe-like cataleptic black holes in subjectivity, takes flatline voyages into the land of the dead and back to confront the ‘edge of no escape’, seeing in seizures little deaths (petil mals as petit morts) which offer terrifying but exhilarating releases from identity, more powerful than any orgasm.

In this colony

Try to imagine England in 1979 now…

Pre-VCR, pre-PC, pre-C4. Telephones far from ubiquitous (we didn’t have one till around 1980, I think). The postwar consensus disintegrating on black and white TV.

More than anyone else, Joy Division turned this dourness into a uniform that self-consciously signified absolute authenticity; the deliberately functional formality of their clothes seceding from punk’s tribalised anti-Glamour, ‘depressives dressing for the Depression’ (Deborah Curtis). It wasn’t for nothing that they were called Warsaw when they started out. But it was in this Eastern bloc of the mind, in this slough of despond, that you could find working class kids who wrote songs steeped in Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Burroughs, Ballard, kids who, without even thinking about it, were rigorous modernists who would have disdained repeating themselves, never mind disinterring and aping what had been done 20, 30 years ago (the 60s was a fading Pathe newsreel in 1979).

Back in ‘79, Art Rock still had a relationship to the sonic experimentation of the Black Atlantic. Unthinkable now, but White Pop then was no stranger to the cutting edge, so a genuine trade was possible. Joy Division provided the Black Atlantic with some sonic fictions it could re-deploy – listen to Grace Jones’s extraordinary cover of ‘She’s Lost Control’, or Sleazy D’s ‘I’ve Lost Control’, or even to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak (with its sleeve references to Saville’s ‘Blue Monday’ cover design, and its echoes of Atmosphere and ‘In A Lonely Place’). For all that, Joy Division’s relationship to black pop was much more occluded than that of some of their peers. Postpunk’s break from lumpen punk R and R consisted in large part in an ostentatiously flagged return-reclaiming of Black Pop: funk and dub especially. There was none of that, on the surface at least, with Joy Division.

But a group like PiL’s take on dub, now, sounds a little laborious, a little literal, whereas, Joy Division, like The Fall, came off as a white anglo equivalent of dub. Both Joy Division and The Fall were ‘black’ in the priorities and economies of their sound: bass-heavy and rhythm-driven. This was dub not as a form, but a methodology, a legitimation for conceiving of sound-production as abstract engineering. But Joy Division also had a relationship to another super-synthetic, artily artificial ‘black’ sound: disco. Again, it was they, better than PiL, who delivered the ‘Death Disco’ beat. As Jon Savage loves to point out, the swarming syn-drums on ‘Insight’ seem to be borrowed from disco records like Amy Stewart’s ‘Knock on Wood’.

The role in all this of Martin Hannett, a producer who needs to be counted with the very greatest in pop, cannot be underestimated. It is Hannett, alongside Peter Saville, the group’s sleeve designer, who ensured that Joy Division were more Art than Rock. The damp mist of insinuating uneasy listening Sound FX with which Hannett cloaked the mix, together with Saville’s depersonalising designs, meant that the group could be approached, not as an aggregation of individual expressive subjects, but as a conceptual consistency. It was Hannett and Saville who transmuted the stroppy neuromantics of Warsaw into cyberpunks.

Day in/ Day out

Joy Division connected not just because of what they were, but when they were. Mrs Thatcher just arrived, the long grey winter of Reagonomics on the way, the Cold War still feeding our unconscious with a lifetime’s worth of retina-melting nightmares.

JD were the sound of British culture’s speed comedown, a long slow screaming neural shutdown. Since 1956, when Eden took amphetamines throughout the Suez crisis, through the Pop of the 60s, which had been kicked off by the Beatles going through the wall on uppers in Hamburg, through punk, which consumed speed like there was no tomorrow, Britain had been, in every sense, speeding. Speed is a connectivity drug, a drug that made sense of a world in which electronic connections were madly proliferating. But the comedown is vicious.

Massive serotonin depletion.

Energy crash.

Turn on your TV.

Turn down your pulse.

Turn away from it all.

It’s all getting

Too much

Melancholia was Curtis’ art form, just as psychosis was Mark E Smith’s. Nothing could have been more fitting than that Unknown Pleasures began with a track called ‘Disorder’, for the key to Joy Division was the Ballardian spinal landscape, the connexus linking individual psychopathology with social anomie. The two meanings of breakdown, the two meanings of Depression. That was how Sumner saw it, anyhow. As he explained to Savage, ‘There was a huge sense of community where we lived. I remember the summer holidays when I was a kid: we would stay up late and play in the street, and 12 o’clock at night there would be old ladies, talking to each other. I guess what happened in the ‘60s was that the council decided that it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood that went. We were moved over the river to a towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantastic; now of course I realise it was an absolute disaster. I’d had a number of other breaks in my life. So when people say about the darkness in Joy Division’s music, by age of 22, I’d had quite a lot of loss in my life. The place where I used to live, where I had my happiest memories, all of that had gone. All that was left was a chemical factory. I realised then that I could never go back to that happiness. So there’s this void.’

Dead end lives at the end of the 70s. There were Joy Division, Curtis doing what most working class men still did, early marriage and a kid…

Feel it closing in

Sumner again: ‘When I left school and got a job, real life came as a terrible shock. My first job was at Salford town hall sticking down envelopes, sending rates out. I was chained in this horrible office: every day, every week, every year, with maybe three weeks holiday a year. The horror enveloped me. So the music of Joy Division was about the death of optimism, of youth.’

A requiem for doomed youth culture. ‘Here are the young men/ the weight on their shoulders,’ went the famous lines from ‘Decades’, on Closer. The titles ‘New Dawn Fades’ and Unknown Pleasures could themselves be referring to the betrayed promises of youth culture. Yet what is remarkable about Joy Division is their total acquiescence in this failure, the way in which, from the start, they set up an Antarctic camp beyond the pleasure principle.

Set the controls for the heart of the black sun

What impressed and perturbed about JD was the fixatedness of their negativity. Unremitting wasn’t the word. Yes, Lou Reed and Iggy and Morrison and Jagger had dabbled in nihilism – but even with Iggy and Reed that had been ameliorated by the odd moment of exhilaration, or at least there had been some explanation for their misery (sexual frustration, drugs). What separated Joy Division from any of their predecessors, even the bleakest, was the lack of any apparent object-cause for their melancholia. (That’s what made it melancholia rather than melancholy, which has always been an acceptable, subtly sublime, delectation for men to relish.) From its very beginnings, (Robert Johnson, Sinatra) 20th-century Pop has been more to do with male (and female) sadness than elation. Yet, in the case of both the bluesman and the crooner, there is, at least ostensibly, a reason for the sorrow. Because Joy Division’s bleakness was without any specific cause, they crossed the line from the blue of sadness into the black of depression, passing into the ‘desert and wastelands’ where nothing brings either joy or sorrow. Zero affect.

No heat in Joy Division’s loins. They surveyed ‘the troubles and the evils of this world’ with the uncanny detachment of the neurasthenic. Curtis sang ‘I’ve lost the will to want more’ on ‘Insight’ but there was no sense that there had been any such will in the first place. Give their earliest songs a casual listen and you could easily mistake their tone for the curled lip of spiky punk outrage, but, already, it is as if Curtis is not railing against injustice or corruption so much as marshalling them as evidence for a thesis that was, even then, firmly established in his mind. Depression is, after all and above all, a theory about the world, about life. The stupidity and venality of politicians (‘Leaders of Men’), the idiocy and cruelty of war (‘Walked in Line’) are pointed to as exhibits in a case against the world, against life, that is so overwhelming, so general, that to appeal to any particular instance seems superfluous. In any case, Curtis expects no more of himself than he does of others, he knows he cannot condemn from a moral high ground: he ‘let them use you/ for their own ends’ (‘Shadowplay’), he’ll let you take his place in a showdown (‘Heart and Soul’).

That is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock’s standard downer states, but depression: depression, whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered The (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life – or inner death – overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty. For the depressive, the habits of the former lifeworld now seem to be, precisely, a mode of playacting, a series of pantomime gestures (‘a circus complete with all fools’), which they are both no longer capable of performing and which they no longer wish to perform – there’s no point, everything is a sham.

Depression is not sadness, not even a state of mind, it is a (neuro)philosophical (dis)position. Beyond Pop’s bipolar oscillation between evanescent thrill and frustrated hedonism, beyond Jagger’s Miltonian Mephistopheleanism, beyond Iggy’s negated carny, beyond Roxy’s lounge lizard reptilian melancholy, beyond the pleasure principle altogether, Joy Division were the most Schopenhauerian of rock groups, so much so that they barely belonged to rock at all. Since they had so thoroughly stripped out rock’s libidinal motor – it would be better to say that they were, libidinally as well as sonically, anti-rock. Or perhaps, as they thought, they were the truth of rock, rock divested of all illusions. (The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.) What makes Joy Division so Schopenhauerian is the disjunction between Curtis’s detachment and the urgency of the music, its implacable drive standing in for the dumb insatiability of the life-Will, the Beckettian ‘I must go on’ not experienced by the depressive as some redemptive positivity, but as the ultimate horror, the life-Will paradoxically assuming all the loathsome properties of the undead (whatever you do, you can’t extinguish it, it keeps coming back).

Accept like a curse an unlucky deal

JD followed Schopenhauer through the curtain of Maya, went outside Burroughs’ Garden of Delights, and dared to examine the hideous machineries that produce the world-as-appearance. What did they see there? Only what all depressives, all mystics, always see: the obscene undead twitching of the Will as it seeks to maintain the illusion that this object, the one it is fixated upon NOW, this one, will satisfy it in a way that all other objects thus far have failed to. Joy Division, with an ancient wisdom (‘Ian sounded old, as if he had lived a lifetime in his youth’ – Deborah Curtis), a wisdom that seems pre–mammalian, pre-multicellular life, pre-organic, saw through all those reproducer ruses. This is the ‘Insight’ that stopped fear in Curtis, the calming despair that subdued any will to want more. JD saw life as the Poe of ‘The Conqueror Worm’ had seen it, as Ligotti sees it: an automated marionette dance, which ‘Through a circle that ever returneth in/ To the self-same spot’, an ultra-determined chain of events that goes through its motions with remorseless inevitability. You watch the pre-scripted film as if from outside, condemned to watch the reels as they come to a close, brutally taking their time.

A student of mine once wrote in an essay that they sympathise with Schopenhauer when their football team loses. But the true Schopenhauerian moments are those in which you achieve your goals, perhaps realise your long-cherished heart’s desire – and feel cheated, empty, no, more – or is it less? – than empty, voided. Joy Division always sounded as if they had experienced one too many of those desolating voidings, so that they could no longer be lured back onto the merry-go-round. They knew that satiation wasn’t succeeded by tristesse, it was itself, immediately, tristesse. Satiation is the point at which you must face the existential revelation that you didn’t want really want what you seemed so desperate to have, that your most urgent desires are only a filthy vitalist trick to keep the show on the road. If you ‘can’t replace the fear or the thrill of the chase’, why stir yourself to pursue yet another empty kill? Why carry on with the charade?

Depressive ontology is dangerously seductive because, as the zombie twin of a certain philosophical wisdom, it is half true. As the depressive withdraws from the vacant confections of the lifeworld, he unwittingly finds himself in concordance with the human condition so painstakingly diagrammed by a philosopher like Spinoza: he sees himself as a serial consumer of empty simulations, a junky hooked on every kind of deadening high, a meat puppet of the passions. The depressive cannot even lay claim to the comforts that a paranoiac can enjoy, since he cannot believe that the strings are being pulled by any one. No flow, no connectivity in the depressive’s nervous system. ‘Watch from the wings as the scenes were replaying’, go the fatalistic lines in ‘Decades’, and Curtis wrote with a depressive’s iron certainty about life as some pre-scripted film. His voice – from the very start terrifying in its fatalism, in its acceptance of the worst – sounds like the voice of man who is already dead, or who has entered an appalling state of suspended animation, death-within-life. It sounds preternaturally ancient, a voice that cannot be sourced back to any living being, still less to a young man barely in his twenties.

A loaded gun won’t set you free – so you say

‘A loaded gun won’t set you free,’ Curtis sang on ‘New Dawn Fades’ from Unknown Pleasures, but he didn’t sound convinced. ‘After pondering over the words to ‘New Dawn Fades’,’ Deborah Curtis wrote, ‘I broached the subject with Ian, trying to make him confirm that they were only lyrics and bore no resemblance to his true feelings. It was a one-sided conversation. He refused to confirm or deny any of the points raised and he walked out of the house. I was left questioning myself instead, but did not feel close enough to anyone else to voice my fears. Would he really have married me knowing that he still intended to kill himself in his early twenties? Why father a child when you have no intention of being there to see it grow up? Had I been so oblivious to his unhappiness that he had been forced to write about it?’ (Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, Faber&Faber, 1995, p85) The male lust for death had always been a subtext in rock, but before Joy Division it had been smuggled into rock under libidinous pretexts, a black dog in wolf’s clothing – Thanatos cloaked as Eros – or else it had worn pantomime panstick. Suicide was a guarantee of authenticity, the most convincing of signs that you were 4 Real. Suicide has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ – into a cold myth, as solid, seamless and permanent as the ‘marble and stone’ that Peter Saville would simulate on the record sleeves and Curtis would caress in the lyrics to ‘In a Lonely Place’. (‘In a Lonely Place’ was Curtis’ song, but it was recorded by a New Order in a zombie state of post-traumatic disorder after Curtis’ death. It sounds like Curtis is an interloper at his own funeral, mourning his own death: ‘how I wish you were here with me now’.)

The great debates over Joy Division – were they fallen angels or ordinary blokes? Were they Fascists? Was Curtis’ suicide inevitable or preventable? – all turn on the relationship between Art and Life. We should resist the temptation to be Lorelei-lured by either the Aesthete-Romantics (in other words, us, as we were) or the lumpen empiricists. The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. ‘Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand…’ It’s important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions – the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were ‘just a laff’ – at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased some 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.

‘I crept into my parents’ house without waking anyone and was asleep within seconds of my head touching the pillow. The next sound I heard was “This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend, the end. I’ll never look into your eyes again…” Surprised at hearing the Doors’ ‘The End’, I struggled to rouse myself. Even as I slept I knew it was an unlikely song for Radio One on a Sunday morning. But there was no radio – it was all a dream.’ (Touching From a Distance, p132)

Ghosts Of My Life  

 Mark Fisher

Cioran: Everything is good which brings me closer to Buddha

 To deliver Mows none of which land, to attack everyone without anyone’s noticing, to shoot arrows whose poison you alone receive!

X, whom I have always treated as badly as I could, does not resent me because he resents no one. He forgives every insult, he even forgets them. How I envy him! To be like him, I should have to live through several existences and exhaust all my possibilities of transmigration.

In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

How can you control yourself, master your behavior, when you come from a country where people howl at funerals?

On certain mornings, no sooner have I stepped out the door than I hear voices calling my name. Am I really me? Is it really my take another step, I stood there nailed to the spot, petrified IMPOSSIBILITY—this ordinary word came, more apropos than usual, to enlighten me as to myself, no less than as to the word as well: it had so often come to my aid, yet never as now. At last I understood, definitively, what it meant….

An ancient cleaning woman, in answer to my “How’s everything going?” answers without looking up: “Taking its course.” This ultra-banal answer nearly brings me to tears.

The more such turns of speech, which deal with becoming, with the passage of time, with the course of things, are worn down, the more likely they are to acquire the quality of a revelation. But the truth is not that they create an exceptional state, only that you yourself were in that state without realizing it, and that it required only a sign or a pretext for the extraordinary to occur.

We lived in the country, I went to school, and—an important detail—I slept in my parents’ room. At night it was my father’s habit to read aloud to my mother. Though he was a Greek Orthodox priest, he would read anything, doubtless assuming that at my age I wouldn’t understand. Usually I didn’t even listen and fell asleep, unless the text was some gripping story. One night I pricked up my ears. He was reading the scene from a biography of Rasputin where the father, on his deathbed, calls his son to him and says: “Go to Saint Petersburg and make yourself master of the city, fear nothing and no one, for God is an old hog.”Such an enormity in my father’s mouth, for whom the priesthood was not a joke, impressed me as much as a conflagration or an earthquake. But I also distinctly recall—this was over fifty years ago—that my emotion was followed by a strange, dare I say a perverse pleasure.

Having penetrated, in the course of years, quite deeply into two or three religions, I have always retreated on the threshold of “conversion,” lest I lie to myself. None of them was, in my eyes, free enough to admit that vengeance is a need, the most intense and profound of all, and that each man must satisfy it, if only in words. If we stifle that need, we expose ourselves to serious disturbances. More than one disorder—perhaps all disorders—derive from a vengeance too long postponed. We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

Philosophy in the Morgue. “My nephew was obviously a failure. If he had succeeded in making something of himself he would have had a different ending than … this.” “You know, Madame,” I replied to the monumental matron who had addressed me, “whether one succeeds or not comes down to the same thing.” “You’re right,” she said, after a few seconds’ thought. This unexpected acquiescence on the part of such a woman moved me almost as much as the death of my friend.

Misfits … It seems to me that their adventure, more than any other, sheds a light on the future, that they alone allow us to glimpse and to decipher it, and that if we set their exploits aside we utterly disqualify ourselves from describing the days to come.

“A pity,” you were saying, “that N has never produced anything.”

“So what! He exists. If he had given birth to books, if he had had the misfortune to ‘realize’ himself, we wouldn’t have been talking about him the last hour.” The advantage of being someone is rarer than that of creating. To produce is easy; what is difficult is to scorn the use of one’s gifts.

Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.”

One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write….

T, a rabbi’s son, complains that this age of unprecedented persecutions has seen the birth of no original prayer capable of being adopted by the community and uttered in the synagogues. I assure him that he is mistaken to be distressed or alarmed by the fact: the great disasters yield nothing on the literary or religious level. Only the semi-misfortunes are fruitful, because they can be, because they are a point of departure, whereas too perfect a hell is almost as sterile as paradise.

I was twenty. Everything was a burden. One day I collapsed on a couch with an “I can’t take it any longer.” My mother, already driven distracted by my sleepless nights, told me she had just had a mass said for my “rest.” Not one but thirty thousand, I would have liked to shout at her, thinking of the figure Charles V inscribed in his will—for a much longer rest, true enough.

I ran across him again, quite by chance, after twenty-five years. Unchanged, intact, fresher than ever, he actually seems to have retreated toward adolescence.

Where has he been hiding, and what has he done to escape the action of the years, to avoid our wrinkles and grimaces? And how has he lived, if in fact he has lived at all? Actually, a ghost. He must have cheated, he has not performed his duty as a living man, not played the game. A ghost, yes, and a gate-crasher. I discern no sign of destruction on his countenance, none of those marks which testify that one is a real being, an individual and not an apparition. What can I say to him? I feel awkward, embarrassed, even afraid. So greatly are we upset by anyone who escapes time, or merely deceives it.

D.C, who was writing his recollections of childhood in his Rumanian village, having told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he wouldn’t be left out, received a visit from the latter early the next day: “I know I’m a worthless man but all the same I didn’t think I had fallen so low as to be talked about in a book.”

How superior the oral world was to ours! Beings (I should say, peoples) live in the truth only as long as they have a horror of the written. Once they catch the virus, they enter the inauthentic, they lose their old superstitions to acquire a new one, worse than all the others combined.

Incapable of getting up, nailed to my bed, I drift with the whims of my memory, and I see myself wandering, as a child, in the Carpathians. One day I stumbled on a dog whose master, doubtless to be rid of it, had tied it to a tree; the animal was little more than a skeleton, so drained of life that it barely had the strength to look at me, without being able to move. Yet it was standing, that dog….

A stranger comes and tells me he has killed someone. He is not wanted by the police because no one suspects him. I am the only one who knows he is the killer. What am I to do? I lack the courage as well as the treachery (for he has entrusted me with a secret—and what a secret!) to tum him in. I feel I am his accomplice, and resign myself to being arrested and punished as such. At the same time, I tell myself this would be too ridiculous. Perhaps I shall go and denounce him all the same. And so on, until I wake up.

The interminable is the specialty of the indecisive. They cannot mark life out for their own, and still less their dreams, in which they perpetuate their hesitations, pusillanimities, scruples. They are ideally qualified for nightmare.

A film about wild animals: endless cruelty in every latitude. “Nature,” a torturer of genius, steeped in herself and her work, exults with good reason: there is not a moment when what is alive fails to tremble, to make others tremble. Pity is a strange luxury only the most perfidious and the fiercest creature could invent, out of a need to punish and torture itself—out of ferocity, still.

On a poster which, at a church door, announces The Art of the Fugue, someone has scrawled in huge letters: God is dead. This apropos of the composer who testifies that God, in the event of his decease, can revive precisely while we are listening to certain cantatas, certain fugues!

We have spent a little over an hour together. He has used the time to show off, and by dint of trying to say interesting things about himself, has succeeded. If he had merely swaggered in moderation, I should have found him a bore and left in a few minutes. By exaggerating, by playing the peacock to perfection, he has come close enough to wit to show some. The desire to appear subtle does not destroy subtlety. A mental defective, if he could feel the longing to astonish, would manage to deceive us—would even catch up with intelligence.

X, who is older than the patriarchs, after inveighing, during a long tête-à-tête, against this one and that, tells me: “The great weakness of my life is that I’ve never hated anyone.” Our hatred does not diminish with the years: in fact, it mounts. That of an old man like X attains incredible proportions: now insensitive to his former affections, he puts all his faculties at the service of his rancors which, miraculously reinvigorated, will survive the crumbling of his memory and even of his reason.

… The danger of frequenting the old is that when we find them so far from detachment and so incapable of espousing it, we arrogate to ourselves all the advantages they are supposed to have and do not. And it is inevitable that our real or imaginary advance upon them in matters of weariness or disgust should incite to presumption.

Every family has its own philosophy. One of my cousins, who died young, once wrote me: “It’s all the way it’s always been and probably always will be until there’s nothing left any more.”

Whereas my mother ended the last note she ever sent me with this testamentary sentence: “Whatever people try to do, they’ll regret it sooner or later.”

Nor can I even boast of having acquired this vice of regret by my own setbacks. It precedes me, it participates in the patrimony of my tribe. What a legacy, such unfitness for illusion!

A few kilometers from the village where I was born, there was a hamlet, perched on a hill and inhabited solely by gypsies. In 1910 an amateur ethnologist visited the place, accompanied by a photographer. He managed to collect the inhabitants, who agreed to let their picture be taken, without knowing what that meant. At the instant they were asked to hold still, an old woman shrieked: “Watch out, they’re stealing our souls!” Whereupon they all flung themselves upon the two visitors, who had the greatest difficulty making their escape.

These half-savage gypsies—what were they but India, their land of origin which, under these circumstances, was speaking through them?

In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was. It is an aberration to want to be different from what you are, to espouse in theory any and every condition, except your own.

The day I read the list of nearly all the Sanskrit words that designate the absolute, I realized that I had taken the wrong path, the wrong country, the wrong idiom.

A friend, after I don’t know how many years of silence, writes that she hasn’t much longer to live, and that she is preparing to “enter the Unknown….” The cliché gives me a start. I find it hard to see what one might enter by death. Any affirmation, in this realm, seems to me a delusion. Death is not a state, perhaps not even a transition. Then what is it? And by what cliché, in my turn, will I answer my friend?

I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!

Hale and hearty still, the woman dragged her husband after her, a tall, hunched man, eyes staring; she dragged him as if he had been the survivor of another age, an apoplectic and suppliant diplodocus.

An hour later, a second encounter: a neatly dressed old woman, extremely stooped, “advanced” toward me; her body forming a perfect half circle, she necessarily kept her eyes on the ground, doubtless counting her unimaginable slow tiny footsteps. It was as if she were learning how to walk, as if she were afraid of not knowing how and where to place her feet in order to move.

… Everything is good which brings me closer to Buddha.

Despite her white hair, she still paraded up and down her part of the sidewalk, looking for customers. I would run into her often, at three in the morning, and never felt like going home until I had heard her tell a few anecdotes or exploits. I have forgotten anecdotes and exploits alike, but not the readiness with which, one night when I had begun storming against all the sleeping ‘Vermin” of Paris, she broke in with her forefinger pointing to heaven and: “What about the vermin up there?’“Everything is without basis, without substance,” and I never repeat it to myself without feeling something like happiness. Unfortunately there are so many moments when I fail to repeat it to myself.

The Trouble With Being Born 

We should never deprive ourselves of the “pleasures of piety

 Suddenly feeling that you know as much as God about anything and everything and quite as suddenly seeing this sensation vanish …

Firsthand thinkers meditate upon things; the others upon problems. We must live face to face with being, and not with the mind.

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?” —Each sickness sends us a summons disguised as a question. We play deaf, even as we realize that the game is played out and that next time we must have the courage, at last, to capitulate.

The older I grow, the less I react to frenzy, delirium. My taste, among thinkers, now goes only to extinct volcanoes.

As a young man, I bored myself to death, but I believed in myself. If I had no suspicion of the dreary creature I was to become, I knew nonetheless that, whatever happened, Perplexity would not desert me, that it would keep watch over my years with all the zeal and exactitude of Providence.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

I once remarked to an Italian friend that the Latin peoples are without secrecy—too open, too garrulous—and that I preferred nations ravaged by timidity, adding that a writer who has failed to know it in his life is worthless in his writings. “You’re right,” he answered. “When we describe our experiences in our books, there is a lack of intensity, and of extension, for we have already told them a hundred times before.” Whereupon we talked about the literature of femininity, of its absence of mystery in countries where the salon and the confessional prevail.

We should never deprive ourselves, I forget who once remarked, of the “pleasures of piety.” Has religion ever been justified more delicately?

This craving to revise our enthusiasms, to change idols, to pray elsewhere …

To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to fest on, to dissolve into. …

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of the means of expression, as well as by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naïveté, without which the arts can never begin again.

In one of the chapels of this ideally ugly church, we find the Virgin standing with her Son above the globe: an aggressive sect which has undermined and conquered an empire and inherited its flaws, beginning with gigantism.

It is written in the Zohar: “When man appeared, thereupon appeared the flowers.” I suspect they were there long before him, and that his advent plunged them all into a stupefaction from which they have not yet recovered.

Impossible to read a line by Kleist without thinking that he committed suicide: as if his suicide had preceded his works.

In the Orient, the oddest, the most idiosyncratic Western thinkers would never have been taken seriously, on account of their contradictions. This is precisely why we are interested in them. We prefer not a mind but the reversals, the biography of a mind, the incompatibilities and aberrations to be found there, in short those thinkers who, unable to conform to the rest of humanity and still less to themselves, cheat as much by whim as by fatality. Their distinctive sign? A touch of fakery in the tragic, a hint of dalliance even in the irremediable.

If, in her Foundations, Teresa of Avila lingers over the subject of melancholia, it is because she recognizes it as incurable. Physicians, she says, cannot deal with it, and the mother superior of a convent, faced with such sufferers, has but one recourse: to inspire them with the dread of authority, to threaten them, to frighten them. The saint’s method remains the best: only kicks, slaps, and a good beating will be effective in the case of a “depressive.” Moreover, such treatment is precisely what the “depressive” himself resorts to when he decides to end it all: he merely employs more thorough means.

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Easy to imagine the elements, bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly predictable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote….

Anything that can be done seems to me pernicious and at best futile. If need be I can rouse myself but not act. I understand all too well Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge: eternal activity without action.

Whenever something still seems possible, I have the sense I have been bewitched.

The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—when we talk about other people.

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tête-à-tête with what is left of ourselves.

“The quality of every perfect form is to release the mind immediately, whereas the corrupt form holds the mind prisoner, like a bad mirror which tells us of nothing but itself.” In Kleist’s praise—and how un-German it sounds—of limpidity, his target was not philosophy in particular. Yet his is the best possible critique of philosophical jargon, a pseudo-language which, attempting to reflect ideas, merely assumes a contour at their expense, merely denatures and darkens them, merely calls attention to itself. By one of the most troublesome of all usurpations, the word has taken the leading role in a realm where it should be imperceptible.

“O Satan, my Master, I give myself unto thee forever!” How I regret not remembering the name of the nun who, having written these words with a nail dipped in her own blood, deserves to figure in an anthology of prayer and concision.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.

An existence constantly transfigured by failure.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

Nature’s great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one “kingdom”: juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of “problems,” it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

The last whose disloyalty wre forgive are those we have disappointed.

What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.

“I was the Prophet,” Mohammed informs us, “when Adam was still between the water and the clay.” … When we have not had the pride to found a religion—or at least to destroy one—how do we dare show ourselves in the light of day?

Detachment cannot be learned: it is inscribed in a civilization. We do not tend toward it, we discover it in ourselves. I was thinking this when I read that a missionary, after eighteen years in Japan, had made only sixty converts, and old ones at that Moreover they escaped him at the last moment, dying in Japanese fashion, without remorse, without torments, worthy descendants of their ancestors who, to inure themselves, In the days of the Mongol wars, let themselves be impregnated by the nothingness of all things and by their own nothingness.

We can meditate upon eternity only in a prone position. For a considerable period, eternity was the Orientals’ principal concern: did they not prefer the horizontal position? Once we lie down, time ceases to pass, to count. History is the product of a race that stands. As a vertical animal, man was to get into the habit of looking ahead, not only in space but in time as well. To which wretched origins we may trace the Future!

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, would ring at the door from time to time….

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.

Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.

Buddhism calls anger, “corruption of the mind,” manicheism “root of the tree of death.” I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

The least impure thoughts are those which appear between our anxieties, in the intervals of our annoyance, in those deluxe moments our misery grants itself.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.

Impossible to imagine a degraded animal, a sub-animal.

O to have been born before man!

Try as I will, I cannot manage to scorn all those centuries during which men busied themselves with nothing more than perfecting a definition of God.

The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure that they are the kind you will never use….

As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.

There is no limit-disappointment.

Grievances of every kind pass, but their source abides, and nothing has any effect on it: unassailable and unvarying, it is our fatum.

To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature, as Bossuet says, will not long grant us “this morsel of matter she lends.”—This morsel of matter:. by dint of pondering it we reach peace, though a peace it would be better never to have known.

Paradox is not suited to burials, nor to weddings or births, in fact. Sinister—or grotesque—events require commonplaces; the terrible, like the painful, accommodates only the cliché.

However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.

The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

A blind man, authentically blind for once, held out his hand: in his posture, his rigidity, there was something that caught you, that made you hold your breath. He was handing you his blindness.

We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

To be “happy” you must constantly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager—and with what success!—to sabotage happiness.

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?

To be sterile—with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words.

Pure fatigue—fatigue without cause, the kind that comes like a gift or a scourge: that is what helps me pull myself together, that is what affords me knowledge of my “self.” Once it leaves me, I am no more than an inanimate object.

Anything in folklore that remains alive comes from before Christianity. —The same is true of whatever is alive in each of us.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

“Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind”—this advice is surely not offered to those who “consider” their minds night and day, and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none.

Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not

A passion for musk is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who Is deaf to musk and whom we see every day.

No meditation without a tendency to repetitiveness.

As long as God had him in tow, man advanced slowly, so slowly he did not even realize it. Now that he no longer lives in anyone’s shadow, he is in a rush, and deplores it—he would give anything to regain the old cadence.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

Satiety—I have just now uttered this word, and already I no longer know apropos of what, so readily does it apply to everything I feel and think, to everything I love and loathe, to satiety itself.

I have killed no one, I have done better: I have killed the Possible, and like Macbeth, what I need most is to pray, but like him too, I cannot say Amen.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born 

The Immortals

Time and again we spot the rising fumes,
Products of high-pressure life on earth;
All its drunken excess, its misery and dearth,
Bloodstained smoke from countless hearty meals
For those condemned to die; fits of carnal lust;
Hands that murder, make money and pray;
Teeming masses, whipped up by fear and greed,
All emitting a rank, stuffy, warm and acrid dust,
The breath of bliss and rampant lechery;
Devouring their own flesh and spitting it out,
Devising future wars and pleasing forms of art,
Painting the brothel red even as it burns,
Gorging, stuffing, whoring their infantile way
Through the gaudy, tawdry fairground array
That’s born afresh for each of them in turn,
But one day will for each to dust return.
Unlike you we’ve found ourselves a home
Up in the starry ether, bright and cold.
Oblivious to the passing hours and days,
We’re neither male nor female, young nor old.
To us your murderous and lecherous ways,
Your fears, your ecstasies and sins
Are merely a show like the circling suns,
And every day is as long as the last.
While you fret and fidget we quietly slumber,
Inhaling the icy cold of outer space,
Or quietly gaze at stars without number
And the heavenly dragon, our friend.
Our life is eternal, cool and unchanging;
Cool and star-bright, our laughter knows no end.

**
Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, spasmodic lust;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each newborn and then
Sinking for each to dust again.
But we above you evermore residing
In the ether’s star-translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go,
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight
Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star-bright is our eternal laughter.

from the book Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

 If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance.

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.”

I forgive X everything because of his obsolete smile.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.

Ama nesari, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …

Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no rises out of the blood.

With the help of the erosion of memory, to recall the first initiatives of matter and the risk of life which followed from them …

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on.

Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Considering things according to nature, man was made to live facing outward. If he would see into himself, he must close his eyes, renounce his endeavors, quit the immediate. What is called “inner life” is a belated phenomenon, possible only by a slowing down of our vital activities, “the soul” being able to emerge and elaborate itself only at the expense of the good behavior of our organs.

The merest atmospheric variation jeopardizes my plans, not to speak of my convictions. This kind of dependency—the most humiliating kind—unfailingly lays me low, even as it dissipates what few illusions remain as to my possibilities of being free and as to freedom itself. What is the use of swaggering if you are at the mercy of Wet and Dry? One craves a less lamentable bondage, and gods of another kidney.

It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

As it leaves dawn behind and advances into the day, light prostitutes itself and is redeemed—ethics of twilight—only at the moment it vanishes.

In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of “the abyss of birth.” An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.

At increasingly wider intervals, impulses of gratitude toward Job and Chamfort—toward vociferation and vitriol …

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy and even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it—so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.

My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposing itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man. And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician’s invention.

The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.

At the climax of a failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

More than once, I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there, there everything weakens and wilts, beginning with your own confusion.

Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question—a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

What a disappointment that Epicurus, the sage I most need, should have written over three hundred treatises! And what a relief that they are lost!

“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”

A remark of my brother’s apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: “Old age is nature’s self-criticism.”

“One must be mad or drunk,” the Abbe Sieyès said, to speak well in the known languages. One must be drunk or mad, I should add, to dare, still, to use words, any word….

The fanatic of elliptical gloom is sure to excel in any career save that of being a writer.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone’s salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.

I never met one Interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.

The trouble with using a borrowed language is that you have no right to make too many mistakes in it. Now, it is by seeking a certain incorrectness without however abusing it, it is by continually approaching solecism, that writing may be given the appearance of life.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this, and I do not. Everything is unique—and insignificant.

Emily Brontë: everything that comes from her has the capacity to overwhelm me. Haworth is my Mecca.

To walk along a stream, to pass, to flow with the water, without effort, without haste, while death continues in us its ruminations, its uninterrupted soliloquy …

Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Plotinus, Porphyry tells us, had the gift of reading men’s souls. One day, without any warning, he told his astounded disciple not to try killing himself but rather to take a journey. Porphyry left for Sicily: there he was cured of his melancholy but, he adds regretfully, he thereby missed being present at his master’s death, which occurred during his absence.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

A work exists only if it is elaborated in the darkness with attention, with all the care of the murderer plotting his crime. In both cases, what counts is the will to strike.

Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring….

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character—precisely that and nothing but.

Pure time, time decanted, freed of events, beings, and things, appears only at certain moments of the night, when you feel it coming on, with the one intention of sweeping you off toward an exemplary catastrophe.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born