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