Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

 Three in the morning, I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

“Ever since I was born”—that since has a resonance so dreadful to my ears it becomes unendurable.

There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

Unmaking, decreating, is the only task man may take upon himself, if he aspires, as everything suggests, to distinguish himself from the Creator.

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.

When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords a certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.

I disentangle myself from appearances, yet I am snarled in them nonetheless; or rather: I am halfway between these appearances and that which invalidates them, that which has neither name nor content, that which is nothing and everything. I shall never take the decisive step outside them; my nature forces me to drift, to remain forever in the equivocal, and if I were to attempt a clean break in one direction or the other, I should perish by my salvation.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

What we can no longer commiserate with counts for nothing—no longer exists. We realize why our past so quickly stops being “ours” and turns into history, something which no longer concerns anyone.

In the deepest part of yourself, aspire to be as dispossessed, as lamentable as God.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being—at my expense.Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas….

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

Here on the coast of Normandy, at this hour of the morning, I needed no one. The very gulls’ presence bothered me: I drove them off with stones. And hearing their supernatural shrieks, I realized that that was just what I wanted, that only the Sinister could soothe me, and that it was for such a confrontation that I had got up before dawn.

“In this our life”—to be in life: suddenly I am struck by the strangeness of such an expression, as if it applied to no one.

Whenever I flag and feel sorry for my brain, I am carried away by an irresistible desire to proclaim. That is the moment I realize the paltry depths out of which rise reformers, prophets, and saviors.

I long to be free—desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.

Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.

Rare are the days when, projected into post-history, I fail to witness the gods’ hilarity at leaving behind the human episode.

What we need is an alternate vision, when that of the Last Judgment no longer satisfies anyone.

An idea, a being, anything which becomes incarnate loses identity, turns grotesque. Frustration of all achievement. Never quit the possible, wallow in eternal trifling, forget to be born.

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

When we see someone again after many years, we should sit down facing each other and say nothing for hours, so that by means of silence our consternation can relish itself.

Days of miraculous sterility. Instead of rejoicing over them, proclaiming victory, transforming this drought into a celebration, seeing it as an illustration of my fulfillment, my maturity, in short my detachment, I let myself be invaded by spite and resentment: so tenacious is the old Adam in us, the bustling canaille, unfit for self-effacement.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

While we are performing an action, we have a goal; performed, the action has no more reality for us than the goal we were seeking. Nothing of much consequence here—no more than a game. But some of us are conscious of this game in the course of the action: we experience the conclusion in the premises, the achieved in the virtual—we undermine “seriousness” by the very fact that we exist.

The vision of non-reality, of universal default, is the product of an everyday sensation and a sudden frisson. Everything is a game—without such a revelation, the sensation we haul through our usual lives would not have that characteristic stamp our metaphysical experiences require to be distinguished from their imitations, our discomforts. For every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience.

When we have worn out the interest we once took in death, when we realize we have nothing more to gain from it, we fall back on birth, we turn to a much more inexhaustible abyss.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

It is not my beginnings, it is the beginning that matters to me. If I bump into my birth, into a minor obsession, it is because I cannot grapple with the first moment of time. Every individual discomfort leads back, ultimately, to a cosmogonie discomfort, each of our sensations expiating that crime of the primordial sensation, by which Being crept out of somewhere….

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

No difference between being and non-being, if we apprehend them with the same intensity.

Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.

This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.

There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left—ignorant how to react—with a foolish grin.

Two kinds of mind: daylight and nocturnal. They have neither the same method nor the same morality. In broad daylight, you watch yourself; in the dark, you speak out. The salutary or awkward consequences of what he thinks matter little to the man who questions himself at hours when others are the prey of sleep. Hence he meditates upon the bad luck of being born without concern for the harm he can cause others or himself. After midnight begins the intoxication of pernicious truths.

As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it? Yes in appearance, no in fact, for the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment.

In major perplexities, try to live as if history were done with and to react like a monster riddled by serenity.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.

The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.

Regarding death, I ceaselessly waver between “mystery” and “inconsequentiality”—between the Pyramids and the Morgue.

It is impossible to feel that there was a time when we did not exist. Hence our attachment to the personage we were before being born.

“Meditate but one hour upon the selfs nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man.” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sea to a Western visitor.

Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over- the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.Instead of clinging to the fact of being born, as good sense bids, I take the risk, I turn back, I retrogress increasingly toward some unknown beginning, I move from origin to origin. Some day, perhaps, I shall manage to reach origin itself, in order to rest there, or be wrecked.

X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain.

Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.

If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.

Amid anxiety and distress, sudden calm at the thought of the foetus one has been.

At this precise moment, no reproach proceeding from men or gods can affect me: I have as good a conscience as if I had never existed.

It is a mistake to believe in a direct relation between suffering reverses and being dead set against birth. Such opposition has deeper, more distant roots, and would occur even if one had only the shadow of a grievance against existence. In fact it is never more virulent than in cases of extreme good fortune.

Thracians and Bogomils—I cannot forget that I have haunted the same whereabouts as they, nor that the former wept over the newborn and the latter, in order to justify God, held Satan responsible for the infamy of Creation.

During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.

The obsession with birth proceeds from an exacerbation of memory, from an omnipresence of the past, as well as from a craving for the impasse, for the first impasse. —No openness, hence no joy from the past but solely from the present, and from a future emancipated from time.For years, in fact for life, to have meditated only on your last moments, only to discover, when at last you approach them, that it was of no use, that the thought of death helps in everything save in dying!

It is our discomforts which provoke, which create consciousness; their task accomplished, they weaken and disappear one after the other. Consciousness however remains and survives them, without recalling what it owes to them, without even ever having known. Hence it continually proclaims its autonomy, its sovereignty, even when it loathes itself and would do away with itself.

According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, if a monk became proud of or merely satisfied with the task he was performing, he was to forsake it then and there.

One danger not dreaded by the man who has lived in the thirst for unsatisfaction, in an orgy of remorse and disgust.

If it is true that God dislikes taking sides, I should feel no awkwardness in His presence, so pleased would I be to imitate Him, to be like Him, in everything, “without opinion.”

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Nietzsche’s great luck—to have ended as he did: in euphoria!

Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence, where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wallowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior to selfhood….

Not to have been born, merely musing on that—what happiness, what freedom, what space!

The Trouble With Being Born

Cioran