The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse

 Without the notion of a failed universe, the spectacle of injustice in every system would put even an abulic into a straitjacket.

Annihilating affords a sense of power, flatters something obscure, something original in us. It is not by erecting but by pulverizing that we may divine the secret satisfactions of a god. Whence the lure of destruction and the illusions it provokes among the frenzied of any era.

Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.

Any and every nation, at a certain moment of its career, considers itself chosen. It is at this moment that it gives the best and the worst of itself.

No accident that the Trappist order was founded in France rather than in Italy or Spain. Granted the Spanish and the Italians talk ceaselessly, but they do not hear themselves talk, whereas the Frenchman relishes his eloquence, never forgets he is talking, is consummately conscious of the fact He alone could regard silence as an ordeal, as an askesis.What spoils the French Revolution for me is that it all happens on stage, that its promoters are born actors, that the guillotine is merely a decor. The history of France, as a whole, seems a bespoke history, an acted history: everything in it is perfect from the theatrical point of view. It is a performance, a series of gestures and events which are watched rather than suffered, a spectacle that takes ten centuries to put on. Whence the impression of frivolity which even the Terror affords, seen from a distance.

Prosperous societies are far more fragile than the others, since it remains for them to achieve only their own ruin, comfort not being an ideal when we possess it, still less of one when it has been around for generations. Not to mention the fact that nature has not included well-being in her calculations and could not do so without perishing herself.

If all peoples turned apathetic at once, there would be no more conflicts, no more wars, no more empires. But unfortunately there are young peoples, and indeed young people—a major obstacle to the philanthropists’ dreams: to bring it about that all men might reach the same degree of lassitude or ineffectual-Ity….

We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.

Characteristic of dying regimes: to permit a confused mixture of beliefs and doctrines, and to give the Illusion, at the same time, that the moment of choice can be indefinitely postponed …

This is the source—the sole source—of the charm of pre-revolutionary periods.

Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

Revolutions are the sublime of bad literature.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

The right to suppress everyone that bothers us should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.

According to the Princess Palatine, Mme de Maintenon was in the habit of repeating, during the years after the king’s death when she had no further role to play: “For some time now, there has prevailed a spirit of vertigo which is spreading everywhere.’ This “spirit of vertigo” is what the losers have always noticed, correctly moreover, and we might well reconsider all history from the perspective of this formula.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

The surfeited hate themselves—not secretly but publicly, and long to be swept away, one way or another. They prefer, in any case, that the sweeping be accomplished with their own cooperation. This is the most curious, the most original aspect of a revolutionary situation.

A nation generates only one revolution. The Germans have never repeated the exploit of the Reformation, or rather, they have repeated but not equaled it. France has remained an eternal tributary of ‘89. Equally true of Russia and of all nations, this tendency to plagiarize oneself in regard to revolutions is at once reassuring and distressing.

Romans of the decadence enjoyed only what they called Greek leisure (otium graecum), the thing they had most despised in the period of their vigor. The analogy with today’s civilizations is so flagrant it would be indecent to insist on it.

Alaric claimed that a “demon” drove him against Rome. Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon.

The West: a sweet-smelling rottenness, a perfumed corpse.

All these nations were great because they had great prejudices. They now have none. Are they nations still? At most, disintegrated crowds.

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning.

The Romans, the Turks, and the British could found lasting empires because, refractory to all doctrine, they imposed none upon the subject nations. They would never have managed to wield so long a hegemony had they been afflicted with some messianic vice Unhoped-for oppressors, administrators, and parasites, lords without convictions, they had the art of combining authority and indifference, rigor and abandon. It is this art, the secret of the true master, which the Spaniards of old lacked, as it is lacking in the conquerors of our own day.

So long as a nation keeps the awareness of its superiority, it is fierce and respected; once it loses that awareness, a nation becomes humanized, and no longer counts.

When I rage against the age, I can calm myself merely by thinking of what will happen, of the retrospective jealousy of those who come after us, in certain respects, we belong to the old humanity, the humanity that could still regret paradise. But those who come after us will not even have the recourse of that regret, they will not even have an idea of it, not even the word!

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.

Hesiod was the first to elaborate a philosophy of history. And also launched the notion of decadence. By doing so, what a light he casts on historical process! If, at the very outset, in the heart of the post-Homeric world, he decided that humanity was In its Iron age, what would he have said a few centuries later—what would he say today?

Except in periods clouded over by frivolity or Utopia, man has always believed himself on the threshold of the worst. Knowing what he knew, by what miracle could he have unceasingly varied his desires and his terrors?

When, just after the First World War, electricity was installed in the village where I was born, there was a general murmur of protest, then mute desolation. But when electricity was installed in the churches (there were three), everyone was convinced the Antichrist had come and, with him, the end of time.

These Carpathian peasants had seen clearly, had seen far: Emerging from prehistory, they knew already, in that day and age, what “civilized” men have known only recently.

It is my prejudice against everything that turns out well that has given me a taste for reading history.

Ideas are unsuited to a final agony; they die, of course, but without knowing how to die, whereas an event exists only with a view to its end. A sufficient reason to prefer the company of historians to that of philosophers.

During his famous embassy to Rome in the second century b.c., Carneades took advantage of the occasion to speak the first day in favor of the idea of justice, and on the following day against it. From that moment, philosophy, hitherto nonexistent in that country of healthy conduct, began to perpetrate its ravages. What is philosophy, then? The worm in the fruit….

Cato the Censor, who had been present at the Greek’s dialectical performances, was alarmed by them and asked the Senate to satisfy the Athenian delegation as soon as possible, so harmful and even dangerous did he consider their presence. Roman youth was not to frequent minds so destructive.

On the moral level, Carneades and his companions were as formidable as the Carthaginians on the military. Rising nations fear above all the absence of prejudices and prohibitions, the intellectual shamelessness which constitutes the allure of declining civilizations.

Hercules was punished for having succeeded in all his undertakings. Similarly Troy, too happy, had to perish.

Pondering this vision shared by the tragic poets, we cannot help thinking that the so-called free world, upon which every fortune has been lavished, will inevitably suffer Ilion’s fate, for the jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance.

“The French don’t want to work any more, they all want to write, my concierge told me, unaware that she was then and there passing judgment on all old civilizations.

A society is doomed when it no longer has the force to be limited. How, with an open mind—too open—can it protect itself against the excesses, the mortal risks of freedom?

Ideological disputes reach the point of paroxysm only in countries where men have fought each other over words, where they have gone to death for words …, in the countries, in short, which have known wars of religion.

A nation which has exhausted its mission is like an author who repeats himself—no, who has nothing left to say. For to repeat yourself is to prove that you still believe in yourself, and in what you have said. But a declining nation no longer has even the strength to mouth its old mottoes, which once had assured it its preeminence and its pride.

French has become a provincial language. The natives don’t mind. Only the foreigner is inconsolable on its account—he alone goes into mourning for Nuance….

Themistocles, by a unanimously approved decree, had the interpreter of Xerxes’ ambassadors put to death “for having dared use the Greek language to express the orders of a barbarian.”

A people commits such an act only at the peak of its career. It is decadent, it is dying, when it no longer believes in its language, when it stops believing that its language is the supreme form of expression, the language.

A nineteenth-century philosopher maintained, In his innocence, that la Rochefoucauld was right for the past, but that he would be invalidated by the fixture. The Idea of progress dishonors the intellect.

The further man proceeds, the less he is in a position to solve his problems, and when, at the apex of his blindness, he will be convinced he is on the point of success, then the unheard-of will occur.

I would bestir myself, at best, for the Apocalypse, but for a revolution … To collaborate with an ending or a genesis, an ultimate or initial calamity, yes, but not with a change for some better or worse….

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man.

Once the animals no longer need to fear each other, they fall into a daze and take on that dumbfounded look they have in zoos. Individuals and’ nations would afford the same spectacle if some day they managed to live in harmony, no longer trembling openly or in secret.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

In two hundred years (let us be precise!), the survivors of the overly fortunate nations will be put on reservations and visited, contemplated with disgust, commiseration, or stupor, and with a malicious admiration as well.

Monkeys living in groups reject, apparently, those which in some fashion have consorted with humans. How one regrets that Swift never knew such a detail!

Are we to execrate our age—or all ages?

Do we think of Buddha withdrawing from the world on account of his contemporaries?

If humanity has such love for saviors, those fanatics who so shamelessly believe in themselves, it is because humanity supposes they believe in it.

The strength of this Statesman is to be visionary and cynical. A dreamer without scruples.The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.

“You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady.

“You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”

Hitler is without a doubt the most sinister character in history. And the most pathetic. He managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what he wanted, he destroyed his ideal point by point. It is for this reason that he is a monster in a class by himself—that is, a monster twice over, for even his pathos is monstrous.

All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.

The Zohar teaches that those who do evil on earth were no better in heaven, that they were impatient to leave it, and, rushing to the mouth of the abyss, that they “arrived ahead of the time when they were to descend into this world.”

One readily discerns the profundity of this vision of the pre-existence of souls, and its usefulness when we are to explain the assurance and the triumph of the “wicked,” their solidity and their competence. Having prepared their endeavors so far ahead, it is not astonishing that they should possess the earth: they conquered it before they were here …, an eternity ago, and for all eternity, as a matter of fact.

What distinguishes the true prophet from the rest is that he stands at the origin of movements and doctrines which exclude and oppose each other.

In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.

The appetite for destruction is so deeply anchored within us that no one manages to extirpate it. It belongs to our constitution, for the very basis of our being is demoniac.

The sage is a pacified, withdrawn destroyer. The others are destroyers in practice.

Misfortune is a passive, endured state, while malediction supposes an election à rebours, consequently a notion of mission, of inner power, which is not implied in misfortune. An accursed individual or nation necessarily outclasses an unfortunate individual or nation.

Strictly speaking, history docs not repeat itself, but since the illusions man is capable of are limited in number, they always return in another disguise, thereby giving some ultradecrepit filth a look of novelty and a tragic glaze.

I read some pages on Jovinian, Saint Basil, and several others. The conflict, during the first centuries of Christianity, between orthodoxy and heresy seems no more insane than the one to which modern ideologies have accustomed us. The modalities of the controversy, the passions at work, the follies and the absurdities, are almost identical. In both cases, everything turns on the unreal and the unverifiable, which form the very basis of either religious or political dogmas. History would be tolerable only if we escaped both kinds. True, it would then cease altogether, for the great good of everyone—those who endure it as well as those who make it.

What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it. But if to destroy is easy, to destroy oneself is less so. Superiority of the outcast over the agitator or the anarchist.

Had I lived in the early period of Christianity, I too, I fear, would have yielded to its seduction. And I hate that sympathizer, that hypothetical fanatic: I cannot forgive myself that conversion of two thousand years ago….

Tom between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus.

According to Hegel, man will be completely free only “by surrounding himself with a world entirely created by himself.”

But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been so enchained, so much a slave as now.

Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so.

Everything I have been able to feel and to think coincides with an exercise in anti-utopia.

Man will not last. Ambushed by exhaustion, he will have to pay for his too-original career. For it would be inconceivable and contra naturam that he drag on much longer and come to a good end. This prospect is depressing, hence likely.

“Enlightened despotism”: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.

Nothing more painful than two contemporary prophets. One must withdraw, must disappear if he is unwilling to expose himself to ridicule. Unless both are thus exposed, which would be the most equitable solution.

I am stirred, even overwhelmed each time I happen upon an innocent person. Where does he come from? What is he after? Doesn’t such an apparition herald some disaster? It is a very special disturbance we suffer in the presence of someone there is no way of calling our kind.

Wherever civilized men appeared for the first time, they were regarded by the natives as devils, as ghosts, specters. Never as living men! Unequaled intuition, a prophetic insight, if ever there was one.

If everyone had seen through everything, if everyone had “understood,” history would have ceased long since. But we are fundamentally, biologically unsuited to “understand.” And even if everyone understood except for one, history would be perpetuated because of that one, because of his blindness. Because of a single illusion!

X maintains we are at the end of a “cosmic cycle” and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment.

At the same time, he is the father of a—numerous—family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos.

Montaigne, a sage, has had no posterity. Rousseau, an hysteric, still stirs nations. I like only the thinkers who have inspired no tribune of the people.

In 1441, the Council of Florence decreed that pagans, Jews, heretics, and schismatics will have no part in “eternal life” and that all, unless they embrace, before dying, the true religion, will go straight to hell.

In the days when the Church professed such enormities it was truly the Church. An institution is vital and strong only if it rejects everything which is not itself. Unfortunately the same is true of a nation or of a regime.

A serious, honest mind understands—and can understand—nothing of history. History in return is marvelously suited to delight an erudite cynic.

Extraordinary pleasure at the thought that, being human, one is born under an accursed star, and that whatever one has undertaken and whatever one is going to undertake will be fondled by mischance.

Plotinus befriended a Roman senator who had freed his slaves, renounced his wealth, and who ate and slept at the houses of friends, for he no longer owned anything. This senator, from the “official” point of view, was deranged, and his case would be regarded as distressing, which indeed it was: a saint in the Senate…. His presence, even his possibility—what an omen! The hordes were not far….

A man who has completely vanquished selfishness, who retains no trace of it whatever, cannot live longer than twenty-one days, according to one modern Vedantist school. No Western moralist, not even the grimmest, would have dared venture an observation on human nature so startling, so revealing.

We invoke “progress” less and less and “mutation” more and more, and all that we allege to illustrate the latter’s advantages is merely one symptom after another of an unrivaled catastrophe.

We can breathe—and brawl—only in a corrupt regime. But we realize as much only after having contributed to its destruction, and when nothing is left but our capacity to regret it.

What we call the creative instinct is merely a deviation, merely a perversion of our nature: we have not been brought into the world in order to innovate, to revolutionize, but to enjoy our semblance of being, in order to liquidate it quietly and to vanish afterward without a fuss.

The Aztecs were right to believe the gods must be appeased, to offer them human blood every day in order to keep the universe from sinking back into chaos.

We long since ceased to believe in the gods, and we no longer offer them sacrifices. Yet the world is still here. No doubt. Only we no longer have the good luck to know why it does not collapse on the spot.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born