The Second-Hand Thinker

 

The Second-Hand Thinker—Advantages of Debility—The Parasite of Poets—Tribulations of an Alien—Ennui of Conquerors—Music and Skepticism—The Automaton—On Melancholy—The Thirst for Power—Position of the Poor.

Ideas are substitutes for griefs.

—Marcel Proust

The Second-Hand Thinker

I live in expectation of the Idea; I foresee it, close in upon it, get a grip—and cannot formulate it, it escapes me, does not yet belong to me: might I have conceived it in my absence? And how, once imminent and vague, to make it present and luminous in the intelligible agony of expression? What conditions should I hope for if it is to bloom—and decay?

Anti-philosopher, I abhor every indifferent idea: I am not always despondent, hence I do not always think. When I consider ideas, they seem even more useless than things; hence I have loved only the elucubrations of the great invalids, the ruminations of insomnia, the flashes of an incurable fear, and the doubts intersected by sighs. The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity, as the despairing accent of its playfulness is the index of its fascination. How many white nights does your nocturnal past conceal? That is how we ought to confront every thinker. The man who thinks when he wants to has nothing to tell us: above—or rather, alongside—his thoughts, he is not responsible for them, not committed to them, neither wins nor loses by risking himself in a struggle in which he himself is not his own enemy. It costs him nothing to believe in Truth. Which is not the case for a mind where true and false have ceased to be superstitions; destroyer of all criteria, such a mind verifies itself like invalids and poets; it thinks by accident: the glory of a discomfort or of a delirium suffices. Is not an indigestion richer in ideas than a parade of concepts? Malfunctions of our organs determine the fruitfulness of our minds: the man who does not feel his body will never be in a position to conceive a living thought; he will wait to no purpose for the advantageous surprise of some disadvantage. . . .

In affective indifference, ideas assume a profile; yet none can take shape: it is up to melancholy to afford a climate to their blossoming. They require a certain tonality, a certain color in order to vibrate, to shine. To be sterile a long time is to lie in wait for them, to yearn for them without being able to compromise them in a formula. The mind’s “seasons” are conditioned by an organic rhythm; it is not up to “me” to be naive or cynical: my truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or of my dejection. I exist, I feel, and I think according to the moment—and in spite of myself. Time constitutes me; in vain I oppose myself—and / am. My undesired present unfolds, unfolds me; unable to command it, I comment upon it; slave of my thoughts, I play with them, fatality’s buffoon. . . .

Advantages of Debility

The individual who fails to transcend his quality as a splendid example, a finished model, and whose existence is identified with his vital destiny, locates himself outside the mind. Ideal masculinity—obstacle to the perception of nuance—involves an insensitivity to the aspect of the everyday supernatural, from which art draws its substance. The more one is a nature, the less one is an artist. Homogeneous, undifferentiated, opaque vigor was idolized by the world of legends, by the fantasies of mythology. When the Greeks turned to speculation, the cult of the anemic ephebe replaced that of the giants; and the heroes themselves, sublime dolts in Homer’s time, became, thanks to tragedy, bearers of torments and doubts incompatible with their rough nature.

Internal wealth results from conflicts sustained within oneself; now, the vitality which is entirely self-possessed knows only external struggle, the attack upon the object. In the male weakened by a dose of femininity, two tendencies are at grips: by what is passive in himself he apprehends a whole world of relinquishment; by what is imperious, he converts his will into law. As long as his instincts remain unslaked, he concerns only the species; once a secret dissatisfaction creeps in, he becomes a conqueror. The mind justifies, explains, and excuses him, and classifying him among the superior simpletons, abandons him to History’s curiosity—the investigation of stupidity in action. . . .

The man whose existence does not constitute a disease both vigorous and vague can never establish himself among problems nor know their dangers. The condition favorable to the search for truth or for expression is to be found halfway between man and woman: the gaps in “virility” are the seat of the mind. . . . If the pure female, whom we can accuse of no sexual or psychic anomaly, is internally emptier than an animal, the intact male fits the definition of “cretin.” Consider any human being who has caught your attention or roused your fervor: something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage. We rightly scorn those who have not made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone “happy,” no greater flattery than to grant him a “vein of melancholy". . . . This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

“Inner life” is the prerogative of the delicate, those tremulous wretches subject to an epilepsy with neither froth nor falling: the biologically sound being scorns “depth,” is incapable of it, sees in it a suspect dimension which jeopardizes the spontaneity of his actions. Nor is he mistaken: with the retreat into the self begins the individual’s drama—his glory and his decline; isolated from the anonymous flux, from the utilitarian trickle of life, he frees himself from objective goals. A civilization is “affected” when its delicate members set the tone for it; but thanks to them, it has definitively triumphed over nature—and collapses. An extreme example of refinement unites in himself the exalté and the sophist: he no longer adheres to his impulses, cultivates without crediting them; this is the omniscient debility of twilight ages, prefiguration of man’s eclipse. The delicate allow us to glimpse the moment when janitors will be tormented by aesthetes' scruples; when farmers, bent double by doubts, will no longer have the vigor to guide the plow; when every human being, gnawed by lucidity and drained of instincts, will be wiped out without the strength to regret the flourishing darkness of their illusions. . . .

The Parasite of Poets

I. There can be no issue in a poet’s life. It is from everything he has not undertaken, from all the moments fed on the inaccessible, that his power comes to him. If he finds existence a disadvantage, his expressive faculties are thereby reinforced, his inspiration dilated.

A biography is legitimate only if it focuses the elasticity of a fate, the sum of variables it contains. But the poet follows a line of fatality whose rigor nothing inflects. Life belongs to dolts; and it is in order to fill out the life they have not had that we have invented the lives of the poets. . . .

Poetry expresses the essence of what cannot be possessed; its ultimate meaning: the impossibility of all “actuality.” Joy is not a poetic sentiment (though it proceeds from a sector of the lyric universe in which chance unites, in one and the same bundle, flames and fatuities). Who has ever read a song of hope which failed to inspire a sensation of discomfort, even of disgust? And how sing a presence, when the possible itself is shadowed with vulgarity? Between poetry and hope, complete incompatibility: hence the poet is a prey to an ardent decomposition. Who would dare to wonder how he has experienced life when it is by death that he has been alive at all? When he succumbs to the temptation of happiness—he belongs to comedy. . . . But if, on the other hand, flames spring up from his wounds and he sings felicity—that voluptuous incandescence of woe—he rescues himself from the nuance of vulgarity inherent in any positive accent. Thus a Hölderlin withdrawing to a dream Greece and transfiguring love by purer intoxications, by those of unreality. . . .

The poet would be an odious deserter of reality if in his flight he failed to take his suffering alone. Unlike the mystic or the sage, he cannot escape himself, nor leave the stage of his own obsession: even his ecstasies are incurable, and harbingers of disasters. Unable to run away, for him everything is possible, except life. . . .

II. This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself: not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. Valéry and Stefan George leave us where we picked them up, or else make us more demanding on the formal level of the mind: they are geniuses we have no need of, they are merely artists. But a Shelley, but a Baudelaire, but a Rilke intervene in the deepest part of our organism which annexes them as it would a vice. In their vicinity, a body is fortified, then weakens and disintegrates. For the poet is an agent of destruction, a virus, a disguised disease, and the gravest danger, though a wonderfully vague one, for our red corpuscles. To live around him is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears. . . .

III. Whereas verse permits everything—you can pour into it tears, shames, ecstasies, complaints above all—prose forbids you to give vent, to lament: its conventional abstraction is opposed to overflowing. Prose requires other truths: verifiable, deduced, measured. But what if you were to steal those of poetry, if you pillaged its substance and dared as much as the poets? Why not insinuate into discourse their indecencies, their humiliations, their grimaces, and their sighs? Why not be decomposed, rotten, corpse, angel, or Satan in the language of the vulgar, and pathetically betray so many aerial and sinister moods? Much more than in the school of the philosophers, it is in the academy of poets that we learn the courage of intelligence and the audacity to be ourselves. Their “affirmations” outdo the most strangely impertinent sayings of the ancient sophists. No one adopts them: has there ever been a single thinker who went as far as Baudelaire or who steeled himself to systematize a Lear’s howl, Hamlet’s soliloquy? Nietzsche perhaps before his end, but unfortunately he kept harping on his prophet’s string. . . . And if we looked among the saints? Certain frenzies of Teresa of Avila or Angela of Foligno. . . . But here we meet God too frequently—God, that consoling blank who, reinforcing their courage, diminishes its quality. To advance without convictions and alone among the truths is not given to a man, nor even to a saint; sometimes, though, to a poet. . . .

I can imagine a thinker exclaiming in an impulse of pride: “I’d like a poet to make his fate out of my thoughts!” But for such an aspiration to be legitimate, he himself would have to have frequented the poets a long time, he would have to have borrowed from them the joys of malediction, and given back, abstract and completed, the image of their own defections or their own deliriums; above all he would have to have succumbed on the threshold of song and, a living anthem this side of inspiration, to have known the regret of not being a poet, of not being initiated into the “science of tears,” the scourges of the heart, the formal orgies, the immortalities of the moment. . . .

Many times I have dreamed of a melancholy and erudite monster, versed in all idioms, familiar with numbers and souls alike, who would wander the world feeding on poisons, fervors, ecstasies, crossing Persias, Chinas, defunct Indies, and dying Europes—many times I have dreamed of a friend of the poets who would have known them all out of his despair at not being one of them.

Tribulations of an Alien

Offspring of some wretched tribe, he prowls the boulevards of the West. Cherishing one country after the next, he no longer hopes for any; stuck in a timeless twilight citizen of the world—and of no world—he is ineffectual, nameless, powerless. . . . Peoples without a destiny cannot give one to their sons who, thirsting for other horizons, attach themselves to a fate and ultimately exhaust it to finish their days as ghosts of their admirations and their exhaustions. Having nothing to love at home, they locate their love elsewhere, in other lands, where their fervor astonishes the natives. Overworked, the feelings erode and disintegrate, admiration first of all. . . . And the Alien who dispersed himself on so many highways of the world, exclaims: “I have set up countless idols for myself, have raised too many altars everywhere, and I have knelt before a host of gods. Now, weary of worship, I have squandered my share of delirium. One has resources only for the absolutes of one’s breed; a soul—like a country—flourishes only within its frontiers. I am paying for having crossed them, for having made the Indefinite into a fatherland, and foreign divinities into a cult, for having prostrated myself before ages which excluded my ancestors. Where I come from I can no longer say: in the temples I am without belief; in the cities, without ardor; among my kind, without curiosity; on the earth, without certitudes. Give me a specific desire and I could shake the world to its foundations. Release me from this shame of actions which makes me perform, every morning, the farce of resurrection and, every night, that of entombment; in the interval, nothing but this torment in the shroud of ennui. .. . I dream of wanting—and all I want seems to me worthless. Like a vandal corroded by melancholy, I proceed without a goal, self without a self, toward some unknown corner . . . in order to discover an abandoned god, a god who is his own atheist, and to fall asleep in the shadow of his last doubts and his last miracles.”

Ennui of Conquerors

Paris weighed on Napoleon, by his own admission, like a “leaden garment": for which ten million men were to die. This is the balance sheet of the mal du siède when a René on horseback becomes its agent. Born of the idleness of the eighteenth-century salons, this disease, in the indolence of an over-lucid aristocracy, extended its ravages deep into the countryside: peasants were to pay with their blood for a mode of sensibility alien to their nature and, with them, a whole continent. The exceptional natures in which Ennui insinuated itself, horrified by any one place and obsessed by a perpetual elsewhere, exploited the enthusiasm of the nations only to multiply their graveyards. This condottière who wept over Werther and Ossian, this Obermann who projected his void into space and who, according to Josephine, was capable of no more than a few moments of abandon, had as his unavowed mission to depopulate the earth. The dreaming conqueror is the greatest calamity for men; they are no less eager to idolize him, fascinated as they are by distorted projects, ruinous ideals, unhealthy ambitions. No reasonable being was ever the object of worship, left a name, or marked a single event with his individual stamp. Imperturbable before a precise conception or a transparent idol, the mob is roused by the unverifiable, by false mysteries. Who ever died in the name of rigor? Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it. It is nonetheless true that the victims were willing enough to be immolated once they believed in glory, in that victory of one man alone, that defeat of all. . . .

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish. Reigns in which citizens died in their sleep do not figure in history, nor the wise prince, inveterately scorned by his subjects; the crowd loves the fictive, even at its expense, the scandal of behavior constituting the web of human curiosity and the underground current of every event. The unfaithful woman and the cuckold provide comedy and tragedy, even the epic, the quasi-totality of their motifs. Since virtue has neither biography nor charm, from the Iliad to vaudeville, only the luster of dishonor has entertained and intrigued. Hence it is quite natural that humanity should have offered itself up to the conquerors, that it should seek to be trampled underfoot, that a nation without tyrants should never be talked about, that the sum of iniquities a people commits should be the sole index of its presence and of its vitality. A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

Universal history: history of Evil. Take away the disasters from human evolution and you might as well conceive of nature without seasons. If you have not contributed to a catastrophe, you will vanish without a trace. We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us. “I never made anyone suffer!"—an exclamation forever alien to a creature of flesh and blood. When we feel enthusiasm for a character of the past, or the present, we unconsciously ask ourselves: “For how many people was he the cause of disaster?” Who knows if each of us doesn’t aspire to the privilege of killing all his kind? But this privilege is assigned to very few, and never integrally: this restriction alone explains why the earth is still inhabited. Indirect murderers, we constitute an inert mass, a multitude of objects confronting Time’s true subjects, the great criminals who came to something.

But we can take comfort: our descendants, remote or immediate, will avenge us. For it is not difficult to imagine the moment when men will cut each other’s throats out of disgust with themselves, when Ennui will get the best of their prejudices and their diffidences, when they will run out into the street to slake their thirst for blood, and when the destructive dream prolonged for so many generations will become the universal reality. . . .

Music and Skepticism

I have searched for Doubt in all the arts, have found it there only disguised, furtive, breaking out during the entr'actes of inspiration, rising from slackened impulse; but I have given up searching for it—even in this form—in music; it cannot bloom there: ignorant of irony, music proceeds not from the pranks of the intellect but from the tender or vehement nuances of Naïvete, stupidity of the sublime, heedlessness of the infinite. . . . Wit having no equivalent in sound, we denigrate a musician by calling him intelligent. This attribute diminishes him and is not suitable in that languorous cosmogony where, like a blind god, he improvises one universe after another. If he were conscious of his gift, of his genius, he would succumb to pride; but he is not responsible for it; born in the oracle, he cannot understand himself. Let the sterile interpret him: he is not a critic, as God is not a theologian.

Limit-case of unreality and the absolute, infinitely real fiction, a lie more authentic than the world, music loses its prestige as soon as, dry or morose, we dissociate ourselves from the Creation, and Bach himself seems no more than insipid rumors; this is the extreme point of our non-participation in things, of our coldness and our collapse. To jeer amid the sublime—sardonic victory of the subjective principle, and one which makes us members of the Devil’s brood! Lost is the man who has no more tears for music, who Eves now only by the memory of those he has shed: sterile lucidity will have vanquished ecstasy—which once created worlds. . . .

The Automaton

I breathe out of prejudice. And I contemplate the spasm of ideas, while the Void smiles at itself. . . . No more sweat in space, no more life; the least vulgarity will make it reappear: a second’s waiting will suffice.

When we perceive ourselves existing we have the sensation of a stupefied madman who surprises his own lunacy and vainly seeks to give it a name. Habituación blunts our amazement at being: we are—and move on, we go back to our place in the asylum of the existing.

A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality. An automaton’s resignation: to affect a pretense of fervor and secretly to laugh at it; to bow to conventions only to repudiate them on the sly; to be numbered in every ledger but to have no residence in time; to save face whereas it would be only duty to lose it. . . .

The man who scorns everything must assume an air of perfect dignity, deceive the others and even himself: thereby he will the more easily accomplish his task of counterfeit living. What use displaying your failure when you can feign prosperity? Hell lacks manners: it is the exasperated image of a frank and uncouth man, it is the earth conceived without one superstition of elegance and civility.

I accept life out of politeness: perpetual rebellion is in bad taste, as is the sublimity of suicide. At twenty we rage against the heavens and the filth they hide; then we grow tired of it. The tragic attitude suits only an extended and ridiculous puberty; but it takes a thousand ordeals to achieve the histrionics of detachment.

The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the “pleasure” of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an “I” without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us from carrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth. . . .

Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . .

On Melancholy

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. In vain we call upon the Lord of Shades, the bestower of a precise curse: we are invalids without disease, and reprobates without vices. Melancholy is the dream state of egoism: no longer any object outside oneself, no reason for hate or love, but that same fall into a languid mud, that same circling of the damned without a hell, those same reiterations of a zeal to perish. . . . Whereas sadness is content with a circumstantial context, melancholy requires a debauch of space, an infinite landscape in order to spread out its sullen and vaporous grace, its shapeless evil, which, fearing to recover, dreads any limit to its dissolution and its undulation. It expands—strangest flower of self-love—among the poisons from which it extracts its vital juices and the vigor of all its failures. Feeding on what corrupts it, melancholy hides, under its melodious name, Self-Commiseration and the Pride of Defeat. .

The Thirst for Power

A Caesar is closer to a village mayor than to a mind sovereignly lucid but lacking the instinct of domination. The important fact is to command: almost all men aspire to this. Whether you have in your hands an empire, a tribe, a family, or a servant, you deploy your talent as a tyrant, glorious or absurd: a whole world or a single person obeys your orders. Thus is established the series of calamities which rise from the need, the thirst to excel . . . We jostle none but satraps: each of us—according to his means—seeks out a host of slaves or is content with just one. No one is self-sufficient: the most modest of men will always find a friend or a companion to authenticate his dream of authority. The man who obeys will be obeyed in his turn: the victim will become the executioner; this is the supreme desire—universally. Only beggars and sages do not experience it; unless theirs is an even subtler game. . .

The thirst for power permits History to renew itself and yet to remain basically the same; religions try to oppose this appetite, but manage only to exasperate it. Christianity would have found an issue whether the earth was a desert or a paradise. Under the variable forms man can assume is concealed one constant, an identical basis which explains why, against all the appearances of change, we move in a circle—and why, if we lost, following some supernatural intervention, our quality as monsters and clowns, history would immediately vanish.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards—but from which you do not escape without dying. Where to go, when you can live only in the city and you lack the instincts for doing so, and when you are not enterprising enough to beg your bread, nor balanced enough to give yourself up to wisdom? In the end, you stay there like everyone else, pretending to busy yourself; you convince yourself of this extremity by the resources of artifice, since it is less absurd to simulate life than to live it.

As long as men have the passion of the city, a disguised cannibalism will rule there. The political instinct is the direct consequence of Sin, the immediate materialization of the Fall. Each man should be assigned to his solitude, but each man keeps an eye on that of everyone else. Angels and bandits have their leaders; how could the intermediary creatures—the very texture of humanity—lack theirs? Take away their desire to be slaves or tyrants and you demolish the city in the wink of an eye. The monkey-pact is sealed forever; and history follows its course, the horde gasping between crimes and dreams. Nothing can arrest it: even those who execrate it participate in its progress. . . .

Position of the Poor

Owners and beggars: two categories which oppose any change, any renewing disorder. Placed at the two extremities of the social ladder, they fear any modification in good and evil: they are equally settled the former in opulence, the latter in destitution. Between diem are located—anonymous sweat, the basis of society—those who strive, labor, persevere, and cultivate the absurdity of hope. The State feeds on their anemia; the notion of citizen would have neither content nor reality without them, any more than luxury and alms: the rich man and the beggar are parasites of the poor, the Pauper’s dependents.

If misery has a thousand remedies, poverty has none. How succor those who persist in not dying of hunger? God himself could not correct their lot. Between fortune’s darlings and the tatterdemalion circulate these honorable starvelings, exploited by splendor and by rags, pillaged by those who, loathing labor, settle, according to their luck or their vocation, in the salon or the gutter. And so humanity advances: with a few rich men, with a few beggars—and with all its poor. . . .

E. M. CIORAN

A Short History of Decay