The Decor of Knowledge

 

Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves “advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge—if it is profound—never changes: only its decor varies. Love continues without Venus, war without Mars, and if the gods no longer intervene in events, those events are neither more explicable nor less disconcerting: the paraphernalia of formulas merely replaces the pomp of the old legends, without the constants of human life being thereby modified, science apprehending them no more intimately than poetic narratives.

Modern complacency is limitless: we suppose ourselves more enlightened, more profound than all the centuries behind us, forgetting that the teaching of a Buddha confronted thousands of beings with the problem of nothingness, a problem we imagine we have discovered because we have changed its terms and introduced a touch of erudition into it. But what Western thinker would survive a comparison with a Buddhist monk? We lose ourselves in texts and terminologies: meditation is a datum unknown to modern philosophy. If we want to keep some intellectual decency, enthusiasm for civilization must be banished from our mind, as well as the superstition of History. As for the great problems, we have no advantage over our ancestors or our more recent predecessors: men have always known everything, at least in what concerns the Essential; modern philosophy adds nothing to Chinese, Hindu, or Greek philosophy. Moreover, there cannot be a new problem, despite our naïvete or our infatuation which would like to persuade us to the contrary. In the play of ideas, who ever equaled a Chinese or a Greek sophist, who was ever bolder in abstraction? All the extremities of thought were reached from the first—and in all civilizations. Seduced by the demon of the Unpublished, we forget too quickly that we are the epigones of the first pithecanthropus who bothered to reflect.

Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses? Becoming excludes an absolute fulfillment, a goal: the temporal adventure unfolds without an aim external to itself, and will end when its possibilities of movement are exhausted. The degree of consciousness varies with the ages, such consciousness not being aggrandized by their succession. We are not more conscious than the Greco-Roman world, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century; each period is perfect in itself—and perishable. There are privileged moments when consciousness is exasperated, but there was never an eclipse of lucidity such that man was incapable of confronting the essential problems, history being no more than a perpetual crisis, even a breakdown of naïvete. Negative states—precisely those which exasperate consciousness—are variously distributed; nonetheless they are present in every historical period; balanced and “happy,” they know Ennui—the natural name for happiness; unbalanced and tumultuous, they suffer Despair and the religious crises which derive from it. The idea of an Earthly Paradise was composed of all the elements incompatible with History, with the space in which the negative states flourish.

All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs—modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable—and fragile. The absolute and decrepitude characterize the work ripened for years and the poem dashed off in a moment. Is there more truth in The Phenomenology of Mind than in Epipsychidion? Lightninglike inspiration, as well as laborious investigation, offers us definitive results—and ridiculous ones. Today I prefer this writer to that one; tomorrow will come the turn of a work I detested quite recently. The creations of the mind—and the principles which preside over them—follow the fate of our moods, of our age, of our fevers, and our disappointments. We call into question everything we once loved, and are always right and always wrong; for everything is valid—and nothing has any importance. I smile: a world is born; I frown: it vanishes, and another appears. No opinion, no system, no belief fails to be correct and at the same time absurd, depending on whether we adhere to it or detach ourselves from it.

We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments. What we call truth is an error insufficiently experienced, not yet drained, but which will soon age, a new error, and which waits to compromise its novelty. Knowledge blooms and withers along with our feelings. And if we are in a position to scrutinize all truths, it is because we have been exhausted together—and because there is no more sap in us than in them. History is inconceivable outside of what disappoints.Which accounts for the desire to submit ourselves to melancholy, and to die of it. . . .

True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? Is your sleep sound? Are your dreams sweet? You swell the anonymous crowd. Daylight is hostile to thoughts, the sun blocks them out; they flourish only in the middle of the night. . . . Conclusion of nocturnal knowledge: every man who arrives at a reassuring conclusion about anything at all gives evidence of imbecility or false charity. Who ever found a single joyous truth which was valid? Who saved the honor of the intellect with daylight utterances? Happy the man who can say to himself: “Knowledge turned sour on me.”

History is irony on the move, the Mind’s jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices. Consider the polemics of each age: they seem neither motivated nor necessary. Yet they were the very life of that age, Calvinism, Quietism, Port-Royal, the Encyclopedia, the Revolution, Positivism, etc. . . . what a series of absurdities . . . which/tai to be, what a futile and yet fatal expense! From the ecumenical councils to the controversies of contemporary politics, orthodoxies and heresies have assailed the curiosity of mankind with their irresistible non-meaning. Under various disguises there will always be pro and con, whether apropos of Heaven or the Bordello. Thousands of men will suffer for subtleties relating to the Virgin and the Son; thousands of others will torment themselves for dogmas less gratuitous but quite as improbable. All truths constitute sects which end by enduring the destiny of a Port-Royal, by being persecuted and destroyed; then, their ruins, beloved now and embellished with the halo of the iniquity inflicted upon them, will be transformed into a pilgrimage-site. . . .

It is no less unreasonable to grant more interest to the arguments around democracy and its forms than to those which took place, in the Middle Ages, around nominalism and realism: each period is intoxicated by an absolute, minor and tiresome, but in appearance unique; we cannot avoid being contemporaries of a faith, of a system, of an ideology, cannot avoid being, in short, of our time. In order to be emancipated from that, we would require the coldness of a god of scorn. . . .

That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities. The universe begins and ends with each individual, whether he be Shakespeare or Hodge; for each individual experiences his merit or his nullity in the absolute. . . .

By what artifice did what seems to be escape the control of what is not? A moment of inattention, of weakness at the heart of Nothingness: the grabs took advantage of it; a gap in its vigilance: and here we are. And just as life supplanted nothingness, life in its turn was supplanted by history: existence thereby committed itself to a cycle of heresies which sapped the orthodoxy of the void.

E. M. CIORAN

A Short History of Decay

Dealing With the Mystics

 

NOTHING is more irritating than those works which “coordinate” the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system. What is the use of giving a so-called coherence to Nietzsche’s ideas, for example, on the pretext that they revolve around a central motif? Nietzsche is a sum of attitudes, and it only diminishes him to comb his work for a will to order, a thirst for unity. A captive of his moods, he has recorded their variations. His philosophy, a meditation on his whims, is mistakenly searched by the scholars for the constants it rejects.

The obsession with a system is no less suspect when it is applied to the study of the mystics. It will do, possibly, in the case of a Meister Eckhart, who took the trouble to discipline his thought: was he not a preacher? A sermon, however inspired, partakes of the course, sets forth a thesis, and labors to reveal its cogency. But what can we say of an Angelus Silesius, whose distichs readily contradict one another and possess only one theme in common: God—presented in so many aspects that it is difficult to identify the true one? The Cherubic Wanderer, a series of irreconcilable remarks, a splendor of confusion, expresses only the strictly subjective states of its author: to try to detect its unity, its system, is to spoil its capacities for seduction. Angelus Si-lesius is preoccupied less with God than with his own god. A host of poetical insanities are the consequence, which must bewilder the scholar and appall the theologian. But such is not the case. Both do their utmost to put these remarks in some kind of order, to simplify them, to compress them into some specific idea. Maniacs of rigor, they try to find out what their author thought about eternity and death. What he thought? Anything. They are experiences of his, personal and absolute. As for his god, never completed, always imperfect and changing, Angelus Silesius registers his moments and translates his becoming into a thought which is no less imperfect and changing. Let us beware of the definitive, let us avoid those who claim to possess an exact view of anything. To be surprised that Angelus Silesius in one distich should identify death with evil, and in another with good, is to lack both probity and humor. Since death itself is a becoming in us, let us consider its stages, its metamorphoses; to reduce it to a formula is to halt, to impoverish, to sabotage death.

The mystic experiences neither his ecstasies nor his disgusts within the limits of a definition: his claim is not to satisfy the demands of his thought, but those of his sensations. And he tends much more toward sensation than the poet, for it is by sensation that he verges upon God.

No frissons are identical, none may be repeated ad libitum: the identity of a word conceals, as a matter of fact, a number of divergent experiences. There are a thousand perceptions of Nothing, and only one word to translate them: the indigence of language renders the universe intelligible … In Angelus Silesius, the interval which separates one distich from another is diminished, if not canceled, by the familiar image of the same words which recur, by that poverty of language which makes his sighs and his horrors and his ecstasies lose their individuality. Hence the mystic denatures his experience by expressing it, almost as much as the scholar denatures the mystic by glossing him.

*

It is a mistake to suppose that mysticism derives from a softening of the instincts, from a compromised vitality. A Luis of Leon, a John of the Cross crowned an age of great enterprises and were necessarily contemporaries of the Conquest.

Far from being defectives, they fought for their faith, attacked God head on, appropriated heaven for themselves. Their idolatry of the wilFs abeyance, of gentleness and passivity, secured them against a scarcely bearable tension, against that superabundant hysteria which is responsible for their intolerance, their proselytism, their power over this world and the next. To get a sense of them, imagine a Hernando Cortez in the middle of an invisible geography.

The German mystics were conquerors too. Their penchant for heresy, for personal assertion, for protest expressed—on the spiritual level—the will of an entire nation to individualize itself. Such was the meaning of the Reformation which gave Germany its historical orientation. At the height of the Middle Ages, Eckhart overflows the tradition and follows his own path : his vitality anticipates Luther’s. He also suggests the direction German thought will take. But what assures him a unique position is that as the father of paradox in religious matters, he was the first to have given a tonality of intellectual drama to the relations between man and God. This tension was particularly appropriate to an age in which a whole people was in ferment and in search of itself.

There was something of the knight, the Ritter, in these mystics. Wearing a secret cuirass, invincible even in their passion for torturing themselves, they could moan with a swagger and possessed a contagious, incendiary madness. Suso yields nothing to the most extravagant anchorites, so skillful is he in varying his torments. The knightly spirit, turned toward the intemporal, perpetuates there the love of adventures. For mysticism is an adventure, a vertical adventure: it forays upward and seizes another form of space. Thereby it differs from those doctrines of the decadence, whose characteristic is not to well up from the spot, to come from elsewhere, like those transplanted from the Orient to Rome. Hence they answered only to the thirst for stagnation of a civilization incapable of creating a new religion or of cleaving still to the glamors of mythology. The same is true of today’s mystics, with their imported absolute, for the use of the weak and the disappointed.

Piety, that insolent sigh of the creature, is inseparable from energy and from vigor. Port-Royal, for all its idyllic appearance, was the expression of an exultant spirituality. There France knew her last moment of interiority. Subsequently she could lay claim to excess and power only in the lay world: she made the Revolution; after the advent of a sugared Catholicism, it was all she could undertake. Having lost the temptation of heresy, she became sterile in religious inspiration.

Refractory by vocation, rampant in their prayers, the mystics play with heaven, trembling the while. The Church has degraded them to the rank of supernatural mendicants so that, wretchedly civilized, they might serve as “models.” Yet we know that both in their lives and in their writings they were phenomena of nature and that no worse disaster could happen to them than to fall into the hands of the priests. Our duty is to wrest them away: only at this price could Christianity still admit even a hint of duration.

When I call them “phenomena of nature,” I am not claiming that their “health” was foolproof. We know that they were sick. But disease acted upon them like a goad, like a factor of excess. By sickness, they aimed at another genre of vitality than ours. Peter of Alcantara managed to sleep no more than one hour a night: was this not a sign of strength? And they were all strong, for they destroyed their bodies only in order to derive a further power from them. We think of them as gentle; no beings were tougher. What is it they propose? The virtues of disequilibrium. Avid for every kind of wound, hypnotized by the unwonted, they have undertaken the conquest of the only fiction worth the trouble; God owes them everything: his glory, his mystery, his eternity. They lend existence to the inconceivable, violate Nothing in order to animate it: how could gentleness accomplish such an exploit?

Contrary to that abstract, false void of the philosophers, the mystics’ nothingness glistens with plenitude: delight out of this world, discharge of duration, a luminous annihilation beyond the limits of thought. To deify oneself, to destroy in order to regain oneself, to engulf oneself in one’s own lucidity demands more resource and temerity than all the rest of our actions. Ecstasy—the limit-condition of sensation, fulfillment by the wreck of consciousness—is available only to those who, venturing outside themselves, substitute for the commonplace illusion which grounded their life another and supreme illusion in which everything is resolved, in which everything is transcended. Here the mind is suspended, reflection abolished and, with it, the logic of disarray. If we could, after the example of the mystics, pass beyond the evidence, beyond the impasse which proceeds from it, if we could become that dazzled, divine errantry, if we could, like them, reascend to the true nothingness! With what skill they plagiarize God, pillage Him, strip Him of His attributes with which they arm themselves in order to … remake Him! Nothing can resist the effervescence of their madness, that expansion of their soul forever threatening to fabricate another heaven, another earth. Everything they touch takes on the color of being. Having understood the disadvantage of seeing and of leaving things as they are, they have forced themselves to denature them. An optical defect on which they lavish all their care. No trace of reality, they know, subsists after the passage, after the devastations of clairvoyance. Nothing is, that is their point of departure, that is the evidence which they have managed to conquer, to reject, in order to reach the affirmation: everything is. Until we have followed the path which has led them to so surprising a conclusion, we shall never be on an equal footing with them.

*

Even in the Middle Ages, certain minds, tired of sifting the same themes, the same expressions, were obliged, in order to renew their piety and to emancipate it from the official terminology, to fall back on paradox, on the alluring, sometimes brutal, sometimes subtle formula. Hence Meister Eckhart. However rigorous, and however preoccupied with coherence, he was too much a writer not to seem suspect to Theology: his style, rather than his ideas, gained him the honor of being convicted of heresy. When we consider, in his treatises and sermons, the propositions condemned, we are amazed at the concern they betray for the niceties of expression; they reveal the inspired aspect of his faith. Like every heretic, he sinned on the side of form. An enemy of language, all orthodoxy; whether religious or political, postulates the usual expression. If almost all the mystics had their contentions with the Church, it is because they had too much talent; the Church demands none, and insists only on obedience, submission to its style. In the name of a sclerotic Word, the stakes, the pyres were erected. In order to escape them, the heretic had no other recourse than to change his formulas, to express his opinions in other terms, in terms that were consecrated. The Inquisition might nevei have existed if Catholicism had shown more indulgence and comprehension of the life of language, its departures, its variety, and its invention. When paradox is banned, one avoids martyrdom only by silence or banality.

Other reasons combine to make the mystic a heretic. If he is reluctant to let an external authority regulate his relations with God, he is no readier to admit meddling from on high: it is all he can do to tolerate Jesus. Anything but accommodating, he must nonetheless submit to certain compromises, mumble the recommended, the prescribed prayers, lacking the power to improvise ever-fresh ones. Let us forgive him this weakness. Perhaps he stoops to it only to prove that he is capable of lowering himself to the level of the vulgar and of employing their language; perhaps, too, to prove that he is not ignorant of the temptation of humility. But we know that he does not yield to it often, that he loves to innovate when he prays, that he invents on his knees, and that this is his way of breaking with the God of the common.

The mystic reanimates and rehabilitates faith, threatens and undermines it as an intimate, providential enemy. Without him, it would wither. We can guess now the reason why Christianity is dying and why the Church, deprived of both apologists and detractors, no longer thrives on praise or persecution. Fresh out of heretics, she would gladly stop demanding obedience if, in return, she discerned among her own a single fanatic who, deigning to attack her, to take her seriously, might give her some hope, some reason for alarm. To shelter so many idols and to glimpse not one iconoclast on the horizon! The faithful no longer vie with each other, nor the unbelievers, moreover: no one tries to come in first in the race for salvation or damnation …

A considerable occurrence: the two greatest modern poets, Shakespeare and Hölderlin, have bypassed Christianity. If they had yielded to its seduction, they would have made their own mythology out of it, and the Church would have had the luck of counting in her ranks two more heresiarchs. Without deigning to attack the Cross, still less to pull it up to their own level, one passed beyond it to the gods, the other resuscitated those of Greece. The first rose above prayer, the second invoked a heaven which he knew to be impotent, which he loved defunct: one is the precursor of our indifference, the other of our regrets.

*

The solitary, in his own way a combatant, feels the need to populate his solitude with enemies, whether real or imaginary. If he believes, he fills it with demons, as to whose reality he allows himself no. illusion. Without them, he would fall into insipidity: his spiritual life would suffer. It was appropriately that Jakob Boehme called the Devil “Nature’s cook,” whose art lends a. savor to everything. God himself, positing from the first the necessity of the adversary, acknowledged that He could not do without a struggle, attacking and being attacked.

As the mystic, in most cases, invents his adversaries, it follows that his thought asserts the existence of others by calculation, by artifice: it is a strategy of no consequence. His thought boils down, in the last instance, to a polemic with himself: he seeks to be, he becomes a crowd, even if it is only by making himself one new mask after the other, multiplying his” faces : in which he resembles his Creator, whose histrionics he perpetuates.

*

The mystical phenomenon lacks continuity: it flourishes, achieves its apogee, then degenerates and ends in a caricature. Such was the case of the religious flowering in Spain, in the Low Countries or in Germany. If, in the arts, the epigone manages to inspire respect, nothing is more pathetic, on the other hand, than a second-class mystic, parasite of the sublime, plagiarist of ecstasies. One can play at poetry, one can even give the illusion of originality: it suffices to have penetrated the secrets of the trade. These secrets count for nothing in the eyes of the mystic, whose art is only a means. Since he does not aspire to please men and seeks to be read elsewhere, he addresses himself to a rather limited public, a rather difficult audience which demands of him much more than talent or genius. What does he work for? To find what escapes or survives the disintegration of his experiences: the residue of intemporality under the ego’s vibrations. He erodes his senses in contact with the indestructible, contrary to the poet who exhausts his in contact with the provisional; one wrecks himself almost carnally in the Supreme (mysticism: the physiology of essences), the other revels on the surface of himself. Two sensualists, at different levels. Having once tasted appearances, the poet cannot forget their savor; it is the mystic who, unable to rise to the voluptuous pleasure of silence, restricts himself to that of the word. A chatterbox of quality, a suberior soliloquist.

*

When we read the Revelations of Margaret Ebner, when we follow her through her crises into her adorable hell, we are filled with … jealousy. For days at a time she could not unclench her teeth; when finally she opened her mouth, it was to utter cries which exalted and terrorized the convent. And what can we say about Angela of Foligno? Let us listen to her instead: “I contemplate, in the abyss into hieh I see I have fallen, the glut of my iniquities, I seek, to no avail, how to discover and manifest them to the world, I would walk naked through cities and squares, meat and fishes hung from my neck and crying out: here is the vile creature!”

Sanguine temperaments, delighting in the extremity of degradation and of purity, in the delirum of the depths and of the heights, the saints do not accommodate themselves to our rationalizations, nor to our cowardices. To see them as meditative souls is to deceive oneself altogether. Too unbridled, too fierce to be able to stop at meditation (which supposes self-control and hence a mediocrity of the blood), if they aspire to descend to the foundations of things, the steps that lead them there are not precisely “reflective.” Without prudence, without the least trace of stoicism in their gestures and their words, they believe everything is permitted to them, they parade their indiscretion through the hearts they trouble because they abominate peace and cannot endure a soul that has arrived. Indeed they would damn rather than accept themselves. Listen to Angela of Foligno once again: “Should all the sages of the world and all the saints of Paradise shower me with their consolations and their promises, and God Himself with His gifts, if He did not change me from such as I am, if He did not begin a new work in the depths of my soul instead of giving me ease, then the sages, the saints and God would exasperate beyond all expression my despair, my rage, my melancholy and my blindness.” Must we not, in the face of such declarations and such demands, liquidate our last vestiges of good sense and fling ourselves, like barbarians, toward the “darkness of the light”? Yet how can we bring ourselves to do it, fastened as we are to the infirmities of modesty? Our blood is too tepid, our appetites too well trained. No chance of getting beyond ourselves. Even our madness is too measured. To knock down the partitions of the mind, to shake it up, to seek its ruin—wellspring of the new! As it is, the mind is refractory to the invisible and perceives only what it already knows. To open itself to the true learning, it must be dislocated, must exceed its bounds, must pass through orgies of annihilation. Ignorance would not be our fate if we dared hoist ourselves above our certitudes and above that timidity which, keeping us from working miracles, bogs us down in ourselves. O for the pride of the saints!

If they keep their vigils and pray, it is to tap the secret of God’s power. Perfidious supplications, the prayers of these rebels around whom the Demon prowls by choice. Cunning, they tap his secret, too, and force him to work for them. The wicked principle which inhabits them they know how to use—in order to ascend. Those among them who break down do so with a certain complacency: they collapse not as victims but as colleagues of the Devil. Saved or lost, all bear a mark of non-humanity, all scorn to assign a limit to their undertakings. If they renounce, their renunciation is complete. But instead of being diminished and weakened thereby, they find themselves more powerful than the rest of us, who preserve what they have abandoned. These giants with their shattered bodies and souls—terrify us. Contemplating them, we are ashamed of being men and nothing more. And if, in their turn, they contemplate us, we decipher the words with which our mediocrity inspires their mercy: “Poor creatures who lack the courage to become unique, to become monsters.” Decidedly, the Devil labors for them and is no stranger to their aureole. What a humiliation for the rest of us, to have come to terms with him for nothing!

*

A destructor in the service of life, a demon oriented to good, the saint is the grand master of the effort against the ego. To vanquish his tendencies as much as in terror of himself, he keeps on a regimen of goodness and, supposing himself to have brothers and duties toward them, imposes on himself the overwork of pity. He suffers, and loves to suffer, but at the end of his sufferings, he makes beings into his playthings, rushes into the future, reads the thoughts of others, heals the incurable, infringes the laws of nature with impunity. It is to acquire this freedom and this power that he has prayed and resisted temptations. Pleasure, as he is aware, relaxes, softens: if he were to resort to it, he could no longer accede nor even aspire to the extraordinary, his strength and his faculties would diminish: no longer any energy in his desires nor any flexibility in his ambition. What he seeks are satisfactions of another order, and a kind of exemplary voluptuousness: that of equaling God. His horror of the senses is calculated, and anything but disinterested. He persecutes and rejects them, knowing he will rediscover them, transfigured, elsewhere.

The moment he aspires to substitute himself for the divinity, the saint agrees to pay the price: so great an end justifies any and every means. Convinced that eternity is the apanage of a dilapidated body, he will seek out all kinds of infirmities and conspire against his well-being, from whose ruin he will expect his salvation and his triumph. If he let himself follow his own nature, he would perish; but since he utilizes his mistreated vitality, he recovers. Too long contained, it explodes. And he becomes a fearful invalid who turns toward heaven in order to dislodge the usurper there. Such a favor, dispensed to those who, by suffering, have penetrated the secret of Creation, is met with only in periods when sanctity is identified with disgrace.

*

Every inspired state proceeds from a cultivated, willed inanition. Sanctity—uninterrupted inspiration—is an art of letting oneself die of hunger without … dying, a challenge hurled at one’s entrails, and a kind of demonstration of the incompatibility of ecstasy and digestion. A well-fed humanity produces skeptics, never saints. The absolute? A matter of diet. No “inner fire,” no “flame” without the virtually complete suppression of nourishment. Let us counter our appetites: our organs will burn, our substance catch fire. He who eats his fill is spiritually doomed.

Moved by savage impulses, the saints had managed to master them, hence to preserve them in secret. They were aware that charity derives its power from our physiological dramas, and that in order to attach themselves to beings they must declare war on the body, pervert it, martyr it, and subjugate it. Each of them evokes an aggressor who, suddenly converted to love, would subsequently employ himself in hating himself. And they knew how to hate themselves to the very end; but, since this self-hatred was exhausted, they were free, released from all shackles: the askesis had revealed to them the meaning, the usefulness of destruction, prelude to purity and deliverance. In their turn, they will reveal to us what pangs we must suffer if we, too, seek to be free.

At whatever level our life is lived, it will be truly our own only in proportion to our efforts to break its apparent forms. Ennui, despair, abulia itself will aid us here, on condition, of course, that we make our experience of them complete, that we live them through to the moment when, risking surrender, we rise up and transform them into auxiliaries of our vitality. What is more fruitful than the worst, for the man who knows how to desire it? For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer.

*

How can we laugh at the hysteria of the Middle Ages? In your cell you sighed or shrieked: the others venerated you … Your troubles did not lead you to the psychiatrist. Lest you be cured of them, you exasperated them, while you concealed your health like a stigma, a vice. Disease was the general recourse, the great remedy. Nowadays, fallen into discredit, boycotted, it continues to reign, but no one loves k, no one seeks it out. Sick men, we are at a loss for what to do with our ills. More than one of our madnesses will remain forever unexploited.

There are other hysterias which are no less admirable, those which generate hymns to the Sun, to Being, to the Unknown. Dawn of Egypt, of Greece, frenzy of mythologies, accents in first contact with the elements! At their antipodes, we are unfit to thrill to the spectacle of origins: our interrogations, instead of leaping in rhythms, drag in the lees of concept or are disfigured beneath the sneer of our systems. Where is our hymnic sensibility, the intoxication of our beginnings, the dawn of our stupefactions? Let us fling ourselves at the Pythoness’ feet, returning to our old ecstasies: the philosophy of unique moments, the only philosophy …

*

Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond. And if, nonetheless, the obsession of another world were to pursue us, it would be permissible to construct, to project one for the occasion, if only to satisfy our thirst for the invisible. What matters are our sensations, their intensity and their virtues, as our capacity to fling ourselves into a madness that is not sacred. In the unknown, we can go as far as the saints, without making use of their means. It will be enough for us to constrain reason to a long silence. Handed over to ourselves, nothing will keep us from acceding to the delicious suspension of all our faculties. A man who has glimpsed these states knows that our movements there lose their habitual direction: we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven. Where are we? A question without object: we no longer take place …

The Temptation to Exist 

Cioran 

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

Abdications

 

The Rope—Underside of an Obsession—Epitaph—Secularization of Tears—Fluctuations of the Will—Theory of Goodness—Making Allowances—Wonders of Vice—The Corrupter—The Architect of the Caves—Discipline of Atony—Supreme Erosion—At the Obsequies of Desire—Irrefutable Disappointment—In the Secret of Moralists—Monastic Fantasy—In Honor of Madness—My Heroes—The Simple-Minded—Poverty: Mental Stimulant—Invocation to Insomnia—Profile of the Wicked Man—Views on Tolerance—Sartorial Philosophy—Among the Dregs—On an Entrepreneur of Ideas—Truths of Temperament—Flayed Alive—Incompatibilities—Restoration of a Cult—We Troglodytes— Physiognomy of a Failure—Procession of Sub-Men—Quousque Eadem?

The Rape

I no longer remember how I happened to become the recipient of this confidence: “Possessing not property, projects, or even memories, I have given over future and philosophy alike, owning merely a cot on which to unlearn the sun and sighs. I remain stretched out there, and spin out the hours; around me, utensils, objects which suggest suicide, every one. The nail whispers: stick me through your heart, the trickle of blood need not alarm you. The knife insinuates: my blade is infallible; one second’s decision and you have triumphed over misery and shame. The window opens of its own accord, creaking in the silence: you share the city’s heights with the poor; fling yourself out, my overture is a generous one; in the wink of an eye, you will land on the pavement with the meaning—or the meaninglessness—of life in your grasp. And a rope coils as though around some ideal neck, borrowing the tone of a suppliant power: I have been waiting for you forever, I have watched your terrors, your struggles, and your rages, I have seen your rumpled sheets, the pillow where your fury gnawed, as I have heard the swearwords with which you gratified the gods. Charitable, I sympathize and offer my services. For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair.”

Underside of an Obsession

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.

It is the vain, the fatuous, and the coquettish who, dreading gray hair, wrinkles and the death rattle, fill their daily vacancy with the image of their own carrion: they cherish and despair of themselves; their thoughts flutter between the mirror and the graveyard, and discover in the jeopardized features of their faces truths as serious as those of religion. Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal; so that those obsessed by frivolity prefigure authentically tormented minds. The superficial idler, haunted by the specter of age, is closer to Pascal, Bossuet, or Chateaubriand than a savant quite unconcerned with himself. A touch of genius in vanity: you have the great proud man who finds death hard to deal with—who takes it as a personal offense. Buddha himself, superior to all the sages, was merely fatuous on a divine scale. He discovered death, his death, and, wounded, renounced everything and imposed his renunciation on others. Thus the most terrible and the most futile sufferings are begotten by that crushed pride which, in order to face up to Nothingness, transforms it, out of revenge, into Law.

Epitaph

“He had the pride never to command or to prescribe anything, anyone. Without subalterns, without masters, he neither gave nor received orders. Excluded from the empire of laws and somehow anterior to good and evil, he never made a living soul suffer. The names of things faded from his memory; he looked without seeing, listened without hearing; scents and savors vanished at the approach of his nostrils, his palate. His senses and his desires were his only slaves: hence they felt, desired nothing. He forgot happiness and misery, thirst and fear; and if he happened to recall them, he scorned to name them and thereby to sink to hope or regret. The merest gesture cost him more efforts than it would cost others to establish or overthrow a kingdom. Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die?”

Secularization of Tears

Only since Beethoven has music addressed itself to men: before him, it was concerned only with God. Bach and the great Italians knew nothing of this descent toward the human, this false titanism which has diluted, since the Deaf Man, the purest art. The torsion of the will replaced the suavities; the contradiction of the feelings, the naive flight; frenzy, the disciplined sigh: heaven having vanished from music, man was installed there. Where sin had once spread in gentle tears, it now displayed itself so that declamation overtook prayer, and the romanticism of the Fall triumphed over the harmonious dream of deposition. . . .

Bach: languor of cosmogony; a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend; architecture of our fragilities, positive dissolution—the highest of all—of our will; celestial ruin in Hope; the one mode of destroying ourselves without disaster, and of disappearing without dying. . . .

Is it too late to relearn such dying out? Or must we go on faltering without benefit of the organ’s chords?

Fluctuations of the Will

“Do you know that furnace of the will in which nothing resists your desires, where fatality and gravitation lose their empire and vanish before the magic of your power? Certain that your gaze would revive the dead, that your hand laid upon matter would bring it to life, that stones would shudder at your touch, that every graveyard would blossom in a smile of immortality—you tell yourself: 'From now on there will be nothing but an eternal spring, a dance of wonders, and the end of all sleep. I have brought another fire: the gods pale and the creatures rejoice; consternation has seized upon the vaults, and the din has descended into the very tombs.'

“. . . and the amateur of paroxysms, winded, falls silent only to resume, with the accent of quietism, words of abandon:

“ 'Have you ever experienced that somnolence which is transmitted to things, that slackness which weakens the sap and suggests a triumphant—and eternal—autumn? Even as I pass all hopes drowse, flowers fade, the instincts wither: everything stops willing, everything repents of having willed. And each being whispers to me: “Let someone else have lived my life, God or garter snake. I sigh for a will to inaction, an unreleased infinity, an ecstatic atony of the elements, a hibernation in broad daylight, which would benumb everything, from hog to dragonfly. . . .”’”

Theory of Goodness

Since for you there is no ultimate criterion nor irrevocable principle, and no god, what keeps you from committing any and every crime?

“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action—mother of all the vices—1 am the cause of no one’s suffering. Harmless, without greed, and without enough energy or indecency to affront others, I leave the world as ! found it. To take revenge presupposes a constant vigilance and a systematic mind, a costly continuity, whereas the indifference of forgiveness and contempt renders the hours pleasantly empty. All ethics represent a danger for goodness; only negligence rescues it. Having chosen the phlegm of the imbecile and the apathy of the angel, I have excluded myself from actions and, since goodness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to be good.”

Making Allowances

It requires a considerable amount of unconsciousness to devote oneself unreservedly to anything. Believers, lovers, disciples perceive only one face of their deities, their idols, their masters. The worshipper remains ineluctably naive. Is there a pure feeling which fails to betray the mixture of grace and imbecility, a blissful admiration without an eclipse of the intelligence? The man who glimpses simultaneously all the aspects of a being or a thing remains forever undecided between impulse and stupor. Dissect any belief: what pomp of the heart—and how much turpitude underneath! Infinity dreamed of in the gutter retains, ineffaceable, its imprint, its stench. There is a notary in every saint, a grocer in every hero, a concierge inside the martyr. The depth of sighs conceals a grimace; sacrifices and devotions are mingled with the vapors of the earthly bordello. Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime, but a sublimity inseparable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sanctity of the orifices. . . . It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology, or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous. The waking state in our ravishments alters their flavor and transforms their victim into a visionary trampling ineffable pretexts. We cannot love and know at the same time, without love suffering and expiring under the mind’s gaze. Search your admirations, scrutinize the beneficiaries of your worship and the profiteers of your abandons: under their most disinterested thoughts you will discover self-love, the spur of fame, the thirst for domination and power. All thinkers are action’s eunuchs who take revenge for their failure by the intermediary of concepts. Born this side of the deed, they exalt or decry it, depending on whether they aspire to humanity’s gratitude or that other form of fame: its hatred; they unduly erect their own deficiencies, their own miseries to the rank of laws, their futility to the level of a principle. Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.

Wonders of Vice

Whereas a thinker requires—to dissociate himself from the world—an enormous labor of interrogations, the privilege of a flaw confers from the start a singular destiny. Vice—bestower of solitude—offers the man marked out by it the excellence of a separate condition. Consider the invert: he inspires two contradictory sentiments: disgust and admiration; his “failure” makes him at once inferior and superior to the others; he does not accept himself, constantly justifies himself, invents reasons, torn between shame and pride; yet—enthusiasts of the fatuities of procreation—we go with the herd. Woe to those who have no sexual secrets! How could we divine the fetid advantages of the aberrations? Shall we remain forever the progeniture of nature, victims of her laws, nothing but human trees?

The individual’s deficiencies determine a civilization’s flexibility and subtlety. Rare sensations are conducive to the mind and its vitality: the distracted instinct is located at the antipodes of barbarism. Consequently an impotent man is more complex than a brute with undisturbed reflexes, and realizes better than anyone the essence of mankind, that deserter from zoology, and is enriched by all its inadequacies, all its impossibilities. Suppress vices and flaws, take away carnal disorders, and you will meet no more souls; for what we call by that name is merely a product of inner scandals, a designation of mysterious shames, an idealization of abjection. . . .

In the depths of his naïvete, the thinker envies the possibilities of knowledge open to whatever is contra naturam he believes—not without repulsion—in the privileges of “monsters". . . . Vice being a suffering and the sole form of celebrity worth the trouble, the “vicious” man has to be deeper than the common run, since unspeakably separated from the rest; he begins where the others leave off. . . .

A natural pleasure, taken in what is obvious, cancels itself out, destroys itself in its own means, expires in its actuality, whereas an unwonted sensation is a thought out sensation, a reflection in the reflexes. Vice attains the highest degree of consciousness—without the intermediary of philosophy; but the thinker requires a whole lifetime to arrive at this affective lucidity by which the pervert begins. Yet they resemble one another in their propensity to wrest themselves from the others, though the one strives to do so by meditation while the other merely follows the wonders of his inclination.

The Corrupter

“Where have the hours gone? The memory of a gesture, the mark of a passion, the luster of a risk, a lovely, fugitive madness—nothing of all that in your past; no delirium bears your name, no vice honors you. You have slipped through without a trace; but what was your dream, then?

“I should have liked to sow Doubt into the entrails of the globe, to imbue its substance with Doubt, to enthrone Doubt where the mind never penetrated, and before reaching the marrow of mankind, to shake the calm of stones, to introduce there the insecurity and the anguish of the heart. Architect, I would have built a temple to Ruin; preacher, revealed the farce of prayer; king, hoisted the flag of rebellion. As men cherish a secret craving to repudiate themselves, I should have provoked self-betrayal everywhere, plunged innocence into stupor, multiplied disloyalties, kept the multitude from wallowing in the compost heap of certitudes.”

The Architect of the Caves

Theology, ethics, history, and everyday experience teach us that to achieve equilibrium there is not an infinity of secrets; there is only one: submit “Accept a yoke,” these disciplines all repeat, and you will be happy; be something and you shall be released from your labors.” Indeed, all is task here on earth: professionals of time, functionaries of respiration, dignitaries of hope, a job is waiting for us before we are born: our careers are prepared in the wombs of our mothers. Members of an official universe, we have to occupy a place there, by the mechanism of a rigid fate, which is left vacant only in favor of the mad; they, at least, are not constrained to have a belief, to adhere to an institution, to sustain an idea, to pursue an undertaking. Since society was constituted, those who sought to withdraw from it were persecuted or mocked. You are forgiven everything, provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness. No one has the audacity to exclaim: “I don’t want to do anything!” —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions. To multiply the possibilities of submission, to abdicate his freedom, to kill the vagabond in himself—thus has man refined his slavery and enfeoffed himself to phantoms. Even his scorns and his rebellions have been cultivated only so he can be dominated by them, serf that he is of his attitudes, his gestures, and his moods. Having left the caves, he has kept their superstition; he was their prisoner, and has become their architect. He perpetuates Ms primal condition with more invention and more subtlety, but at bottom, dilating or diminishing his caricature, he plagiarizes himself brazenly enough. A charlatan short of tricks, his contortions, his grimaces still deceive, . . .

Discipline of Atony

Like wax in the sun, I dissolve by day and solidify at night, an alternation which decomposes me and restores me to myself, a metamorphosis in inertia and sloth. . . . Was it here that all I have read and learned was to end, was this the goal of my vigils? Idleness has blunted my enthusiasms, slackened my appetites, enervated my fury. The man who fails to let himself go seems to me a monster: I use up my strength in the apprenticeship to abandon, and train myself in leisure, confronting my whims with the paragraphs of an Art of Putrescence.

Everywhere people who will . . . masquerade of steps hurrying toward mean or mysterious goals; conflicting wills; everyone wills; the mob wills; thousands bent on something, anything. . . . I cannot follow, still less defy them; I stop, stupefied: what marvel inspired them with such energy? Hallucinating mobility: in so little flesh, so much vigor and hysteria! These bacteria that no scruple can calm, that no wisdom can soothe, that no gall can disconcert, . . . They brave dangers with more aplomb than any hero: unconscious apostles of the effective, these saints of the Immediate . . . gods in the carnivals of time. . . .

I turn away, and step off the sidewalks of the world. . . . Yet there was a time when I admired the conquerors and the bees, when I very nearly hoped; but now, movement maddens me, and energy merely grieves. There is more wisdom in letting yourself be carried by the waves than in struggling against them. Posthumous to myself, I remember Time as a kind of child’s play or a lapse of taste. Without desires, without the hours in which to make them bloom, I have only the assurance of having always outlived myself, a fetus devoured by an omniscient idiocy even before his eyelids opened, and stillborn of lucidity. . . .

Supreme Erosion

There is something which rivals the most sordid troll, something dirty, worn, defeated, and which provokes and at the same time disconcerts fury-—a peak of exasperation and an article of every moment: the word, any word, and more precisely the one we make use of. I say: tree, house, me, magnificent, stupid; I could say anything, and I dream of a murderer of all nouns and all adjectives, of all these honorable eructations. Sometimes it seems to me they are dead and no one wants to bury them. Out of cowardice, we still consider them to be alive and go on enduring their smell without holding our noses. Yet they are not, no longer express, anything. When we think of all the mouths they pass through, all the breaths they corrupt, all the occasions on which they were offered, can we still employ a single one without being polluted?

They are tossed to us pre-chewed: yet we would not dream of swallowing food already masticated by others: the material action which corresponds to the use of words turns our stomach; yet all it takes is a moment’s irritation to realize, under any word, an aftertaste of someone else’s saliva.

To refresh language, humanity would have to stop talking: it would resort profitably to signs, or more effectively, to silence. Prostitution of the word is the most visible symptom of its degradation; there is no utterance intact, no pure articulation, and down to the very things signified, everything is corrupted by repetitions. Why would each generation not learn a new idiom, if only to give a new vigor to objects? How love and hate, struggle and suffer with these anemic symbols? “Life,” “death"—metaphysical stereotypes, exhausted enigmas. . . . Man should create another illusion of reality and invent to this end other words, since his own lack blood and, at their stage of agony, there is no transfusion possible.

At the Obsequies of Desire

A tiny cave yawns in each cell . . . We know where diseases set in, their site, the specific weakness of the organs; but this unspecifiable ill . . . this oppression under the weight of a thousand oceans, this desire for an ideally baleful poison. . . .

The vulgarities of renewal, the provocations of the sun, of foliage, of sap. . . . My blood disintegrates when the buds open, when the bird and the beast frolic. . . . I envy the mad, the sleeping dormouse, the bear’s winters, the sage’s dryness; I would exchange for their torpor my agitation, the frenzy of a vague murderer who dreams of crimes this side of blood. And more than them all, how much I envy those emperors of the decadence, sullen and cruel, who were stabbed at the height of their criminal course!

I give myself up to space like a blind man’s tears. Whose will am 1, who wills in me? I wish some demon would- conceive a conspiracy against man: I would join it. Tired of participating in the obsequies of my desires, I should at last have an ideal excuse, for Ennui is the martyrdom of those who live and die for no belief.

Irrefutable Disappointment

Everything confirms it, feeds it; it crowns—knowing, unimpeachable—events, feelings, thoughts; no moment which fails to consecrate it, no impulse which fails to empower it, no reflection which fails to reinforce it. Divinity, whose kingdom is limitless, more powerful than the fatality which serves and illustrates it, hyphen between life and death, it unites, identifies, and feeds on them both. Beside its arguments and verifications, the sciences themselves seem a jumble of whims. Nothing can diminish the fervor of its distastes: what truths, flourishing in a spring of axioms, could defy its visionary dogmatism, its proud insanity? No heat of youth nor even the mind’s derangement resists its certitudes, and its victories are proclaimed with one and the same voice by wisdom and by madness. Before its seamless empire, before its limitless sovereignty, our knees bend: everything begins in ignorance of it, everything ends by yielding to it; no action evades it, none fails to be led back to it. The last word here on earth, it alone does not disappoint. . .

In the Secret of Moralists

When we have stuffed the universe with melancholy, all we have left to light up the mind with is joy, impossible, rare, flashing joy; and it is when we no longer hope that we suffer the fascination of hope. Life—a gift given to the living by those obsessed with death. . . . Since the direction of our thoughts is not that of our hearts, we sustain a secret inclination for all that we trample down. Say a man registers the creaking of the world’s machinery: it is because he has dreamed too much of the resonance of the Spheres; failing to hear them, he abases himself to hear only the din around him. Bitter words emanate from a wounded sensibility, from an offended delicacy. The venom of a La Rochefoucauld, a Chamfort, was the revenge they took on a world designed for brutes. All gall conceals a revenge and is translated into a system: pessimism—that cruelty of the conquered who cannot forgive life for having deceived their expectations.

The gaiety which strikes mortal blows .. . the pleasantry which conceals the dagger under a smile .. . I think of certain ironies of Voltaire, certain retorts of Rivarol, the stinging words of Mme. du Deffand, the jeers which show through so much elegance, the aggressive frivolity of the salons, the sallies which entertain and slaughter, the bitterness contained in an excess of civility. . . . And I think of an ideal moralist—a combination of cynicism and lyric ardor—exalted and icy, vague and incisive, as close to Rousseau’s Reveries as to Lacios' Liaisons, or uniting in himself Vauvenargues and Sade, tact and torment. . . . Observer of mores in himself having no need to seek elsewhere, the least attention on home grounds would show him the contradictions of life, all of whose aspects he would reflect so well that, ashamed of duplication, it would disappear. . . .

No attention whose exercise fails to lead to an act of annihilation: this is the fatality of observation, with all the disadvantages which derive from it for the observer, from the classical moralist down to Proust. Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves A touch of lucidity in the “heart” makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my “neighbor” it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer “myself” if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it. Placed at the antipodes of naïvete, of integral and authentic existence, the moralist exhausts himself in a vis-á-vis with himself and with others: comedian, microcosm of second thoughts, he does not endure the artifice which men, in order to live, spontaneously accept and incorporate in their nature. Everything seems convention: he divulges the motives of feelings and actions, he unmasks the simulacra of civilization, because he suffers at having glimpsed and gone beyond them; for these simulacra give life, they are life, whereas his existence, in contemplating them, strays into the search for a “nature” which does not exist and which, if it did, would be as alien to him as the artifices which have been added to it. All psychological complexity reduced to its elements, explained and dissected, involves an operation much deadlier to the operator than to the victim. We liquidate our feelings by pursuing their detours, and our impulses if we ambush their trajectory; and when we detail the movements of others, it is not they who lose their way. . . . Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.

Monastic Fantasy

Those days when women took the veil to conceal from the world, and as if from themselves, the advances of age, the diminution of their beauty, the fading of their charms . . . when men, weary of fame and ceremony, left the Court to take refuge in devotion. . . . The fashion of conversion for discretion’s sake vanished with the seventeenth century: Pascal’s shadow and Jacqueline’s shade fell, like invisible glamors, over the merest courtesan, over the most frivolous beauty. But Port-Royal has been destroyed forever, and with it, the places favorable to discreet and solitary agonies. No more coquetry of the convent: where now to look, in order to soften our degradations, for a context at once dim and sumptuous? An Epicurean like Saint-Evremond imagined one to his liking, and as comforting and lax as his own savoir-vivre. In those days, one still had to take God into account, adjust Him to disbelief, include Him in solitude. A transaction crammed with charm, irremediably vanished! We lack cloisters as dispossessed, as vacant as our souls, in order to lose ourselves there without the attendance of the heavens, and in a purity of absent ideals, cloisters befitting the disabused angels who, in their fall, by dint of vanquished illusions, would remain still immaculate. We long for a vogue of retreats in an eternity without faith, an assumption of the habit in nothingness, an Order released from mysteries, and from which no “brother” would claim anything, disdaining his salvation even as that of others, an Order of Impossible Salvation. . . .

In Honor of Madness

. . . Better I were distract: So should my thoughts he sever'd front my griefs.

 —King Lear

The exclamation is wrung from Gloucester by Lear’s madness. . . . In order to separate ourselves from our griefs, our last resort is delirium; subject to its distractions, we no longer meet our afflictions: parallel to our pains and adjacent to our melancholies, we divagate in a salutary darkness. When we curse that itch called life, and when we are weary of the scabs of duration, the lunatic’s assurance amid his tribulations becomes a temptation and a model: let some kind fate rid us of our reason! No escape so long as the intellect remains attentive to the heart’s impulses, so long as it does not break the habit! I aspire to the idiot’s nights, to his mineral sufferings, to the bliss of groaning with indifference as if they were someone else’s groans, to the calvary in which we are strangers to ourselves, in which our own cries come from elsewhere, to an anonymous hell where we dance and jeer as we destroy ourselves. To live and die in the third person .. . to be exiled - in myself, to dissociate myself from my name, forever distracted from the man I was .. . to attain at last—since life is endurable only at this price—the wisdom of dementia. . . .

My Heroes

When we are young we look for heroes. I have had mine: Kleist, Karoline von Günderode, Nerval, Otto Weininger. . . . Intoxicated by their suicides, I was certain that they alone had gone to the end, that they drew, in death, the right conclusion from their thwarted or fulfilled loves, from their broken minds or philosophic pain. That a man should survive his passion was enough to make him contemptible or abject in my eyes: which is to say that humanity was superfluous. I discovered in it an infinitesimal number of lofty resolutions and so much compromise with life that I turned away from it, determined to put an end to it all before I was thirty. But as the years went by, I lost the pride of youth: each day, like a lesson in humility, I reminded myself that I was still alive, that I was betraying my dreams among men rotten with . . . life. Exasperated by the expectation of no longer existing, I considered it a duty to cleave my flesh when dawn broke after a night of love, and that it was a nameless degradation to sully by memory an excess of sighs. Or, at other moments, how was one to insult duration further, when one had grasped everything in a dilation which enthrones pride in the very heavens? I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life, that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertia of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide. Even now, I have more esteem for a concierge who hangs himself than for a living poet. Man is provisionally exempt from suicide: that is his one glory, his one excuse. But he is not aware of it, and calls cowardice the courage of those who dared to raise themselves by death above themselves. We are bound together by a tacit pact to go on to the last breath: this pact which cements our solidarity dooms us nonetheless—our entire race is stricken by its infamy. Without suicide, no salvation. Strange! that death, though eternal, has not become part of our “behavior": sole reality, it cannot become a vogue. Thus, as living men, we are all retarded. . . .

The Simple-Minded

Consider the accent with which a man utters the word “truth,” the inflection of assurance or reserve he uses, the expression of believing or doubting it, and you will be edified as to the nature of his opinions and the quality of his mind. No word is emptier; yet men make an idol of it and convert its non-meaning at once into a criterion and a goal of thought. This superstition—which excuses the vulgarian and disqualifies the philosopher—results from the encroachment of hope upon logic. You are told over and over: truth is inaccessible; yet it must be searched for, aspired to, fought over. Behold a restriction which fails to separate you from those who declare they have found it: the main thing is to believe it is possible: to possess truth or to aspire to it are two actions which proceed from one and the same attitude. We make an exception of one word as of another: terrible usurpation of language! I call simple-minded any man who speaks of Truth with conviction: it is because he has capital letters in reserve and employs them naively, without deception, without disdain. As for the philosopher, his slightest indulgence in this idolatry exposes him: the citizen in him has won out over the solitary. Hope emerging from a thought—that saddens us, or makes us smile. . . . There is an indecency about putting too much soul in such words: the childishness of any enthusiasm for knowledge. . . . And it is time that philosophy, casting discredit upon Truth, freed itself from all capital letters.

Poverty: Mental Stimulant

To keep the mind vigilant, there is only coffee, disease, insomnia, or the obsession of death; poverty contributes to this condition in equal measure, if not more effectively: terror of tomorrow as much as that of eternity, money troubles as much as metaphysical fears, exclude repose and oblivion. All our humiliations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. We pay dearly for this cowardice. To be dependent on men, without the vocation of beggars! To abase ourselves before these dressed-up, lucky, infatuated marmosets! To be at the mercy of these caricatures unworthy of contempt! It is the shame of seeking anything which excites the desire to annihilate this planet, with its hierarchies and the degradations they involve. Society is not a disease, it is a disaster: what a stupid miracle that one can live in it! When we contemplate it, between rage and indifference, it becomes inexplicable that no one has been able to demolish its structure, that hitherto there have not been minds desperate and decent enough to raze it to the ground without a trace.

There is more than one resemblance between begging for a coin in the city and waiting for an answer from the silence of the universe. Avarice presides over men’s hearts and over matter. Away with this stingy existence! It hoards money and mysteries: purses are as inaccessible as the depths of the Unknown. But—maybe someday that Unknown will reveal itself and open its treasuries; never, so long as there is blood in his veins, will the Rich Man unearth his wealth. . . . He will confess his shames, his vices, his crimes: he will lie about his fortune; he will make you every confidence, hand you his life: you will not share his last secret, his pecuniary secret. . . .

Poverty is not a transitory state: it coincides with the certainty that, whatever happens, you will never have anything, that you are born on the wrong side of the circuit of goods, that you must struggle for even a breath, and conquer air itself, and hope, and sleep, and that even when society disappears, nature will be no less inclement, no less perverted. No paternal principle watched over the Creation; everywhere, buried treasures; behold the Miser as demiurge, the God on high a sly skinflint. It is He who implanted in you the terror of tomorrow: it is scarcely surprising that religion itself should be a form of this terror.

For the paupers of eternity, poverty is a kind of stimulant they have taken once and for all, without the possibility of an antidote, or a kind of innate awareness which, before any knowledge of life, could describe its inferno. . . .

Invocation to Insomnia

I was seventeen, and I believed in philosophy. What did not relate to philosophy seemed to me either a sin or slops: poets? jugglers good for the amusement of trivial women; action? imbecility in delirium; love, death? low excuses rejecting the honor of concepts. Foul odors of a universe unworthy of the mind’s perfume. . . . The concrete, what an abomination! Delight or suffering, what shames! Only abstraction seemed to palpitate with life: I gave myself up to ancillary exploits lest some nobler object might make me infringe my principles and submit to the degradations of the heart. I told myself over and over: only the brothel is compatible with metaphysics; and I coveted—to escape poetry—the eyes of housemaids, the sighs of whores.

. . . when you came, Insomnia, to shake my flesh and my pride, you who transform the childish brute, give nuance to the instincts, focus to dreams, you who in a single night grant more knowledge than days spent in repose, and, to reddened eyelids, reveal yourself a more important event than the nameless diseases or the disasters of time! You made me hear the snore of health, human beings plunged into sonorous oblivion, while my solitude engrossed the surrounding dark and became huger than the night. Everything slept, slept forever. There was no dawn: I shall lie awake this way until the end of time: they will wait for me then to ask me to account for the blank space of my dreams. . . . Each night was like the others, each night was eternal. And I felt one with all those who cannot sleep, with all those unknown brothers. Like the corrupt and the fanatical, I had a secret; like them I belonged to a clan to which everything could be excused, given, sacrificed: the clan of the sleepless. I granted genius to the first-comer whose eyelids were heavy with fatigue, and admired no mind that could sleep, were it the glory of the State, of Art or of Letters. I would have worshipped a tyrant who—to take revenge on his nights—would have forbidden rest, punished oblivion, prescribed disaster and fevers.

And it was then that I appealed to philosophy; but there is no idea which comforts in the dark, no system which resists those vigils. The analyses of insomnia undo all certainties. Weary of such destruction, I came to the point of telling myself: no more vacillation, sleep or die . . . reconquer sleep or disappear. . . .

But this reconquest is no easy matter: when you come close to it, you realize how deeply you have been marked by the nights. You love? . . . your impulses will be forever corrupted; you will emerge from each “ecstasy” like a scarecrow of pleasure; you will confront the glances of your too immediate companion with a criminal countenance; you will answer her sincere gestures with the irritations of an envenomed pleasure; her innocence with a guilty poetry, for everything for you will become poetry, but a poetry of transgression. . . . Crystalline ideas, happy sequence of thoughts? You will not think any more: it will be an explosion, a lava of concepts, without consequence and without order, a vomit of aggressive concepts spewed from your guts, punishments the flesh inflicts upon itself, the mind being a victim of the humors and out of the question. . . . You will suffer from everything, and to excess: the winds will seem gales; every touch a dagger, smiles, slaps; trifles, cataclysms. Waking may come to an end, but its light survives within you; one does not see in the dark with impunity, one does not gather its lessons without danger; there are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover. . . .

Profile of the Wicked Man

What is responsible for his not having done more evil than he might or must, for his not committing murder, wreaking subtler vengeances, for not having obeyed the injunctions of the blood rushing to his head? His moods, his education? Certainly not, and still less a native goodness; but merely the presence of the idea of death. Inclined to forgive no one anything, he pardons all; the slightest insult arouses his instincts; he forgets it the next moment. Enough for him to imagine his own corpse and to apply this method to others in order to be suddenly soothed; the figure of what decomposes makes him good—and cowardly: no wisdom (nor charity) without macabre obsessions. The healthy man, proud of existing, takes his revenge, listens to his blood and his nerves, heeds his prejudices, answers, blow for blow, and kills. But the mind undermined by the fear of death no longer reacts to external solicitations: it sketches out actions and leaves them unfinished; reflects upon honor, and loses it . . . tries out passions, and dissects them. . . . This dread which accompanies its gestures enervates their vigor; its desires expire before the vision of universal insignificance. Filled with hatred by necessity, unable to be so by conviction, the plots and crimes of such a man are halted in mid-course; like all men, he conceals a murderer inside himself, but a murderer imbued with resignation, and too weary to crush his enemies or to create new ones. He dreams, forehead on his dagger, and as though disappointed, before they happen, by every crime; considered a good man by everyone, he would be wicked if he did not find it futile to be so.

Views on Tolerance

Signs of life: cruelty, fanaticism, intolerance; sighs of decadence: amenity, understanding, indulgence. .. . So long as an institution is based on strong instincts, it admits neither enemies nor heretics: it massacres, burns, or imprisons them. Stakes, scaffolds, prisons! it is not wickedness which invented them, but conviction, any utter conviction. Once a belief is established the police will guarantee its “truth” sooner or later. Jesus—once he wanted to triumph among men—should have been able to foresee Torquemada, ineluctable consequence of Christianity translated into history. And if the Lamb failed to anticipate the torturer of the Cross, his future defender, then he deserves his nickname. By the Inquisition, the Church proved that it still possessed enormous vitality; similarly, the kings by their “royal will” All authorities have their Bastille: the more powerful an institution, the less humane. The energy of a period is measured by the beings that suffer in it, and it is by the victims it provokes that a religious or political belief is affirmed, bestiality being the primal characteristic of any success in time. Heads fall where an idea prevails; it can prevail only at the expense of other ideas and of the heads which conceived or defended them.

History confirms skepticism; yet it is and lives only by trampling over it; no event rises out of doubt, but all considerations of events lead to it and justify it. Which is to say that tolerance—supreme good on earth—is at the same time the supreme evil To admit all points of view, the most disparate beliefs, the most contradictory opinions, presupposes a general state of lassitude and sterility. Whence we arrive at this miracle: the adversaries coexist—but precisely because they can no longer be adversaries; opposing doctrines recognize each other’s merits because none has the vigor to assert itself. A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed. An absolute perishes: a vague glow of earthly paradise appears, a fugitive gleam, for intolerance constitutes the law of human affairs. Collectivities are reinforced only under tyrannies, and disintegrate in a regime of clemency; then, in a burst of energy, they begin to strangle their liberties and to worship their jailers, crowned or commoners.

The periods of fear predominate over those of calm; man is much more vexed by the absence than by the profusion of events; thus History is the bloody product of his rejection of boredom.

Sartorial Philosophy

With what tenderness, and what jealousy, my thoughts turn toward the desert fathers and toward the cynics! The abjection of owning the merest object: this table, this bed, these rags. . . . Clothes get between us and nothingness. Look at your body in a mirror: you will realize that you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs as though across a guitar, and you will see how close you are to the grave. It is because we are dressed that we entertain immortality: how can we die when we wear a necktie? The corpse that decks itself out fails to recognize itself, and imagining eternity, appropriates that illusion. Flesh covers the skeleton, clothes cover the flesh: subterfuge of nature and of man, instinctive and conventional deceptions: a gentleman cannot be kneaded of clay and dust. . . . Dignity, decency—so many escapes in the face of the irremediable. And when you put on a hat, who would say that you have sojourned among entrails or that the worms will gorge on your fat?

. . . This is why I shall abandon these rags and, casting away the mask of my days, flee the time when, in collusion with the others, I strive to betray myself. There was a time when solitaries stripped themselves of everything, in order to identify with themselves; in the desert or in the street, delighting in their nakedness, they attained to the supreme fortune: they were the equals of the dead. . . .

Among the Dregs

To console myself for the remorse of sloth, I take the path to the lower depths, impatient to degrade myself and identify with the gutter. I know these grandiloquent, stinking, sneering bums; engulfed in their filth, I take my pleasure in their fetid breath no less than in their verve. Pitiless for those who succeed, their genius for doing nothing compels admiration, though the spectacle they afford is the saddest in the world: poets without talent, whores without clients, businessmen without a penny, lovers without glands, inferno of women no one wants. . . . Behold then, I tell myself, man’s negative fulfillment, behold, laid bare, this being who pretends to a divine lineage, pathetic counterfeiter of the absolute. . . . Here is where he was to end, in this spitting image of himself, mud God never laid a hand on, beast no angel has a part in, infinity begotten in moans, soul risen out of a spasm. .. . I contemplate that dim despair of spermatozoa that have reached their end, these funeral countenances of the race. I am reassured: I have a way to go still. . . . Then I am frightened: shall I too fall so low? And I hate that toothless crone, this rhymer without verses, these impotents of love and affairs, these models of the dishonor of the mind and the flesh. . . . The man’s eyes overwhelm me; I wanted to reap, on contact with these wrecks, a harvest of pride; I take away a shudder like the one a living man would experience who, to delight in not being dead, pilfered a coffin. . . .

On an Entrepreneur of Ideas

He tries everything, and for him everything succeeds; nothing of which he is not the contemporary. So much vigor in the artifices of the intellect, so much readiness to confront all the realms of the mind and of fashion-—from metaphysics to movies—dazzles, must dazzle. No problem resists him, no phenomenon is foreign to him, no temptation leaves him indifferent. He is a conqueror, and has but one secret: his lack of emotion; nothing keeps him from dealing with anything, since he does so with no accent of his own. His constructions are magnificent, but without salt: categories swell with intimate experiences, classified as in a file of disasters or a catalogue of anxieties. Here are ranged the tribulations of man, as well as the poetry of his laceration. The Irremediable has turned into a system, even a side show, displayed like an article of common commerce, a true mass product of anguish. The public delights in it; the nihilism of the boulevard and the bitterness of the café feed on it.

Thinker without fate, infinitely empty and marvelously ample, he exploits his thought, wants it to be on every mouth. No destiny pursues him: born in the age of materialism, he would have followed its facility and given it an unimaginable extension; out of romanticism he would have constituted a Summa of reveries; appearing in the world of theology, he would have wielded God like any other concept. His skill in confronting the great problems is disconcerting: everything is remarkable, except authenticity. Basically non-poet, if he speaks of nothingness, he lacks its shudder; his disgusts are pondered; his exasperations controlled and invented after the fact; but his will, supernaturally effective, is at the same time so lucid, that he could be a poet if he wanted to, and I should add, a saint, if he insisted. . . . Having neither preferences nor oppositions, his opinions are accidents; one regrets that he believes in them; only the movement, the method, of his thought is of interest. Were I to hear Mm preach from the pulpit I would not be surprised, so true is it that he locates himself beyond all truths, masters them, so that none is necessary or organic to him. . . .

Advancing like an explorer, he conquers realm after realm; his steps no less than his thoughts are enterprises; his brain is not the enemy of his instincts; he rises above the rest, having suffered neither fatigue nor that vehement mortification which paralyzes desire. Son of a period, he expresses its contradictions, its futile dilation; and when he flung himself forward in its conquest, he employed so much pertinacity and stubbornness that his success and his renown equal those of the sword and rehabilitate the mind by means which, hitherto, were hateful or unknown to it.

Truths of Temperament

Confronting thinkers without pathos, character, and intensity, who model themselves on the forms of their time, appear others of whom we feel that appearing whenever, they would have been the same, themselves, unconcerned by their age, drawing their thoughts from their own depths, from the specific eternity of their flaws. They take from their environment only the surface, a few peculiarities of style, a few characteristic turns of a given development. In love with their fate, they suggest explosions, tragic and solitary figurations, something between apocalypse and psychiatry. A Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, had they appeared in the most anodyne age, would have had no less tremulous, no less incendiary an inspiration. They perished in their flames; a few centuries earlier, they would have perished in those of the stake: vis-a-vis general truths, they were predestined to heresy It matters little that one be engulfed in one’s own fire or in that kindled for you: the truths of temperament must be paid for in one way or another. The viscera, the blood, the miseries, and the vices converge to beget them. Impregnated with subjectivity, we perceive a self behind each of them: everything becomes confession: a shriek of the flesh is at the source of the most banal utterance; even a theory of impersonal appearance serves only to betray its author, his secrets, his sufferings: no universality which is not his mask: even logic, everything is an excuse for his autobiography; his “self” has infested ideas, his anguish has been converted into a criterion, into the sole reality.

Flayed Alive

What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges—the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet—horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst he would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one. . . . Crime glistens in his eyeballs; his hands tighten in vain to strangle. Life is transmitted like a leprosy: too many creatures for a single murderer. It is in the nature of the man who cannot kill himself to seek revenge against whatever enjoys existing. And failing, he mopes like a damned soul infuriated by impossible destructions. A discarded Satan, he weeps, pounds his breast, bows his head; the blood he wanted to shed fails to redden his own cheeks whose pallor reflects his disgust with that secretion of hopes produced by the advancing species. His great dream was to destroy the days of Creation .. . he renounces his dream, collapses into himself, and yields to the elegy of his own failure: another order of excess is the result. His skin burns: fever fills the universe; his brain is on fire: the air is inflammable. His ills fill sidereal space; his griefs make the poles tremble. And whatever is allusion to existence, the most imperceptible breath of life, wrings from him a cry which compromises the music of the spheres and the movement of the stars.

Incompatibilities

A mind compels us only by its incompatibilities, by the tension of its movements, by the divorce of its opinions from its inclinations. Marcus Aurelius, engaged on remote expeditions, tends more toward the idea of death than toward that of the Empire; Julian, made emperor, regrets his contemplative life, envies the sages, and wastes his nights polemicizing against the Christians; Luther, with a vandal’s vitality, sinks and mopes in the obsession of sin, and without finding an equilibrium between his delicacies and his crudities; Rousseau, who mistakes his instincts, lives only in the idea of his sincerity; Nietzsche, whose entire oeuvre is nothing but a hymn to power, drags out a sickly existence of a poignant monotony. . . .

For a mind matters only to the degree that it deceives itself as to what it wants, what it loves, or what it hates; being several, it cannot choose itself. A pessimism without raptures, an agitator of hopes without bitterness, deserves only scorn. Only the man who has no regard for his past, for propriety, logic, or consideration is worthy of our attachment: how can we love a conqueror if he fails to plunge into events with a suspicion of failure, or a thinker if he has not conquered his instinct for self-preservation? Man fallen back on his futility is no longer concerned with the desire to have a life. .. . If he were to have one, or were not—would concern the others. . . . Apostle of his fluctuations, he no longer encumbers himself with an ideal identity; his temperament constitutes his sole doctrine, and the whim of the moment his sole knowledge.

Restoration of a Cult

Having eroded my quality as a man, nothing is any longer of any value. Everywhere all I see are animals with an ideal that herd together to bleat their hopes. . . . Even those who did not live together are constrained to do so like ghosts, or else to what end have we conceived the “communion” of saints? In pursuit of a true solitary, I scrutinize the ages, and I find there, and envy there, only the Devil. . . . Reason banishes him, the heart craves him. . . . Spirit of lies, Prince of darkness, the Evil One, the Enemy—how sweet it is to murmur the names that flayed his solitude! And how I cherish him since his daily relegation! If only I could re-establish him in his primal state! I believe in him with all my incapacity to believe. His company is necessary to me: a lonely being tends toward the loneliest being—toward the One. . . . I owe it to myself to tend toward him: my power to admire—fearing to remain unemployed—compels me to it. Behold me confronting my model; attaching myself to him, I punish my solitude for not being total, I forge out of it another which transcends it: it is my way of being humble. . . .

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

We Troglodytes

Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation. This is even more the case in the succession of centuries: the Renaissance could not “save” the depth, the phantoms, the genre of savagery of the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment in its turn preserved only the sense of the universal from the Renaissance, without the pathos which marked its physiognomy. The modern illusion has plunged man into the swoons of becoming: he has lost his footing in eternity, his “substance.” Every conquest, spiritual or political, implies a loss; every conquest is an affirmation . . . but a murderous one. In the realm of art—the only one in which we can speak of the life of the mind—an “ideal” is established only on the ruins of its predecessor: each true artist is a traitor to his forebears. . . . There is no superiority in history: republic-monarchy; romanticism-classicism; liberalism-autocracy; naturalism-abstraction; irrationalism-intellectualism—institutions, like currents of thought and feeling, are of equal worth. No form of mind can assume another; we are something only by exclusion: no one can reconcile order and disorder, abstraction and immediacy, impulse and fatality. The periods of synthesis are not creative: they summarize the fervor of the others, a confused, chaotic résumé—every eclecticism being an indication of an ending.

Every step forward is followed by a step back: this is the unfruitful oscillation of history—a stationary . . . becoming. That man should have let himself be duped by the mirage of Progress is what renders his claims to subtlety absurd. Progress? Perhaps we can find it in hygiene. . . . But anywhere else? In scientific discoveries? After all, no more than deadly glories. . . . Who, in good faith, could choose between the stone age and the age of modern weapons? As close to the ape in one as in the other, we scale the clouds for the same reasons we shinnied up trees: the means of our curiosity pure or criminal are all that have changed, and—with disguised reflexes—we are more diversely rapacious. A mere whim to accept or reject a period: we must accept or reject history en bloc. The notion of progress makes us all dolts on the pinnacles of time; but these pinnacles do not exist: the troglodyte who trembled with fear in the caves still trembles in the skyscrapers. Our capital of misery remains intact down through the ages; yet we have one advantage over our ancestors: that of having invested our capital better, since our disaster is better organized.

Physiognomy of a Failure

Monstrous dreams inhabit groceries and churches: I have come across no one who did not live in delirium. Since the merest desire conceals a source of insanity, it is enough to conform to the instinct of self-preservation to deserve the asylum. Life—a fit of lunacy throttling matter. .. . I breathe: enough to be put away. . . . Incapable of attaining to the lucidities of death, I crawl in the shadow of the days, and I yet am only by the will no longer to be. . . .

Once I thought I could crush space with a blow of my fist, play with the stars, halt time or wield it according to my whim. The great captains seemed to me the great cowards, the poets, wretched stammerers; not knowing the resistance things, men, and words offer us, and supposing I felt more than the universe allowed, I gave myself up to a suspect infinity, to a cosmogony resulting from a puberty unfit to end itself. . . . How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind! And with how many illusions must I have been born in order to be able to lose one every day! Life is a miracle bitterness destroys.

The interval separating me from my corpse is a wound; yet I aspire in vain to the seductions of the grave: unable to rid myself of anything, to cease breathing either, everything in me suggests that the worms will be out of work when they get to my instincts As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad. . . .

Procession of Sub-Men

Committed beyond his means, beyond his instincts, man has ended up in an impasse. He has burned his bridges . . . to catch up with his conclusion; animal without a future, he has foundered in his ideal, he has worsted himself at his own game. Having ceaselessly sought to transcend himself, he is paralyzed; and his only remaining resource is to recapitulate his follies, to expiate them, and to commit a few more. . . .

Yet there are some to whom even this resource remains forbidden: “Unaccustomed to being men,” they murmur, “do we still belong to a tribe, a race, a breed? So long as we had the prejudice of life, we espoused an error which kept us on a footing with the others. . . . But we have escaped the race. . . . Our lucidity, crumbling our skeleton, has reduced us to a limp existence—invertebrate rabble stretching out on matter to corrupt it with slobber. Behold us among the slime, behold us at that laughable end where we pay for having misused our faculties and our dreams. . . . Life was not our lot: at the very moments when we were drunk with life, all our joys came from our transports above it; taking revenge, life lugs us toward its lower depths: procession of sub-men toward a sub-life. . . ”

Quousque Eadem?

Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe— where nonetheless everything repeats itself—will it never come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: “I loathe this life I idolize?” The nullity of our deliriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain.

E. M. CIORAN

A Short History of Decay