I have never objected to any man's mediocrity ...

 

In 1949, I was introduced to the poet Ezra Pound, who was at that time an inmate of St. Elizabeths Hospital. There had been conflicting reports as to his mental condition; that is to say, the reports of the government psychiatrists, and the reports of everyone else who knew him. The hospital officials avoided the issue by describing him to prospective visitors quite honestly as a "political prisoner". In the interests of national security, Pound was being kept under guard by the Federal Bureau of Health, Education and Welfare. I also was a ward of the government. My status as a veteran of the Second World War had won me paid subsistence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington.
*
In reality, persons under observation for mental illness are immediately deprived of all their civil rights, a dilemma that the writers of the Constitution unfortunately overlooked. It has been very simple for bureaucrats to designate their critics as being "mentally ill", and to shut them away from the eyes of the world in the various Bastilles that have been built for that purpose. No one dares to intervene on behalf of a person who is "mentally ill". It is much safer to be a Communist or a hoodlum. The sculptor John B. Flannagan, who was a patient at Bloomingdale Hospital in New York (reputedly one of the best in the country), wrote of his experiences, "There are actually more legal safeguards for a felon than checks on the psychiatrist to whom civil liberty is a joke."

The superintendent of St. Elizabeths, Dr. Winfred Overholser, was a genial type who wished the patients to help him create the atmosphere of a Y M C A summer camp, but the assorted rapists, dope addicts, and political prisoners refused to cooperate. The staff employed the latest methods of "therapy" (which were constantly changing), such as acting out one's repressions, without weapons of course.
*
The medical techniques used at St. Elizabeths are regarded as incredibly backward and inhumane by more advanced European physicians. Although the members of the staff no longer cure "mental illness" by removing the entire large intestine, this was a popular remedy there until the Second World War. The superstitious doctors of several decades ago believed that mental disorder was caused by bacteria in the gut, the bacteria that in reality are responsible for the osmotive digestive process. The operation had no visible effect on the patients' mental capacities, but more than eighty per cent of them died from its aftereffects.
*
Psychiatrists comprise a fascinating group for future study in the field of mental disorder. Dr. Overholser's predecessor at St. Eliza-beths had been shot dead by his wife while he was sitting in an automobile with his mistress in front of a fashionable dress shop on Washington's F Street. A few months later, a series of brutal muggings and rapes, committed by employees of St. Elizabeths, had moved a Washington editor to complain that the attendants should be locked up at night with the patients, and that they should not be allowed to come into the city.
*
In the preface to one of Robert Harborough Sherard's books, Lord Alfred Douglas writes, "I always had an instinctive feeling that once Oscar Wilde had been sent to prison, prison became the obvious goal for any self-respecting poet, and I never rested until I got there. It took me about twenty-five years to do it, but I succeeded in the end, and I did six months' imprisonment in the Second Division for libelling Mr. Winston Churchill about the battle of Jutland. The result is that I am one of the very few Englishmen of letters now living, or who has been living since 1895, who can go to bed every night without feeling more or less ashamed of being an Englishman."
*
The use of the term "mental illness" as a weapon to dispose of political opponents is by no means rare in American history. A recent book, The Trial of Mary Todd Lincoln, by James A. Rhodes and Dean Jauchius (Indianapolis, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, exposes the rigged insanity trial of President Lincoln's widow to invalidate the possible influence of her son, Robert Todd Lincoln, in the elections of 1876. As soon as they were over, and only two hours after the results were known, Mrs. Lincoln was given a new sanity hearing and released. As Rex Lampman said of the inmates of St. Elizabeths, "Most of these people are here because somebody wants them to be here."
*
Many people who would have liked to visit him were fearful of doing so because they had to apply by letter. Since Ezra had been accused of treason against the present office-holders, those who visited him incurred considerable risk. A visitor might be promptly investigated by government agents, and some of them lost their jobs.

Later on, journalists began to carp about the fact that some of Pound's visitors were anarchists or other types of extremists, the forerunners of the beatniks. But people who had something to lose could not afford to visit Pound and incur the inevitable penalties. Despite the fact that many literate persons who occupied subordinate positions in the government read and admired Pound's work, none of them dared to visit him. Even Huntingdon Cairns, who holds a fairly lofty post at the National Gallery, would only risk seeing Pound a few times during the twelve and a half years of his imprisonment in Washington.

Consequently, Pound's visitors could be divided into two groups, the youthful and reckless art students, or beatniks, and those admirers of his work who came from other countries and were therefore immune to reprisals by the federal government. This group included scholars and diplomats from almost every country in the world except Russia.
*
The tragedy of the First World War, which signified the down-fall of an orderly Western civilization, spurred Pound to seek justice. It is impossible for the artist to complete himself, or do significant work, without committing himself to this struggle. Sooner or later, he will be asked to become a lackey to the existing order, regardless of that order's merits. His life then becomes a precarious existence, if he chooses to carry on without submitting, or an empty one, if he surrenders.
*
Archibald MacLeish described the scene in a review that ap-peared in the New York Times, December 16, 1956:

". . . Not everyone has seen Pound in the long dim corridor inhabited by the ghosts of men who cannot be still, or who can be still too long. . . . When a conscious mind capable of the most complete human awareness is incarcerated among minds which are not conscious and cannot be aware, the enforced association produces a horror which is not relieved either by the intelligence of doctors or by the tact of administrators or even by the patience and kindliness of the man who suffers for it. You carry the horror away with you like the smell of the ward in your clothes, and whenever afterward you think of Pound or read his lines, a stale sorrow afflicts you."
*
He informed us that it would be impossible for Reck to see Pound without going through the requisite preliminaries, as Pound was "a political prisoner".

Ezra was delighted to learn that the officials were being so frank about his status, and it gave me new insight into the opposition of the state that held him in bondage. As I plunged deeper into the  study of his work, I was forced to take into account the entire circumstances that had led him to make the broadcasts from Italy, resulting in his indictment on a charge of treason. I learned that he could have avoided the indictment by renouncing his American citizenship, but he had purposely refused to make this sacrifice, for behind his every act was his loyalty to his country.
*

The basis of Ezra's struggle against bureaucracy—his "treason" if you will—is based on two fundamental concepts: "the state as convenience" and the tax system as "legalized robbery". It is no wonder that his captors put him in a madhouse for thirteen years.

No doubt, he would have been shot had they not feared that this would only accelerate the circulation of his ideas. For they are his ideas. I fail to discover in Plato or Pascal anything so obvious, even though these abuses already existed, in a lesser degree, during their lifetimes.
Ezra once said to me, "I did not understand, until I read Confucius, the impact of one man upon another." He suggests that Confucius is the philosophical base for many of his ideas, as explained in the editorial in The Exile of Autumn, 1927:

"The dreary horror of American life can be traced to two damnable roots, or perhaps it is only one root: 1. the loss of all distinction between public and private affairs. 2. the tendency to mess into other people's affairs before establishing order in one's own affairs, and in one's thought. To which one might perhaps add the lack in America of any habit of connecting or correlating any act or thought to any main principle whatever, the ineffable rudder-lessness of that people. The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius, it consists of establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without special effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other people's affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, as far as I know, by any monotheistic religion. Many 'mystics' do not even aim at the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic relationship with the unknown. The original Quakers may have had  some adumbration of the good principle. (But no early Quaker texts are available in this village.)" Ezra's preference for Confucian principles is based upon his statement that "It is the only system which shows a concern with social order." This explains why he has devoted so many years to giving us the thought of Confucius in digestible language. In his translation entitled The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest of Confucius, he says, "Finding the precise word for the inarticulate heart's tone means not lying to oneself, as in the case of hating a bad smell or loving a beautiful person, also called respecting one's own nose. On this account the real man has to look his heart in the eye even when he is alone.

"You improve the old homestead by material riches and irrigation; you enrich and irrigate the character by the process of looking straight into the heart and then acting on the results. Thus the mind becomes your palace and the body can be at ease; it is for this reason that the great gentleman must find the precise verbal expression for his inarticulate thoughts.

"That is the meaning of the saying: If a man does not discipline himself he cannot bring order into the home.

"One humane family can humanize a whole state; one courteous family can lift a whole state into courtesy; one grasping and perverse man can drive a nation into chaos. Such are the seeds of movement . . . (semina motuum, the inner impulses of the tree). That is what we mean by: one word will ruin the business, one man can bring the state to an orderly course."

These pithy excerpts, chosen at random from many such thoughts presented in Ezra's Chinese translations, explain what he wants to give to us. The greatest human problem, and the one most fraught with difficulties, is the problem of communicating with others, and here civilization is always put to the ultimate test. "The inarticulate heart's tone," that beautiful phrase for the melody of the being, depends upon not lying to oneself, a much more demanding precept than the conventional admonition that one should not lie to others.

We have seen in recent years the terrible truth in the Confucian saying "One humane family can humanize a whole state." Russell Kirk has written graphically of the decay of the great houses in  England and Scotland, those manifestations of a culture that now lie roofless to the weather, symbolizing the vanished glories of their builders as well as the present apathy of the village inhabitants. The strength of the shire, and its ability to produce people who emigrated to various parts of the world and distinguished themselves, notably in America, was centered in the "humane family" occupying the great house, and their humane influence pervaded the entire community. Now that good manners have been equated with tyranny, the villagers have returned to the graces of their cattle.

The American South also has benefited by the influence of the "great house" and its humane influence. Now that most of its mansions are in decay, or restored and in the hands of "Yankees", the influence is hardly discernible, although traces of it linger in speech and minor courtesies.
Ezra's translations of Confucius were not widely reviewed in the United States because the first mention of the word "order" in contemporary intellectual circles is equivalent to the cry of "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Everyone dashes for the exits. Confucius states (and this is out of context) that "One man can bring the state to an orderly course." By this he means one "humane" man, not a Fascist dictator. Confucius treats of the "gentleman in government", not the egomaniac.

The history of modern Europe might have been quite different had Mr. Hitler been able to bring order into his thought, but he is seldom criticized on that ground, perhaps because many self-styled liberals think in the same irregular fashion that he did. Their minds proceed in a sort of Cinerama, at one moment whirling down the roller-coaster of psychoanalysis, and the next moment drifting in a balloon over Paris.

Fighting this trend, Ezra Pound was driven further and further from his homeland, geographically speaking, but at the same time, he was drifting closer to his roots. At least he came to an under-standing of those Confucian gentlemen of the early Republic, Mr. Washington and Mr. Adams, whose virtu stemmed from the humane families of Great Britain.
*
Pound appended a long list of editorial suggestions, containing such pointed items as the following:

"1. All bureaucrats should be drowned. All interference in human affairs by people paid to interfere ought to be stopped."

"2. Le style c'est homme. Knowledge of this simple fact would have saved us from Woodie Wilson."

"3. All officials in the State dept. ought to be vacuum-cleaned." Pound antedated Joe McCarthy's assault on the State Department by more than two decades. Despite this warning, no improvements were made until the lad from Wisconsin came onto the  scene. As for Woodie Wilson, his style did not alert the American public against him, perhaps because no one ever read his dry historical writings.

In October, 1951, Ezra wrote me a note on Wilson: "From perusal of House's and Wilson's own writing it is difficult to form an estimate of their ethics, that is to say, they may have thought themselves honest. They did not believe in democracy or in representative of government. Like all men who have respected Alex. Hamilton they believed in financial oligarchy and dictatorship. They played into the hands of international usury and control of that most vital 'instrument of policy' the issue of purchasing power.

This they imposed on an unconscious public. There is not the slightest shadow of doubt that they knew their acts to be serious, vide House Memoirs, where the Reserve Board is considered (as) important as the Supreme Court of the nation. As an historian Woodrow is second only to Parson Weems, and shows no curiosity regarding the colonial period."
*

Ezra founded a short-lived magazine in Italian, L'Indice, and advertised in the Genoese press for Italian writers, with little success. His efforts to rouse his countrymen from their seemingly hopeless state of mental torpor were not confined to the young. He wrote to his old English professor, Dr. Felix E. Schelling, at the University of Pennsylvania:

"Dear Doc Schelling, As one of the most completely intolerant men I have ever met, the joke is on you if you expected to teach anyone liberality. As for my being embittered, it won't wash; everybody who comes near me marvels at my good nature. Besides, what does it matter to me personally? I don't get scratched by it, but the howls of pain that reach me from the pore bastids that are screwed down under it and who have no outlet, save in final desperation writing to some-one in Europe . . . I have never objected to any man's mediocrity, it is the idiotic fear that a certain type of mediocrity has in the presence of any form of the real. And the terror of newspaper owners, professors, editors, etc. in the presence of idea. I have documents stacked high, from men in most walks of life. Proved over and over again. No intellectual life in the univs. No truth in the press. Refusal to look at fact. It is nonsense to talk about my being embittered. I've got so much plus work going on that I have difficulty in remembering what particular infamy I wrote you about. . . . What little life has been kept in American letters has been largely due to a few men getting out of the muck and keeping the poor devils who couldn't at least informed. . . . You ain't so old but what you wouldn't wake up. And you are too respected and respectable for it to be any real risk. They can't  fire you now. Why the hell don't you have a bit of real fun before you get tucked under? Damn it all, I never did dislike you."
*
He spent some time with an old friend, Congressman George Holden Tinkham, who is referred to as "Uncle George" in the Cantos. He had met Tinkham years ago in Europe, for Tinkham, the only bearded member of Congress, usually went abroad at campaign time and let his opponent talk himself into defeat. As a visiting Congressman, he had been allowed to fire the first American shot against the Austrians when the United States went to war against the Central Powers in 1917. Pound mentions in the Cantos that he and Uncle George tried to find the exact spot, years later, but the road had been blown off the mountainside.

A descendant of a Mayflower family, Tinkham represented the 11th Massachusetts District—including Newton and the fashionable Back Bay—from 1915 to 1943, when he retired. He was a colorful figure in Washington, and his office was filled with mementoes of his travels, including stuffed heads of game animals, African shields, and a picture of himself from a London news-paper. This last was an item listing the ten most prominent Negroes in America. Tinkham's name was among them, because one of his constituents had put him down as an honorary member of a Negro group in Boston. Tinkham found amusement in his visitors' reaction to this item.

Despite the fact that he enjoyed being a member of the ruling class, Tinkham accomplished some noteworthy acts during his terms of service. It was he who noticed the clause in the League of Nations bill that would have caused us to abnegate our sovereignty. He immediately rushed to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge's office, and told him about it. As Ezra describes the occasion in the Cantos, "and he knew there'd be one hell of a fight in the Senate." Lodge was subsequently memorialized as the man who led the fight against the bill and defeated it, winning for himself the title of the "founder of isolationism", or some such term.

Tinkham also made an amazing prediction in 1934, which was noted by the press, and quickly forgotten. He declared that Roosevelt's recovery program would be a complete failure, and that the President would have to take us into war in order to cover up his failure. As Herbert Hoover pointed out, after the event, in the third volume of his Memoirs, this is exactly what happened.
Tinkham did approve of one Roosevelt deed—repeal. He was one of the most steadfast fighters against prohibition. 

Family investments in South African gold mines gave Tinkham a comfortable fortune. Ezra says that when "Tink" showed his letter of credit to the manager of an Italian bank, the man salaamed to the floor. And, to fix the situation in my mind, Ezra repeated the man's gesture of obeisance to money.

At Ezra's suggestion, I went to the Harvard Club in 1952 to see "Tink". With his typical enthusiasm for a campaign, Ezra had drafted no less than three letters to "Tink", the last of which had been signed by me, in order to set up the appointment. It had been decided that I was to write Tinkham's biography, which would be one of considerable interest, and that the wealthy old bachelor should finance the enterprise. "Tink" was easily the most interesting personality at the Club, openly contemptuous of the young Harvard men who were paralyzed at the sight of him. His beard was as raffish and his eyes as bright as they must have been when Ezra first set eyes on him.

We spent some pleasant hours together, but nothing came of the proposed book. Tinkham was not much interested in whether anyone knew what he had done for his country or not. He was then in his eighties, he had twenty million dollars, and he intended to live out his life as he had always lived it, enjoying it to the full.

Shortly after I talked with him, he went to Europe again. In 1956, he died, leaving only one survivor, a sister who was wealthier than himself, and who lived on top of a mountain in North Carolina. His money went to a children's home in Boston.

From
This Difficult Individual, Ezra Pound By  E U S T A C E   M U L L I N S

Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary

Yeats had recently come through a harrowing experience with the self-professed master of black magic, Alistair Crowley. The two men, both interested in psychic phenomena, had founded a Society for Psychical Research. They set up a "temple" in order to perform their works, but Yeats soon discovered that he, a practitioner of beneficial "white magic", had been lured into an association with a practitioner of evil, or "black magic".

To counteract Crowley's baneful activities, Yeats moved into "the Temple". A titanic struggle for the soul of one of the members ended in a draw between the master of white magic and the lord of black magic. Tiring of the contest, Crowley decided to move to the Continent. He insisted on selling all of the furnishings of "the Temple" before he left, with the proceeds to be divided between the two founders. Yeats refused to let him enter "the Temple", and Crowley, finding his black magic insufficient for the purpose, re-sorted to the courts. The lawsuit was grist for Crowley's mill, but Yeats found the court battle very upsetting.
*
Although Maud Gonne was willing to smoke hashish with Yeats, she was not willing to marry him. Each time that he was rebuffed, he went back to his verses with renewed determination. Perhaps poets should not consummate their love affairs.
*
Fletcher, a shy, neurotic youth who was determined to become a poet, had taken rooms near George Bernard Shaw in Adelphi Terrace, but he could never muster the courage to call upon him.
He led a solitary life during his first year in London. He had met a few would-be writers at Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop, but they could not afford to dine with him at the expensive French restaurant where he usually took his meals. He ate alone, reading at table.

In 1910, Fletcher brought out five small volumes of his poetry, engaging four separate London publishers for the work. He paid the entire costs of publication himself, and hopefully sent the books to critics. There was no enthusiastic reception, such as had greeted Pound, for the poems, although well-written, offered nothing new.

Most of the recipients did review them, and the unsold copies were kept in storage until the outbreak of the First World War, when Fletcher contributed them to the British war effort as paper pulp.

In addition to his duties as foreign editor of Poetry, Pound had also created for himself the post of literary editor of a suffragette newspaper, The New Freewoman, which had formerly been known as The Freewoman. Pound's position on suffragism is not clear; he once remarked in a letter to me that each new dilution of the suf-frage weakened the entire system on which voting was based. His alliance with the staff of The New Freewoman may have been occasioned by the fact that the journal was militantly opposed to the excessive virility of the Pankhurst wing.

These suffragettes chained themselves to fences, in a poor imitation of the Andromeda myth, and also re-enacted other folk-tales which this writer does not care to discuss. In order to re-emphasize the intellectual facets of the suffragette movement, such as they were, a wealthy lady named Miss Harriet Weaver had financed this newspaper. It was written and edited by her friend Dora Marsden. Miss Weaver felt that the paper was not attracting a sufficiently wide audience, and when Ezra Pound chanced upon her at one of Hulme's evenings, he persuaded her that she could get more readership by incorporating a literary review with the suffragette editorials. He agreed to furnish this department without salary, and thus he obtained an English outlet for the promotion of his various disciples and enthusiasms.

Pound praised one of Fletcher's volumes in The New Free-woman, and soon afterwards, he called upon the Arkansas bard at his French restaurant in London. Fletcher has recorded the occasion in his autobiography:

"I must confess that I eyed Pound with considerable interest, having already heard about him while in London, and having read with attraction and repulsion about equally balanced, his own early volumes. What I saw was a man of about my own age and height, dressed in a brown velvet coat, a shirt open at the neck and no necktie, and pearly-gray trousers. His fine-chiseled, for-ward-jutting features were set off by a rounded mass of fiery, curly red hair and beard and mustache similarly red and curly, trimmed to a point. Gray-blue penetrating eyes, shielded by a pince-nez, peered at the world behind his projecting cheekbones; and a high-pitched, shrill, almost feminine voice provided strange contrast to the pugnacious virility of the poet's general aspect. He had, I soon saw, slender feminine hands, which, as he talked, he fluttered to and fro. His body was almost equally mobile, jumping and twitching in his chair, with a backward jerk of the head, as he emphasized each point."

Ezra was quite the innovator in dress, for it took considerable courage to wear an open-necked sport shirt in London at that time. He has told me of an occasion in Rapallo, on a scorching afternoon, when a little Frenchman approached him in the town square. The Frenchman was choking in a high starched collar, as he passed by the comfortable Ezra, who was sauntering along in his customary sport shirt, open wide at the neck. The Frenchman's eyes protruded, first in hate, and then in envy. He reached up and with a single violent gesture ripped open his tie and shirt. It may be said that Ezra found the world writhing in stiff collars and left it in sport shirts.

"I discovered him to be as baffling a bundle of contradictions as any man I have ever known," says Fletcher, continuing his description of Pound. "Internationally Bohemian in aspect, he yet preserved marked farwestern ways of speech and a frank, open democracy of manners. Hating the academicians of England, he yet laid claim to be a great scholar in early Provençal, Italian and Latin. Keen follower of the dernier cri in arts and letters, his own poetry was often deliberately archaic to a degree that repelled me. In short, he was a walking paradox."

Fletcher was unable to understand how a man could dislike academicians and yet devote himself to the study of the classics. Apparently he was unfamiliar with the type of scholar who had grown up in the universities of England like a particularly difficult type of clinging ivy, and is epitomized by T. S. Eliot's pronouncement on Professor Gilbert Murray's translations of the Greek: "He has erected a barrier between the student and the plays greater than that represented by the original Greek."

At first, Pound and Fletcher got along, to such an extent that Fletcher contributed some money to The New Freewoman. Having pumped this masculine source, Pound proposed to Miss Weaver that the journal's title be altered to a noun of more neutral gender. He suggested The Egoist, and she agreed to it.
*
There is no misanthropy in a thorough contempt for the mob. There is no respect for mankind save in detached individuals.
*
Stupidity is a pest, a bacillus, an infection; a raging lion that does not stay in one place but perambulates. When two fools meet, a third springs up instanter between them, a composite worse than either begetter.
*
A more intimate view of Joyce has been given us by Oliver St. John Gogarty:

"Joyce was an unloveable and lonely man; but he willed his life. He was an artist deliberately and naturally, and for this he sacrificed everything, even his humanity. . . . He had the wrong idea of an artist when he dressed himself as a Rembrandt and sent postcards with his portrait to his friends—or rather to his acquaintances, for he would not acknowledge that anyone could be his friend."
*

The character Dick Diver, in Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, is based upon McAlmon, although the critics seem to have missed it. Diver is portrayed as a handsome and intelligent minis-ter's son who meets a neurotic girl from a very wealthy family. He marries her, and abandons his career in order to traipse around with her. Because of the emptiness of his life, he eventually be-comes an alcoholic, gets a divorce, and returns to America as a drunkard and a failure, having dissipated his life in a few short years.

While living with Bryher, McAlmon failed to do any significant work, although everyone expected great things from him. He be-came more of a dilettante, began to drink heavily, and asked her for a divorce in 1926. More than anyone else, his life typifies what has been described as "the lost generation". As such, he is one of the important figures of the Jazz Age. He wandered about Europe for the next few years, returned to America, and lived in Mexico for a while. In 1940, he found that he had contracted tuberculosis.

His last years were spent as a traveling salesman for a surgical supply house, owned by one of his brothers, that was located in El Paso, Texas. He died in 1956.

*
A less happy occasion when the quarter turned out was the funeral of R. Cheever Dunning. A poet in the classical tradition of the starving artist, or rather, the western tradition, Dunning lived in a tiny garret room, slowly dying of malnutrition and tuberculosis. Pound and other expatriates helped him as much as they could, but at last he died in his garret.

McAlmon tells the story of another casualty of the Left Bank, a lively and brilliant young Japanese of samurai stock. For some months, Toda had been seen daily at the Café Dôme, the Rotonde, and other haunts of the expatriates. Then he disappeared, and none of his friends could find out what had happened to him. Finally they located him in a tiny room, dying of starvation. His money had run out, and either he could get no more from his family, or he had exhausted his inheritance. At any rate, he was too proud to let anyone know of his dilemma, and he went to his room to await death. When he was discovered, it was too late to save him.
*
It would be a mistake to suppose that all of the expatriates were engaged in the production of serious works of art. Most of them frequented salons or cafés where no work was done or even con-templated. Such were the establishments of Harry and Caresse Crosby, and of Peggy Guggenheim.

Harry Crosby was a nephew of J. P. Morgan, and he maintained an elaborate place in Paris. The Crosbys often entertained forty or fifty people. He ended this regime by shooting himself in the temple, in order to get nearer to the sun.

Peggy Guggenheim, being a woman, did not shoot herself when she became bored. She simply changed husbands, a recipe which the envious Caresse was not slow to follow. The Guggenheim auto-biography, Out of This Century, is "must" reading for many reasons, none of them literary. In describing the aftermath of her parties at the Boulevard St. Germain flat, which were distinguished by the guests' lack of concern for their hostess, she says, "After the guests would leave, I went around, like my aunt, with a bottle of lysol. I was so afraid of getting a venereal disease."

It wasn't safe to lie down in the Guggenheim apartment. Her book also offers a delightful description of a sexual experience atop a Portuguese manure pile. The tome really has something for everybody, and we should be grateful to all purchasers of copper for having made Miss Guggenheim's charming autobiography possible.
*
With the demise of the transatlantic review, the expatriates had to read imported copies of Samuel Roth's quarterly, Two Worlds, for they no longer had a magazine of their own. This too was short-lived, for Roth was sent to prison for selling through the mails a four-hundred-year-old work on love by an Arab physician —or was it four-year-old work on a hundred ways of making love? At any rate, poor Roth, victim of innumerable prejudices, went to jail.
*
Miller's columns attracted some attention, and he began to expand them into a book. He developed a peculiar, foaming, self-propelled prose to describe his adventures in the prone, and soon had sufficient pages for two books. They eventually appeared as The Tropic of Cancer (1931) and The Tropic of Capricorn (1939).

The publisher was one Jack Kahane, formerly of Dublin. His out-fit was called the Obelisk Press, and its chief claim to fame was the publication of Frank Harris' Autobiography, four or five vol-umes in which Harris monotonously recounts in detail his seduction of innumerable Amys and Lillies. These works were sold to tourists who had advanced beyond the "feelthy postcard" stage.
Despite the success of the Harris work, Kahane was very cau-tious, and he did not publish anything else as daring. The rest of the Obelisk list was composed of innocuous volumes by "Cecil Barr" or by "Basil Carr", which were Mr. Kahane's pen-names.

Unlike bootleggers, dope peddlers, or pimps, publishers of pornog-raphy are usually shy, nervous fellows, and are as reluctant to publish books as their more respectable colleagues. Kahane vir-tually swooned from fear when he read the purple pages of Miller's books, but he could not refuse them. They made a fortune for both himself and the writer, mostly because of the Second World War.

When the Americans liberated Paris, a vast stock of the "Tropic" books was discovered, and Kahane's nephew sold them for fifty dollars apiece to the victors. Soon Miller had a nest egg of forty thousand dollars in a French bank, enabling him to retire in California like any professor emeritus of biology, which, perhaps, he is.
*
In August, 1932, Olga Rudge was present when Ford Madox Ford came to Rapallo. She recorded the following conversation, which subsequently appeared in Il Mare, Western Review, and Mood:

"POUND: What authors should a young Italian writer read if he wants to learn how to write novels? 

FORD: (Spitting vigorously) Better to think about finding himself a subject.

POUND: (Suavely, ignoring Ford's irritation) Well, suppose he has already had the intelligence to read Stendhal and Flaubert? 

FORD: A different curriculum is needed for each talent. One can learn from Flaubert and from Miss Braddon. In a certain way one can learn as much from a rotten writer as from a great one. 

POUND: Which of your books would you like to see translated into Italian and in what order? 

FORD: I don't trust translations; they would leave nothing of my best qualities. Some writers are translatable. 

POUND: What are the most important qualities in a prose writer? 

FORD: What does 'prose writer' mean? The Napoleonic Code or the Canticle of Canticles?
POUND: Let us say a novelist. 

FORD: (In agony) Oh Hell! Say philosophical grounding, a knowledge of words' roots, of the meaning of words. 

POUND: What should a young prose writer do first? 

FORD: (More and more annoyed at the inquisition) Brush his teeth. 

POUND: (Ironically calm, with serene magniloquence) In the vast critical output of the illustrious critic now being interviewed (changing tone) . . . , you have praised writer after writer with no apparent distinction (stressing the word 'apparent' nearly with rage). Is there any? 

FORD: There are authentic writers and imitation writers; there is no difference among the authentic ones. 

POUND: Stick to literary examples. 

FORD: Hudson, and Flaubert in Trois Contes. Not all of Flaubert, let us say the Trois Contes. 

POUND: You have often spoken to me of 'fine talents.' Are some finer than others? 

FORD: (Tries to evade comparison.)

POUND: Are there new writers on a level with Henry James and Hudson? 

FORD: (After qualifying Henry James' talent at some length) Yes. Hemingway, Elizabeth Roberts, Caroline Gordon, George Davis. Read 'The Opening of a Door' and 'Penhelly.'

POUND: But as artists? If James is a consummate artist, is Hudson something else? He may be called a pure prose writer, not a novelist.

FORD: The difference between weaving and drawing. 

POUND: Now for the term 'promising.' What makes you think a new writer 'promises'? 

FORD: The first sentence I read. When two words are put together they produce an overtone. The overtone is the writer's soul. When Stephen Crane wrote, 'The waves are barbarous and abrupt,' he presented simultaneously the sea and the small boat. Waves are not abrupt for a ship. 'Barbarous and abrupt'—onomatopoeic, like 'Poluphloisboion' in Homer (when the Cyclops throws the rock).  

POUND: (concluding) How many have kept their promises since the English Review was founded twenty-five years ago? 

FORD: Stephen Reynolds is dead. Ezra has become hangman's assistant to interviewers. . . . I don't know what Wyndham Lewis is doing. Norman Douglas. D. H. Lawrence is dead, but kept on 'till the end. Rebecca West. Among the successors: Virginia Woolf; Joyce in 'The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'; the Hughes who wrote 'High Wind in Jamaica,' a dramatist's novel, not a novel writer's."

From:

T H I S  D I F F I C U L T  I N D I V I D U A L , E Z R A  P O U N D

B y E U S T A C E  M U L L I N S

Cioran - Strangled Thoughts III

 Sometimes it seems better to realize yourself than to let yourself go, sometimes it seems the contrary. And you are quite right in both cases.

.   .   .

Our virtues, far from reinforcing each other, actually envy and exclude each other: When we grow conscious of their warfare, we begin to denounce them one by one, only too pleased not to have to take any futher trouble for any of them.

.   .   .

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?

.   .   .

Every action, as action, is possible only because we have broken with Paradise, whose memory, which poisons our hours, makes each of us a demoralized angel.

.   .   .

Our repressed prayers explode in sarcasms.

.   .   .

We have the feeling we are someone only when we brood over some misdeed.

.   .   .

If we make doubt a goal, it can be as comforting as faith. Doubt too is capable of fervor, doubt too, in its way, triumphs over every perplexity, doubt too has an answer to everything. How account for its bad reputation then? From the fact that it is rarer than faith, less accessible, and more mysterious. We cannot imagine what is going on in the doubter’s house. . . .

.   .   .

In the marketplace, a five-year-old writhes, screams in a tantrum. Women rush to him, try to soothe him. He goes right on, exaggerates, exceeds all limits. The more you watch, the more you’d like to wring his neck. His mother, finally realizing he has to be taken away, implores the wild creature: “Come on, darling,let’s go home now!” You think—with what satisfaction!—of Calvin, for whom children are “lumps of filth” or of Freud who labels them “polymorphous perverse.” Either would certainly have said, “Suffer the little monsters to come unto me!”

.   .   .

In the decision to abjure salvation, there is no diabolic element; for if there were, what would account for the serenity which accompanies such a decision? Nothing diabolic induces serenity. In the Devil’s vicinity, we are, on the contrary, morose—my case. . . . Hence my serenity is short-lived: just long enough to persuade me to have nothing to do with salavation. Luckily, I am often so persuaded, and each time, what peace!

.   .   .

To get up early, filled with energy and enthusiasm, wonderfully ready to commit some wretched nastiness.

.   .   .

“Free to the last degree”—this phrase raised the bum on the day he uttered it above philosophers, conquerors, and saints; for none of them, at the apex of his career, dared invoke such a success.

.   .   .

A fallen man is like all the rest of us except that he has not condescended to play the game. We reproach him for that, and avoid him, we resent his having revealed and displayed our secret—we rightly regard him as a wretch and a traitor.

.   .   .

Flung out of sleep by the question, “Where is this moment going?” “To death,” was my answer, and I fell back asleep at once.

.   .   .

We should trust only explanations which invoke physiology and theology. Whatever happens between the two is of no importance.

.   .   .

Our pleasure in foreseeing a catastrophe diminishes as the catastrophe approaches and ceases altogether once it is upon us.

.   .   .

Wisdom disguises our wounds: it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

.   .   .

The critical moment for a prophet is the one when he is ultimately imbued by what he preaches, when he is conquered by his own vaticinations. Henceforth a slave, an automaton, he will occupy himself regretting the time when, a free man, he announced calamities without quite believing in them, when he fabricated fears for himself. It is not easy to act an Isaiah and a Jeremiah sincerely. Which is why most prophets prefer being impostors.

.   .   .

Everything that happens to us, everything that counts for us affords no interest for someone else: it is on the basis of this evidence that we should elaborate our rules of behavior. A reflective mind should banish from its intimate vocabulary the word event..   .   .

Anyone who hasn’t died young deserves to die.

.   .   .

Nothing gives us a better conscience than to fall asleep with the clear view of one of our defects, which till then we hadn’t dared admit, we hadn’t even suspected.

.   .   .

Everything blurs and fades in human beings except the look in their eyes and the voice: without these, we could recognize no one after a few years.

.   .   .

At this very moment, almost everywhere, thousands and thousands are dying, while, clutching my pen, I vainly search for a word to annotate their agony.

.   .   .

To dwell on an action, however unmentionable, to invent scruples for yourself and get tangled in them, proves that you are still concerned with your kind, that you like to torment yourself on their account. . . . I shall consider myself liberated only on the day when, like murderers and sages, I have swept my conscience clean of all the impurities of remorse.

.   .   .

Tired of being myself—yet I keep praying the gods to restore me to myself.

.   .   .

To regret is to deliberate in the past tense—to substitute the possible for the irreparable, to cheat by heartbreak.

.   .   .

Delirium is incontestably finer than doubt, but doubt is solider.

.   .   .Skepticism is the faith of what Montaigne calls undulant minds.

.   .   .

To see nothing but words in the calumny of words is the one way to endure that calumny without suffering. Dissect any remark made against yourself, isolate each syllable, treat it with the disdain an adjective is worth, a substantive, an adverb. . . . Or else liquidate the calumniator on the spot.

.   .   .

Our claims to detachment always help us not to ward off blows but to digest them. In any humiliation, there is a first and a second period. It is in the second that our coquetry with sagesse is revealed to be useful.

.   .   .

What place do we occupy in the “universe”? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

.   .   .

To know is to discern the bearing of illusion, a key word as essential to the Vedanta as to the song, to the only ways of translating the experience of unreality.

.   .   .

In the British Museum, looking at the mummy of a singer whose tiny finger-nails stick out of the wrappings, I remember swearing never to say “I . . .” again.

.   .   .

There is only one sign that indicates we have understood everything: tears without cause..   .   .

Fear of an imminent collapse of the brain counts for a great deal in the need to pray.

.   .   .

Happiness and misery being evils for approximately the same reason, the one way of avoiding them is to make yourself external to everything.

.   .   .

When I spend days and days among texts concerned with nothing but serenity, contemplation, and ascesis, I am filled with a longing to rush out into the street and break the skull of the first person I meet.

.   .   .

The proof that this world is not a success is that we can compare ourselves without indecency to Him Who is supposed to have created it, but not to Napoleon or even to a bum, especially if the latter is incomparable of his kind.

.   .   .

“It could not have done better”—a remark made by a pagan about providence which no Father of the Church was honest enough to apply to God.

.   .   .

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

.   .   .

If a Christian heresy—any one of them—had triumphed, it would not have wasted its time on nuances. Bolder than the Church, it would also have been more intolerant, since more convinced. No doubt about it: victorious, the Cathari would have outstripped the Inquisitors. For any victim, however noble, let us have a pity without illusions..   .   .

What remains of a philosopher is his temperament, what makes him forget himself, yield to his contradictions, his whims, reactions incompatible with the fundamental lines of his system. If he seeks truth, let him free himself of all concern with coherence. He must express only what he thinks and not what he had decided to think. The more alive he will be, the more he will let himself be himself; and will survive only if he takes no account of what he ought to think.

.   .   .

When we are to meditate upon vacuity, impermanence, nirvana, crouching or lying down is the best position. It is the one in which these themes were conceived. It is only in the West that man thinks standing up. Which accounts perhaps for the unfortunately positive character of our philosophy.

.   .   .

We can endure an affront only by imagining the scenes of revenge, of the triumph we shall someday have over the wretch who has flouted us. Without this prospect, we would fall victim to disturbances which would radically renew madness.

.   .   .

Every mortal agony is in itself curious; the most interesting, however, remains that of the cynic, of the man who theoretically disdains it.

.   .   .

What is the name of this bone I am touching? What can it have in common with me? I should begin the operation all over again with another part of my body and continue until the moment when nothing is mine.

.   .   .

To have both the taste for provocation and the taste for effacement—to be by instinct a spoilsport and by conviction a corpse!

.   .   .

After so many living men, all dead—how tiring to die in our turn and to suffer, like them, this inept fear! How explain that it still persists, that it is not exhausted or discredited, and that we can still sustain it as intensely as the first mortal?

.   .   .

The hermit assumes responsibilities only toward himself or toward everyone; in no case toward someone. He takes refuge in solitude in order to have no one in his care: himself and the universe—enough.

.   .   .

If I were sure of my indifference to salvation, I should be far and away the happiest man who ever lived.

.   .   .

To come to your senses, there is nothing like being “forgotten.” No one coming between us and what counts. The more others turn away from us, the more they labor toward our perfection: they save us by abandoning us.

.   .   .

My doubts about Providence never last long: Who, except for Providence, would be in a position to distribute so punctually our ration of daily defeats?

.   .   .

“Take nothing to heart,” murmurs the man who blames himself each time he suffers, and who loses no opportunity for suffering.

.   .   .

The battle waged in each individual by the fanatic and the impostor is the reason we never know whom to turn to..   .   .

“What are you working on? What are you doing now?” Would anyone have dared ask Pyrrho or Laotsŭ such a question? We do not imagine that the questions no one could have asked our idols can be asked of us.

.   .   .

By nature I am so refractory to the slightest undertaking that to bring myself to perform one I first have to read some biography of Alexander or Genghis Khan.

.   .   .

What should make old age endurable is the pleasure of seeing disappear, one by one, all those who have believed in us and whom we can no longer disappoint.

.   .   .

It is my delight to gloss our fall from grace—I love living as a parasite of original sin.

.   .   .

If we could make ourselves inhumiliable!

.   .   .

Contrary to the common allegation, suffering attaches, rivets, us to life: it is our suffering, we are flattered to be able to endure it, it testifies to our quality as a being and not as a specter. So virulent is the pride of suffering that it is exceeded only by the pride of having suffered.

.   .   .

Determined to save the past, regret represents our sole recourse against the maneuvers of forgetting: What is regret in substance, if not memory on the offensive? By resuscitating so many episodes and distorting them at will, it offers us all the versions we want of our life, so that it is correct to assert that it is thanks to regret that our life seems to us at once pitiable and fulfilled..   .   .

Every theoretical formula, appearing in sleep, interrupts its course. Dreams are events. Once one of them turns into a problem, or ends in a discovery, we waken with a start. “To think” asleep is an anomaly, frequent among the oppressed, among those who in fact sleep badly, because their miseries culminate in definitions, night after night.

.   .   .

We make martyrs of ourselves, we create, by torments, a “conscience”; and then, we realize with horror that we can never get rid of it again.

.   .   .

The discomfort that follows on a pettiness is the state most favorable to self-examination; it even identifies itself with such reflections. Scarcely surprising that each time it seizes upon us, we should have the impression of knowing ourselves at last.

.   .   .

The only subversive mind is the one which questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the head of the list, compromise with the established order.

.   .   .

My preferences: the age of the Cave Man, the century of the Enlightenment. But I do not forget that the caves opened onto history, and the salons onto the guillotine.

.   .   .

Everywhere, flesh for money. But what can a subsidized flesh be worth? In the old days we engendered out of conviction or by accident; today, in order to gain a subsistance allowance or a tax deduction. Such excess of calculation cannot fail to damage the quality of the spermatozoa.

.   .   .To look for a meaning in anything is less the act of a naif than of a masochist.

.   .   .

To become conscious of our complete, our radical destructibility is salvation itself. But it is to go counter to our deepest tendencies to know we are, at every moment, destructible. Might salvation be an exploit contra naturam?

.   .   .

Frivolous, disconnected, an amateur at everything, I shall have known thoroughly only the disadvantage of having been born.

.   .   .

We should philosophize as if “philosophy” didn’t exist, like some troglodyte dazed or daunted by the procession of scourges which pass before his eyes.

.   .   .

To relish one’s pain—the feeling and even the expression figure in Homer, though of course as an exception. As a general rule, we must wait till more recent times for it. It is a long road from the epic to the diary.

.   .   .

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

.   .   .

Rats, confined in a limited space and fed solely on those chemical products we stuff them with become, apparently, much nastier and more aggressive than usual. Doomed as they multiply to pile on top of each other, men will detest each other much more than before, they will even invent unwonted forms of hatred, they will rend each other as they never did before, and a universal civil war will explode, not because of claims but because of humanity’s inability to witness the spectacle it affords itself. Even now, if for a single moment it glimpsed the whole future, humanity would not survive that moment.

.   .   .

The only true solitude is where we brood upon the urgency of a prayer—a prayer posterior to God and to faith itself.

.   .   .

We should keep reminding ourselves that everything that delights or distresses us corresponds to nothing, that it is all quite meaningless and futile. . . . Well, I keep reminding myself of it every day, and I continue nonetheless in my delight, in my distress.

.   .   .

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

The New Gods

E. M. Cioran

Translated from the French by

RICHARD HOWARD

The populace is coarser in aristocratic countries than anywhere else, in affluent towns more so than in the countryside

 The social arrangements of these people also differed in several respects from what we saw in the Old World: one might have said that they had multiplied their numbers freely in the heart of their deserts, with no contact with races more civilized than their own. Thus with them one did not encounter those nebulous and incoherent ideas of good and evil, that deepest corruption, which is usually linked with ignorance and crude ways of life in civilized nations which have reverted to barbarity. The Indian owed a debt only to himself: his virtues, vices, and prejudices were his own achievement: he had grown up in the primitive independence of his nature.

The coarseness of the populace in civilized countries results not only from their ignorance and poverty but from the fact that, being coarse, they are in daily contact with enlightened and wealthy men.

The sight of their adversity and weakness, in contrast each day to the happiness and power of some of their compatriots, arouses, at the same time, anger and fear in their hearts; the feeling of their inferiority and dependence frustrates and humiliates them. This inner state of mind finds a parallel in their ways as it does in their language; they are simultaneously rude and vulgar.

The truth of this is easily proved by observation. The populace is coarser in aristocratic countries than anywhere else, in affluent towns more so than in the countryside.

In those places where one encounters very powerful and rich men, the weak and poor feel, as it were, burdened by their lowly status and, since they discover no means of being able to recover equality, they lose any sense of hope in themselves, drifting below any standards of human dignity.

The vexing effect of this contrast of human conditions is not to be found in the lives of the natives: the Indians, while they are all ignorant and poor, are all equal and free.

When the Europeans arrived, the native North Americans had no knowledge of the value of wealth and revealed an indifference toward the comforts which civilized man acquires with his means. However, nothing coarse could be perceived in them; rather there resided in their actions a characteristic reserve and a kind of noble politeness.

Gentle and hospitable in times of peace, pitiless in war, even beyond the known bounds of human ferocity, the Indian ran the risk of dying of hunger so as to help the stranger knocking upon his cabin door in the evening and yet would tear apart the quivering limbs of his prisoner with his own hands. The most notorious republics of ancient times had never admired courage more steadfast, souls more proud or a love of independence more uncompromising than that which was concealed by the wild woods of the New World at that time.12 Europeans made but little impression when they landed upon the North American shores; their presence evoked neither envy nor fear. What hold could such men have over them? The Indian could live without necessities, suffer without complaint, die singing.13 Like all the other members of the human family, these primitive men believed in the existence of a better world and worshipped, under different names, the Creator of the universe. Their ideas of the great intellectual truths were, in general, simple and philosophic. (See Appendix D, p. 826.)

However primitive appears the race whose character we are tracing, it could not be doubted that another, more civilized and more advanced in every way than this one, had preceded it in these same lands.

An obscure tradition, although one widely known to the majority of the Indian tribes of the Atlantic seaboard, informs us that, once upon a time, the settlement of these same races had been situated to the west of the Mississippi. Along the banks of the Ohio and in the central valley, we still find, every day, man-made tumuli. Digging to the very center of these monuments, one scarcely ever fails, so it is said, to come across human bones, strange instruments, weapons, metal utensils of all kinds, even some whose use is unknown to present-day races.

Present-day Indians are able to give no information on the history of this unknown people. Neither have those who lived three hundred years ago, at the time of the discovery of America, said anything from which one can draw even a theory. The traditional stories, these decaying monuments, cast no light. Yet, at that time, thousands of people lived who were similar to us; one cannot possibly doubt that. When did they arrive there, what was their origin, destiny, history? When and how did they perish? No one could say.

What a strange thing! There are races which have so utterly disappeared from the earth that even the memory of their name has been blotted out; their languages have gone, their reputation has faded away like a sound without an echo; but I know of not a single race which has not at least a grave to remind us of its passing. Thus of all the works of man, the most lasting is still the one which records his annihilation and wretchedness.

Although the vast country we have just described was inhabited by countless native tribes, it is justifiable to assert that, at the time of its discovery, it formed only a desert. The Indians took up residence there but did not possess it. It is through agriculture that man takes ownership over the soil and the first inhabitants of North America lived off the products of hunting. Their unforgiving prejudices, their indomitable passions, their vices and, still more perhaps, their savage virtues, exposed them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these races began the day the Europeans landed on their shores; it has continued since then; it is reaching its completion at the present time. Providence, in placing them in the midst of the riches of the New World, seemed to have granted them only a short period of enjoyment; they had, in some sense, only a waiting brief. These shores so ready for commerce and industry, these deep rivers, this inexhaustible Mississippi Valley, this entire continent thus appeared like the still empty cradle of a great nation.

There it was that civilized men were to try to build society upon new foundations and that, applying for the first time theories unknown until then or considered inapplicable, they were about to give to the world a sight for which the history of the past had not prepared it.

12. “One has seen among the Iroquois attacked by superior forces,” says President Jefferson (Notes on Virginia, p. 148), “old men disdain to recur to flight or survive the destruction of their country, and brave death like the ancient Romans in the sack of Rome by the Gauls.” Further, on p. 150: “There was never an instance known of an Indian begging his life when in the power of his enemies: on the contrary, he courts death by every possible insult and provocation.”

13. See Histoire de la Louisiane, by Lepage Dupratz; Charlevoix: Histoire de la Nouvelle France; Letters of the Rev. G. Heckewelder, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 1; Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, pp. 135–90. What is said by Jefferson is of special weight, given the personal merit of the writer, his especial position and the down-to-earth age in which he lived.

D. (p. 35)    In Charlevoix, vol. 1, p. 235, will be found a history of the first war which the French inhabitants of Canada undertook against the Iroquois in 1610. The Indians, although they were armed with bows and arrows, offered desperate resistance to the French and their allies. Charlevoix, who is not a great commentator, is, however, able to show in this extract the contrast between the European manner and that of the Indians as well as the different idea which the two races had of honor.

“The French,” he said, “seized hold of the beaver skins with which the fallen Iroquois were covered. The Hurons, their allies, were scandalized by the sight of this. The latter, for their part, began to exercise their usual cruelties upon the prisoners, devouring one of those who had been killed, which horrified the French. Thus, these barbarous men prided themselves on a detachment which they were surprised at not finding in our nation and did not understand that it is less heinous to strip the bodies of the dead than to feed upon their flesh like wild animals.”

Charlevoix again, in another extract, vol. 1, p. 230, describes thus the first torture which Champlain witnessed and the return of the Hurons to their own village:

After having covered eight leagues our allies halted and, taking one of their captives, reproached him for all the cruelty which the braves from their nation who had fallen into his hands had suffered and told him that he should expect to be treated similarly, adding that if he had any courage he would prove it by singing. He immediately intoned his battle song and all the songs that he knew but in a very mournful way, said Champlain, who had not yet had the time to get to know that all primitive music contains a lugubrious element. His torture, accompanied by all the horrors which will be described later, terrified the French who made every effort to put a stop to it, but in vain. The following night, when a Huron dreamed that they were being followed, the retreat changed to real flight and the Indians did not stop anywhere until they were out of all danger.

    From the moment that they spied the huts of their village, they cut long sticks to which they attached the scalps that they had shared between them and they carried them in triumph. Seeing them, the women ran toward them, flung themselves into the water and, having swum out to the canoes, took the bloody scalps from the hands of their husbands and tied them around their necks.

    The braves offered one of these horrible trophies to Champlain and also made him a present of some bows and arrows, the only spoils which they had been willing to seize from the Iroquois, begging him to show them to the King of France.

Champlain lived alone all one winter surrounded by these barbarous people without either his person or his property being compromised for a single moment.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Democracy in America

and Two Essays on America

Translated by GERALD E. BEVAN

The great changes in personality occur mostly in the sphere of feelings. In that of intelligence, the changes are very slight. An imbecile will always be one.

Affective Memory

Memory of feelings exists as does that of intelligence, but to a much lesser degree. Time weakens it very quickly.

The customary inferiority of affective memory to intellectual memory is generally considerable. The persistence of the latter is such that, for centuries, voluminous works such as the Vedas and songs of Homer were transmitted from generation to generation only with the aid of memory. In times when books were rare and costly, in the thirteenth century for example, students knew how to retain the courses that were recited to them. . . .

If memory of feelings were as tenacious as intellectual memory, the persistent remembrance of our sufferings would render life unendurable.

To the theory of the short duration of affective memory, one could oppose the persistence of class hatreds and race hatreds over many generations. This apparent duration is merely an incessant renewal produced by continually repeated causes. An unnourished hatred does not endure. That of the Germans for the French would have disappeared long ago if German newspapers had not constantly stirred it up. . . .

The Russian Alliance and the Anglo-French Entente show how quickly peoples who were former enemies forget hatreds not nourished. When Britain became our friend, however, we were not far from the terrible humiliation of Fashoda. This concept of the essential brevity of affective memory explains many phenomena in the life of peoples. One must not count on their gratitude, but also one must not dread too much their hatred.

The Elements of Character

Character is composed of an aggregate of affective elements on which are superimposed, while being only very slightly mingled, some intellectual elements. It is always the former that give an individual his true personality.

The affective elements being numerous, their association forms various kinds of character: active, reflective, apathetic, sensitive, etc. Each of them behaves differently under the action of similar stimulants.

The aggregates forming character can be strongly or feebly cemented together. Solid aggregates correspond to strong individualities able to maintain themselves despite variations in surroundings and circumstances.

Poorly cemented aggregates correspond to weak mentalities, uncertain and changeable. They would modify themselves from moment to moment under the slightest influences if certain necessities of daily life did not orient them, as the banks of a river confine its course....

Moral causes act on character or at least on its orientation. Following a conversion profane love becomes divine love. A fanatical and persecuting clergyman sometimes ends up as a free thinker equally fanatical and not less persecuting.

Opinions and beliefs being molded on our character, they naturally follow its variations. There does not exist . . . any parallelism between the development of character and that of intelligence. The former, on the contrary, tends to become weakened as the latter develops. Great civilizations were destroyed by inferior intellectual elements endowed with strong will.

Courageous, decisive minds ignore the obstacles signaled by intelligence. Reason does not found great religions and powerful empires. In societies brilliant with intelligence but of weak character, power ends by falling into the hands of narrow-minded bold men. I agree with Faguet that a pacifist Europe will be conquered “by the last people remaining military and relatively feudal.” Such a people will reduce the others to slavery and will put to forced labor for their profit all the pacifists loaded with intelligence but void of energy born of will.

The Collective Characteristics of Peoples

Each people possesses collective characteristics common to most of its members, which is what makes veritable psychological species of different nations.These characteristics create . . . similar opinions among them on a certain number of essential subjects.

The fundamental characteristics of a people are not necessarily numerous. Firmly fixed, they mark its destiny. Let us consider the English, for example. The elements directing their history can be summed up easily in a few lines: the cult of persistent effort preventing retreat in the face of obstacles and consideration of a calamity as irremediable; a religious respect for traditions and for all that has been validated by the passage of time; a need for action and disdain of idle speculative thought; an intense sense of duty; self-control regarded as an essential quality and carefully maintained by special education.

Certain defects of character insupportable in individuals become virtues when collective—pride, for example. This feeling is very different from vanity. . . .

Collective pride is one of the great stimulants of a people’s activity. Due to it, the Roman legionary found full compensation in being a part of a people dominating the universe. The unflinching courage of the Japanese during the last war [Russo-Japanese] came from similar pride. This sentiment, besides, is a source of progress. As soon as a nation is convinced of its superiority, it carries to the maximum the effort necessary to maintain it.

It is character and not intelligence that distinguishes peoples and creates irreducible antipathies or sympathies among them. Intelligence is the same for all. Character, on the contrary, offers strong differences. Peoples being differently impressed by the same things will conduct themselves differently under apparently identical circumstances. Moreover, whether peoples or individuals are concerned, men always are divided more by the contrasts of their character than by those of their interests or intelligence.

The Evolution of Elements of Character

The fundamental feelings forming the web of character evolve slowly over the ages, as is proved by the persistence of national characteristics. The psychological agglomerations forming them are as stable as the anatomical agglomerations.

But around these fundamental characteristics are found in all living beings secondary characteristics which can vary according to the times, environment, etc. It is above all. . . the subjects on which feelings are exercised that change. Love of family, of tribe, of city and country are adaptations of an identical feeling for different groups and not the creation of new feelings.
Internationalism and pacifism represent the latest extensions of the same feeling.

A little less than a century ago, German patriotism was unknown. Germany was divided into rival provinces. If today pan-Germanism is a virtue, that virtue is merely the extension of ancient feelings to new categories of individuals.

Affective states are so stable that their simple adaptation to new subjects requires immense effort. To acquire, for example, a little, a very little of that quality of altruism known as tolerance, it was necessary, says Lavisse correctly, “that martyrs died by the thousands under torture, and that blood flowed in rivers on battlefields.” It is very dangerous for a people to wish to create by means of reason feelings which are contrary to those fixed by nature in their soul. This kind of error weighs heavily on us since the [French] Revolution. It engendered the development of socialism which pretends to be able to change the natural course of things and remake the soul of a nation. . . .

And if, at present, the future seems very dark, it is because the feelings of the masses are tending to undergo new orientation. Under the growth of socialist illusions, everyone—from the workman to the professor—has become dissatisfied with his lot and is persuaded that he merits a different fate. Each workman believes himself to be exploited by the ruling classes and dreams of seizing their wealth by force. In the realm of the affective, illusions have a strength that renders them very dangerous because reason does not affect them.

The Disaggregation of Character and the Oscillations of Personality

We have said that the stability of aggregates forming character is as great as that of anatomical aggregates. The former, like the latter, can undergo morbid changes and even complete disaggregation. These phenomena, which do not arise exclusively in the realm of pathology, have considerable influence on the formation of opinions and beliefs. . . .

Under various disturbances, represented by motives, the combinations forming character can be modified. Then our sensibilities change; the orientation of life becomes different. The personality is renewed.

Such variations are observed above all when—the balance established between affective elements and surroundings having undergone sudden change—the social environment is strongly altered. . . .

Any being, whether inert or living matter, is the result of a certain balance between environment and itself. The latter cannot change without a simultaneous change in the former. A rigid steel bar can, under the influence of a suitable environment, become a light vapor.

The degree of the tendency of disassociation of psychic elements forming character depends on the stability of the latter as well as on the important environmental changes to which they are subjected. Also, they will vary following previously undergone impressions.

Observations made about anatomical aggregates are also valid for psychological aggregates. The lessening of the sensibility of the former under the influence of certain exterior influences is called, as we know, immunization. Future study of the pathology of [psy-chological] characteristics also will comprise that of their immunization.

The true statesman possesses the art, still a mystery, of knowing how to modify some elements of national character for the sake of balance in order to make them predominate according to the necessities of the times.

The Oscillations of Personality

The foregoing considerations tend to show that our personality can become quite variable. It depends, in effect, on two inseparable factors: the being itself and its environment. .. .

Our self is a total. It is the sum of innumerable self cells. Each cell competes with the unity of the whole, in the same manner as a soldier does in an army. The homogeneity of thousands of individuals of which it is composed is the result only of their community of action that numerous causes can destroy.

It is useless to object that people’s personality seems in general quite stable. If it seems hardly to vary, it is because the social environment remains just about constant. But if it is suddenly modified, as in the time of revolution, a person’s personality can change entirely.

It is thus that one saw, during the [Reign of] Terror, good kindly bourgeois become bloodthirsty fanatics. The torment gone and the former environment restored, they recovered their peaceful personality. . . .

What are the elements composing the self of which the synthesis forms our personality? Psychology remains silent on the subject. Without pretending to be too precise, we shall say that all the elements of self are the result of a residue of ancestral personalities, that is to say, they were created by their previous existences.

The self, I insist, is not a unity but a total of millions of cellular lives composing the organism. These can en¬ gender innumerable combinations.

Violent emotional excitements, certain observable pathological states among [spiritualist] mediums, ecstatics, hypnotized individuals, etc., can evoke some of these combinations and obtain, at least momentarily, a different personality in the same person, either inferior or superior to the usual personality. Each of us possesses possibilities of action going beyond our normal capacity that certain circumstances can awaken.

Ancestral residues form the most profound and stable layer of character in peoples and individuals. It is in their ancestral self that an Englishmen, a Frenchman, a Chinese differ so profoundly. But on these far away atavisms are overlaid elements engendered by social milieu (caste, class, profession, etc.), by education and by many other influences. These lend a quite stable orientation to our personality. It is on this somewhat artificial self that we lead our everyday lives.

Among all the elements forming our personality, the most active, after that of race, is that which is determined by the social group to which we belong.

The tyranny of social groups ... is not useless. If men didn’t have the opinions and conduct of their own circle as a guide, where would they find the mental di¬ rection most of them need? Thanks to the group in which they are embedded, they possess a rather con¬ stant way of acting and reacting. Thanks also to it, people of rather spineless nature are oriented and sustained in life.

Thus canalized, the members of an ordinary social group possess along with a temporary or lasting but quite definite personality a power for action which no individual member dreamed of. The great massacres of the Revolution were not the work of individuals.

Their authors acted in groups: Girondists, Dantonists, Hebertists, Robespierrists, Thermidorians, etc. It was these groups rather than individuals who fought one another. They had then to bring to their struggle the furious ferocity and narrow-minded fanaticism characteristic of demonstrations by violent collectivities.

Difficulty of Predicting Conduct

The self being variable and dependent on circumstances, no man ought to pretend to know another. He can only assert that when circumstances do not vary, the conduct of a given individual will hardly change.

The head of a bureau, having directed it honestly for twenty years will doubtless continue to do so with the same honesty, but one must not count too much on this. New circumstances having erupted—a passion overcoming his good sense, a danger menacing his home—the insignificant bureaucrat can become a scoundrel or hero.

The great changes in personality occur mostly in the sphere of feelings. In that of intelligence, the changes are very slight. An imbecile will always be one.

The possible variations of personality which prevent our knowing others also prevent us from knowing ourselves. The ancient philosophers’ adage “Know thyself” is unrealizable. . . . The exterior self usually represents a personage of assumed untruth. This is so, not only because we imagine ourselves to be endowed with many good qualities and do not recognize our faults, but also because though the self contains a small portion of conscious elements, it is for the most part formed of unconscious elements inaccessible to observation.

The only means of discovering one’s real self ... is in one’s actions. One knows oneself a little after having observed one’s own conduct in given circumstances.

To pretend to know in advance how we will behave in a given situation is deceptive. When Marshal Ney swore to Louis XVIII to bring him Napoleon in an iron cage, he was of good faith but didn’t know himself. One look from the master was enough to melt his resolve. The unhappy marshal paid with his own life for his ignorance of his own real personality. Had Louis XVIII been more familiar with the laws of psychology, he probably would have pardoned him. . . .

The theories set forth in this book pertaining to character sometimes seem contradictory. On the one hand, we have insisted on the fixity of sentiments forming character, and on the other we have shown the possible variations of personality. These contradictions disappear when bearing in mind the following points:

1. Characteristics are formed by an aggregate of almost unchanging fundamental affective elements to which are added easily changed accessory elements. These last correspond to the modifications that the art of the stock-breeder makes a species undergo without altering the essential characteristics [of the species].

2. Like anatomical species, psychological species depend narrowly on their milieu. They must adapt themselves to all changes in that milieu and indeed they do adapt themselves providing the changes are neither too considerable nor sudden.

3. The same sentiments appear to change when directed toward different subjects, yet their real nature has not undergone any modification whatsoever. Profane love which has become divine love in certain conversions is a sentiment which has changed its name but not its nature.

All these findings are of very practical interest since they are the very basis of several important modern problems, notably that of education.

Believing that this last modifies intelligence, or at least the sum of our individual knowledge, it was concluded that it could also modify feelings. This was to forget entirely that affective and intellectual states have no parallel evolution.

The deeper one goes into the subject, the more one is obliged to acknowledge that education and political institutions play a rather weak role in the destiny of individuals and peoples.

This doctrine, contrary, by the way, to our democratic beliefs, seems sometimes to contradict the facts observed among certain modern peoples and that is what will always prevent its easy acceptance. In the introduction which he wrote to the Japanese translation of my works, one of the most eminent statesmen of the Far East, Baron Motono, [Japanese] Ambassador to St. Petersburg [Russia], pointed out in objection the many changes produced in the Japanese mentality by the influence of European ideas. Nevertheless, I do not believe that these prove a genuine modification of this mentality. The European ideas simply entered into the ancestral armature of the Japanese soul without modifying its essential aspects. The substitution of insurrection for religious rule [as in the French Revolution] could completely alter the destiny of a people without transforming its national character.

Gustave Le Bon, the Man and His Works ...

Cioran - Strangled Thoughts II

 II

A work cannot rise up out of indifference nor even out of serenity, that sifted, fulfilled, victorious indifference. At the height of an ordeal, we are surprised to find so few works that can calm and comfort us. How could they, when they themselves are the product of disturbance and discomfort?.   .   .

Every beginning of an idea corresponds to an imperceptible lesion of the mind.

.   .   .

On the mantelpiece, the photograph of a chimpanzee and a statuette of the Buddha. This proximity, more accidental than intentional, makes me wonder over and over where my place might be between these two extremes, between man’s pre- and transfiguration.

.   .   .

Not the excess but the absence of fear is morbid. I think of that friend whom nothing ever frightened, a woman who couldn’t even imagine a danger, of any kind. So much freedom, so much safety, was one day to lead her straight to a straight-jacket.

.   .   .

In our certainty of not being understood, there is as much pride as shame. Whence the equivocal character of any failure. We are proud of it on the one hand, mortified on the other. How impure any defeat!

.   .   .

Incurable—an honorific that should be applied to only one disease, the most terrible of all: desire.

.   .   .

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and of our health.

.   .   .

Every neophyte being a spoilsport, once someone gets excited over anything, even my own vagaries, I prepare for a rift—and my revenge..   .   .

Inclined toward resentment, I often give in to it and brood over it, and stop only when I recall that I have envied one sage or another—that I have even thought I resembled him.

.   .   .

Those moments when you want to be absolutely alone because you’re sure that, face to face with yourself, you will be able to discover rare, unique, unheard-of truths—then disappointment and thereafter bitterness, when you find that once this solitude is achieved at last, nothing comes out, nothing could come. . . .

.   .   .

At certain times, instead of the brain, the very exact sensation of usurping nothingness, that steppe which has substituted itself for ideas.

.   .   .

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

.   .   .

Thought is destruction in its essence. More precisely: in its principle. You think, you begin to think, in order to break bonds, to dissolve affinities, to compromise the scaffolding of the “real.” Only later, when the sapper’s work is well under way, does thought recover itself and rebel against its natural movement.

.   .   .

Whereas sadness is justified as much by reasoning as by observation, joy rests on nothing, it derives from divagation. Impossible to be joyous by the pure fact of living; we are sad on the other hand as soon as we open our eyes. Perception as such produces melancholy, witness the animals. Only mice seem to be gay without effort.

.   .   .On the spiritual level, all pain is an opportunity; on the spiritual level alone.

.   .   .

I can undertake nothing without setting aside what I know. Once I envisage that, once I think of that, even if only for a second, I lose courage, I undo myself.

.   .   .

Since things continue to get worse from generation to generation, to predict catastrophes is a normal activity, a duty of the mind. Talleyrand’s remark about the Old Regime suits any period, except the one in which you are living, and the one in which you are going to live. The “sweetness” in question is continually diminishing; one day it will have vanished altogether. In history, we are always on the threshold of the worse. . . . That is what makes history interesting, what makes us hate it, and be unable to detach ourselves from it.

.   .   .

We may be sure that the twenty-first century, more advanced than ours, will regard Hitler and Stalin as choirboys.

.   .   .

Basilides the Gnostic is one of the rare minds to have understood, early in our era, what now constitutes a commonplace, i.e., that humanity, if it wants to be saved, must return within its natural limits by a return to ignorance, true sign of redemption. This commonplace, we hasten to say, is still a clandestine one: each of us murmurs it, but is careful not to declare it aloud. When it becomes a slogan, a considerable step forward will have been taken.

.   .   .

In everyday life, men act out of calculation; in their decisive choices, they please themselves, and we understand nothing of either individual or collective dramas if we lose sight of this unexpected behavior. No one should concern himself with history if he fails to realize how rarely the instinct of self-preservation is manifested in it. Everything occurs as if the defense-mechanisms functioned only in the presence of everyday dangers and failed in the face of a major disaster.

.   .   .

Consider the face of the man who has succeeded, who has struggled, in any realm. You will not find there the slightest trace of pity. He has the stuff out of which enemies are made.

.   .   .

For days at a time, the longing to perpetrate an attack against the five continents, without a moment’s thought as to the means.

.   .   .

My energy awakens only outside of time, and I feel myself a veritable Hercules as soon as I transplant myself in imagination to a universe where the very conditions of action are suppressed.

.   .   .

“The horror and the ecstasy of life”—experienced simultaneously, as though within the same moment, within each instant.

.   .   .

The quantity of exhaustion that rests in my brain!

.   .   .

What I have in common with the Devil is bad humor—I am, like him, crabby by divine decree.

.   .   .

The books I read with most interest concern mysticism and dietetics. Might there be some relation between them? Yes, doubtless, insofar as mysticism implies ascesis, which is to say a regimen, more precisely a diet..   .   .

“Eat nothing you have not sown and harvested with your own hand”—this recommendation of Vedic wisdom is so legitimate and so convincing that, in one’s rage over being unable to abide by it, one would like to let oneself starve to death.

.   .   .

Stretching out, I close my eyes. Suddenly an abyss yawns, like a well that, in search of water, perforates the ground with a dizzying speed. Swept into this frenzy, into this void endlessly begetting itself, I identify myself with the generating principle of the abyss and—unhoped—for happiness—I thereby find an occupation and even a mission.

.   .   .

When Pyrrho conversed, if his interlocutor left he continued talking as if nothing had occurred. This power of indifference, this discipline of disdain I dream of with all the impatience of derangement.

.   .   .

What a friend expects are accommodations, deceptions, consolations, all things which imply effort, the labor of reflection, self-control. The permanent preoccupation with delicacy which friendship supposes is antinatural. Give me enmity or indifference, so I can breathe a little!

.   .   .

By all the emphasis I lay on my miseries, past and future, I have neglected those of the present: which has permitted me to endure them more readily than if I had spent my reserves of attention upon them.

.   .   .

Sleep would be good for something if each time we dropped off we tried to see ourselves die; after a few years’ training, death would lose all its prestige and would seem no more than a formality or a pinprick.

.   .   .

In the career of a mind which has liquidated prejudice after prejudice, there comes a moment when it is quite as easy to become a saint as a swindler in any line.

.   .   .

Cruelty—our oldest characteristic—is rarely described as borrowed, simulated, apparent; labels proper, on the other hand, to kindness, which, being recent, acquired, has no deep roots: It is a belated invention, and an intransmissible one. Each of us struggles to reinvent it, and succeeds only by fits and starts in those moments when his nature is eclipsed, when he triumphs over his ancestors and himself.

.   .   .

Often I imagine myself climbing up on the roof, getting dizzy, and then, on the point of falling, letting out a scream. “Imagine” is not the word, for I am obliged to imagine this. The thought of murder must come in the same way.

.   .   .

If you want never to forget someone, to think of him constantly, to attach yourself to him forever, you must not set about loving him, but hating. According to a Hindu belief, certain demons are the fruit of a vow, made in a previous life, to be incarnated in a being dead set against God, in order to be able to meditate upon Him the better and to have Him ceaselessly present to the mind.

.   .   .

Death is the aroma of existence. Death alone lends savor to the moments, alone combats their insipidity. We owe death almost everything. This debt of recognition which we now and then consent to pay is what is most comforting here on earth..   .   .

It is during our insomnias that pain fulfills its mission, that it materializes, blossoms. Then pain is as limitless as the night, which it imitates.

.   .   .

We should suffer no sort of anxiety so long as we have the notion of bad luck. As soon as we invoke it, we are comforted, we endure anything, we are almost content to suffer injustices and infirmities. Since anything becomes intelligible thereby, we must not be surprised that idiot and illuminated alike resort to it. This is because bad luck is not an explanation, it is the explanation, which is reinforced by the inevitable failure of all the others.

.   .   .

Once we scrutinize the merest memory, we are ready to burst with rage.

.   .   .

What is the source of that monotonous vision of ours, when the ills which have provoked and sustained it are so unaccountably diverse? The fact is that this vision has assimilated them and preserved only their essence, which is common to them all.

.   .   .

Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.

.   .   .

Midnight. Tension bordering on epilepsy. Craving to make everything blow up, efforts not to explode in fragments. Imminent chaos. You can be worth nothing by yourself, and be someone by what you feel. But you can also not be worthy of your sensations.

.   .   .

In theory, it matters as little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

.   .   .

Animals, birds, insects have resolved everything long since. Why try to do better? Nature loathes originality, nature rejects, execrates man.

.   .   .

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment. Everywhere they feel diminished, except in hell.

.   .   .

In the blood an inexhaustible drop of vinegar: to what fairy do I owe it?

.   .   .

An envious man forgives you nothing, he will envy even your embarrassments, even your shames.

.   .   .

The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.

.   .   .

You are obsessed by detachment, purity, nirvana, and yet someone in you whispers: “If you had the courage to formulate your most secret wish, you would say: ‘I’d like to have invented all the vices.’”

.   .   .

There is no point in being a monster if you are not also a theoretician of the “monstrous.”

.   .   .You have let what was best in you die. More careful, you would not have betrayed your true vocation, which was that of the tyrant or the hermit.

.   .   .

To turn against yourself at every opportunity is to give evidence of a great concern for truth and justice; it is to indict and to strike the real criminal. Unfortunately it is also to intimidate and paralyze him, and thereby to make him unlikely to improve.

.   .   .

These rages which strip you of skin and flesh, reducing you to the state of a trembling skeleton!

.   .   .

After certain nights, we should change names, since we are also no longer the same man.

.   .   .

Who are you? I am an alien to the police, to God, to myself.

.   .   .

For years, I have gone into ecstasies over the virtues of impassibility, and a day doesn’t pass that I don’t suffer a fit of violence which, unrepressed, would justify the asylum. These convulsions generally occur without witnesses but, in fact, almost always on account of someone. My rages lack breeding: They are too plebeian, too earthy, to be able to emancipate themselves from a cause.

.   .   .

Impossible for me to deal with anything external, objective, impersonal, unless it should be ills, i.e., what in others makes me think of myself.

.   .   .

The desolation expressed by a gorilla’s eyes. A funereal mammal. I am descended from that gaze..   .   .

Whether we consider the individual or humanity as a whole, we must not identify to advance with to progress, unless we admit that going toward death is progress.

.   .   .

The earth is apparently five billion years old—life, two or three. These figures contain every consolation we could hope for. We should remember them in the moments when we take ourselves seriously, when we dare suffer.

.   .   .

The more we stammer, the more we struggle to write better. Thus we take revenge for not having been able to be an orator. The stutterer is a born stylist.

.   .   .

What is difficult to understand are fruitful, generous natures, always content to be working, to be producing. Their energy seems excessive, and yet one does not quite envy them. They can be anything, because at bottom they are nothing: dynamic puppets, nullities with inexhaustible gifts.

.   .   .

What keeps me from going down into the arena is that I see too many minds there I admire but do not esteem, so naive do they seem to me. Why provoke them, why measure myself against them on the same track? My lassitude grants me such a superiority that it seems (to me) quite impossible they should ever catch up.

.   .   .

We can think of death every day and yet persevere quite cheerfully in being. This is not the case if we think unceasingly of the moment of our death; the man who had only that in view would be committing an outrage against all his other moments..   .   .

People are astonished that France, a frivolous nation, should have produced a Rancé, founder of the austerest order of all; perhaps they should be even more astonished that Italy, more frivolous still, should have given the world a Leopardi, the most serious of all poets.

.   .   .

Germany’s drama is not to have had a Montaigne. What luck for France to have begun with a skeptic!

.   .   .

Disgusted by the nations, I turn to Mongolia, where it must be good to live, where there are more horses than men, where the Yahoo has not yet triumphed.

.   .   .

Every fruitful idea turns into a pseudo-idea, degenerates into a belief. Only a sterile idea preserves its status as an idea.

.   .   .

I imagined myself more exempt from vanity than others: A recent dream was to disabuse me. I had just died. A coffin of planks was brought. “You could have put a little varnish on it, even so!” I exclaimed before belaboring the undertakers with my fists. An uproar ensued. Then came the awakening, and shame.

.   .   .

This fever which leads to no discovery, which bears no idea, but which gives you a feeling of quasidivine power, power which fades once you try to define it—what does it correspond to, and what can it be worth? Perhaps it has no relation to anything, perhaps it goes further than any metaphysical experience.

.   .   .

Happiness is to be outside, to walk, to look, to amalgamate with things. Sitting down, you fall victim to the worst of yourself. Man was not created to be nailed to a chair. But perhaps he doesn’t deserve any better.

.   .   .

During my insomnia I tell myself, as a kind of consolation, that these hours I am so conscious of I am wresting from nothingness, and that if I were asleep they would never have belonged to me, they would never even have existed.

.   .   .

“To lose oneself in God”—this believer’s cliché assumes a revelatory value for the nonbeliever, who in it discerns a longed-for and impracticable adventure, despairing as he does of being unable to stray, he too, into something or, preferably, someone.

.   .   .

Who is superficial? Who is profound? To go very far into frivolity is to cease being frivolous; to reach a limit, even in farce, is to approach extremities of which, in his line, any metaphysician is quite incapable.

.   .   .

An elephant would succumb to these fits of depression that is indistinguishable from a cruelty on the point of dissolving and which, dissolving, would sweep away flesh and blood. Every organ is involved: visceral calamity, sensation of gastric surfeit, of impotence to digest this world.

.   .   .

Man, that exterminator, has designs on everything that lives, everything that moves: soon we shall be talking about the last louse.

.   .   .

In the Trojan War, as many gods on one side as the other. A just and elegant view of which the moderns, too impassioned or too vulgar, are incapable, insisting that the right be partisan at any price. Homer, at the start of our civilization, granted himself the luxury of objectivity; at the antipodes, in a belated period like ours, there is no longer room for anything but attitude..   .   .

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

.   .   .

So long as you envy another’s success, even if it is a god’s, you are a vile slave like everyone else.

.   .   .

Each being is a broken hymn.

.   .   .

According to Tolstoy, we should desire only death, since this desire, unfailingly realized, will not be a deception like all the rest. Yet is it not desire’s essence to tend toward anything, except death? To desire is to want not to die. If then we begin wanting death, it is because desire is diverted from its proper function; it is a deviated desire, raised up against the other desires, all committed to disappoint, whereas this one always keeps its promises. To bet on this one is to be sure of winning, no matter what: This desire does not, cannot deceive. But what we expect of a desire is precisely that it deceive us. Whether or not it is realized, that is secondary; the important thing is that it hides the truth from us. If it reveals the truth it fails in its duty, it compromises and abjures itself and consequently must be struck from the list of desires.

.   .   .

Attracted though I am by Buddhism, or Catharism, or any system or dogma, I preserve a core of skepticism which nothing can ever penetrate and to which I always return after each of my enthusiasms. Whether this skepticism is congenital or acquired, it seems to me no less of a certitude, even a liberation, when every other form of salvation blurs or rejects me.

.   .   .

Other people do not have the feeling that they are charlatans, and they are; I . . . I am one as much as they but I know it and suffer from that.

.   .   .

That I should continue to sabotage my powers—is it not childish to chide myself for that? Yet instead of flattering me, the evidence of my lack of accomplishment discourages me, shatters me. To be intoxicated with lucidity and be no further than this! I drag vestiges of dignity which dishonor me.

.   .   .

Only a writer without a public can allow himself the luxury of being sincere. He addresses no one: at most, himself.

.   .   .

A full life is, in the best of cases, merely an equilibrium of drawbacks.

.   .   .

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

.   .   .

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

.   .   .

Everything, in the end, comes down to desire or to the absence of desire. The rest is nuance.

.   .   .

I have maligned life so much that, wanting for once to do it justice, I find no word that fails to ring false.

The New Gods

E. M. Cioran

Translated from the French by

RICHARD HOWARD