The Rope—Underside of an Obsession—Epitaph—Secularization of Tears—Fluctuations of the Will—Theory of Goodness—Making Allowances—Wonders of Vice—The Corrupter—The Architect of the Caves—Discipline of Atony—Supreme Erosion—At the Obsequies of Desire—Irrefutable Disappointment—In the Secret of Moralists—Monastic Fantasy—In Honor of Madness—My Heroes—The Simple-Minded—Poverty: Mental Stimulant—Invocation to Insomnia—Profile of the Wicked Man—Views on Tolerance—Sartorial Philosophy—Among the Dregs—On an Entrepreneur of Ideas—Truths of Temperament—Flayed Alive—Incompatibilities—Restoration of a Cult—We Troglodytes— Physiognomy of a Failure—Procession of Sub-Men—Quousque Eadem?
The Rape
I no longer remember how I happened to become the recipient of this confidence: “Possessing not property, projects, or even memories, I have given over future and philosophy alike, owning merely a cot on which to unlearn the sun and sighs. I remain stretched out there, and spin out the hours; around me, utensils, objects which suggest suicide, every one. The nail whispers: stick me through your heart, the trickle of blood need not alarm you. The knife insinuates: my blade is infallible; one second’s decision and you have triumphed over misery and shame. The window opens of its own accord, creaking in the silence: you share the city’s heights with the poor; fling yourself out, my overture is a generous one; in the wink of an eye, you will land on the pavement with the meaning—or the meaninglessness—of life in your grasp. And a rope coils as though around some ideal neck, borrowing the tone of a suppliant power: I have been waiting for you forever, I have watched your terrors, your struggles, and your rages, I have seen your rumpled sheets, the pillow where your fury gnawed, as I have heard the swearwords with which you gratified the gods. Charitable, I sympathize and offer my services. For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair.”
Underside of an Obsession
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.
It is the vain, the fatuous, and the coquettish who, dreading gray hair, wrinkles and the death rattle, fill their daily vacancy with the image of their own carrion: they cherish and despair of themselves; their thoughts flutter between the mirror and the graveyard, and discover in the jeopardized features of their faces truths as serious as those of religion. Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal; so that those obsessed by frivolity prefigure authentically tormented minds. The superficial idler, haunted by the specter of age, is closer to Pascal, Bossuet, or Chateaubriand than a savant quite unconcerned with himself. A touch of genius in vanity: you have the great proud man who finds death hard to deal with—who takes it as a personal offense. Buddha himself, superior to all the sages, was merely fatuous on a divine scale. He discovered death, his death, and, wounded, renounced everything and imposed his renunciation on others. Thus the most terrible and the most futile sufferings are begotten by that crushed pride which, in order to face up to Nothingness, transforms it, out of revenge, into Law.
Epitaph
“He had the pride never to command or to prescribe anything, anyone. Without subalterns, without masters, he neither gave nor received orders. Excluded from the empire of laws and somehow anterior to good and evil, he never made a living soul suffer. The names of things faded from his memory; he looked without seeing, listened without hearing; scents and savors vanished at the approach of his nostrils, his palate. His senses and his desires were his only slaves: hence they felt, desired nothing. He forgot happiness and misery, thirst and fear; and if he happened to recall them, he scorned to name them and thereby to sink to hope or regret. The merest gesture cost him more efforts than it would cost others to establish or overthrow a kingdom. Born weary of being born, he chose to be a shade; when, then, did he live, and by the transgression of what birth? And if, living, he wore his shroud, by what miracle did he manage to die?”
Secularization of Tears
Only since Beethoven has music addressed itself to men: before him, it was concerned only with God. Bach and the great Italians knew nothing of this descent toward the human, this false titanism which has diluted, since the Deaf Man, the purest art. The torsion of the will replaced the suavities; the contradiction of the feelings, the naive flight; frenzy, the disciplined sigh: heaven having vanished from music, man was installed there. Where sin had once spread in gentle tears, it now displayed itself so that declamation overtook prayer, and the romanticism of the Fall triumphed over the harmonious dream of deposition. . . .
Bach: languor of cosmogony; a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend; architecture of our fragilities, positive dissolution—the highest of all—of our will; celestial ruin in Hope; the one mode of destroying ourselves without disaster, and of disappearing without dying. . . .
Is it too late to relearn such dying out? Or must we go on faltering without benefit of the organ’s chords?
Fluctuations of the Will
“Do you know that furnace of the will in which nothing resists your desires, where fatality and gravitation lose their empire and vanish before the magic of your power? Certain that your gaze would revive the dead, that your hand laid upon matter would bring it to life, that stones would shudder at your touch, that every graveyard would blossom in a smile of immortality—you tell yourself: 'From now on there will be nothing but an eternal spring, a dance of wonders, and the end of all sleep. I have brought another fire: the gods pale and the creatures rejoice; consternation has seized upon the vaults, and the din has descended into the very tombs.'
“. . . and the amateur of paroxysms, winded, falls silent only to resume, with the accent of quietism, words of abandon:
“ 'Have you ever experienced that somnolence which is transmitted to things, that slackness which weakens the sap and suggests a triumphant—and eternal—autumn? Even as I pass all hopes drowse, flowers fade, the instincts wither: everything stops willing, everything repents of having willed. And each being whispers to me: “Let someone else have lived my life, God or garter snake. I sigh for a will to inaction, an unreleased infinity, an ecstatic atony of the elements, a hibernation in broad daylight, which would benumb everything, from hog to dragonfly. . . .”’”
Theory of Goodness
Since for you there is no ultimate criterion nor irrevocable principle, and no god, what keeps you from committing any and every crime?
“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action—mother of all the vices—1 am the cause of no one’s suffering. Harmless, without greed, and without enough energy or indecency to affront others, I leave the world as ! found it. To take revenge presupposes a constant vigilance and a systematic mind, a costly continuity, whereas the indifference of forgiveness and contempt renders the hours pleasantly empty. All ethics represent a danger for goodness; only negligence rescues it. Having chosen the phlegm of the imbecile and the apathy of the angel, I have excluded myself from actions and, since goodness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to be good.”
Making Allowances
It requires a considerable amount of unconsciousness to devote oneself unreservedly to anything. Believers, lovers, disciples perceive only one face of their deities, their idols, their masters. The worshipper remains ineluctably naive. Is there a pure feeling which fails to betray the mixture of grace and imbecility, a blissful admiration without an eclipse of the intelligence? The man who glimpses simultaneously all the aspects of a being or a thing remains forever undecided between impulse and stupor. Dissect any belief: what pomp of the heart—and how much turpitude underneath! Infinity dreamed of in the gutter retains, ineffaceable, its imprint, its stench. There is a notary in every saint, a grocer in every hero, a concierge inside the martyr. The depth of sighs conceals a grimace; sacrifices and devotions are mingled with the vapors of the earthly bordello. Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime, but a sublimity inseparable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sanctity of the orifices. . . . It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology, or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous. The waking state in our ravishments alters their flavor and transforms their victim into a visionary trampling ineffable pretexts. We cannot love and know at the same time, without love suffering and expiring under the mind’s gaze. Search your admirations, scrutinize the beneficiaries of your worship and the profiteers of your abandons: under their most disinterested thoughts you will discover self-love, the spur of fame, the thirst for domination and power. All thinkers are action’s eunuchs who take revenge for their failure by the intermediary of concepts. Born this side of the deed, they exalt or decry it, depending on whether they aspire to humanity’s gratitude or that other form of fame: its hatred; they unduly erect their own deficiencies, their own miseries to the rank of laws, their futility to the level of a principle. Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.
Wonders of Vice
Whereas a thinker requires—to dissociate himself from the world—an enormous labor of interrogations, the privilege of a flaw confers from the start a singular destiny. Vice—bestower of solitude—offers the man marked out by it the excellence of a separate condition. Consider the invert: he inspires two contradictory sentiments: disgust and admiration; his “failure” makes him at once inferior and superior to the others; he does not accept himself, constantly justifies himself, invents reasons, torn between shame and pride; yet—enthusiasts of the fatuities of procreation—we go with the herd. Woe to those who have no sexual secrets! How could we divine the fetid advantages of the aberrations? Shall we remain forever the progeniture of nature, victims of her laws, nothing but human trees?
The individual’s deficiencies determine a civilization’s flexibility and subtlety. Rare sensations are conducive to the mind and its vitality: the distracted instinct is located at the antipodes of barbarism. Consequently an impotent man is more complex than a brute with undisturbed reflexes, and realizes better than anyone the essence of mankind, that deserter from zoology, and is enriched by all its inadequacies, all its impossibilities. Suppress vices and flaws, take away carnal disorders, and you will meet no more souls; for what we call by that name is merely a product of inner scandals, a designation of mysterious shames, an idealization of abjection. . . .
In the depths of his naïvete, the thinker envies the possibilities of knowledge open to whatever is contra naturam he believes—not without repulsion—in the privileges of “monsters". . . . Vice being a suffering and the sole form of celebrity worth the trouble, the “vicious” man has to be deeper than the common run, since unspeakably separated from the rest; he begins where the others leave off. . . .
A natural pleasure, taken in what is obvious, cancels itself out, destroys itself in its own means, expires in its actuality, whereas an unwonted sensation is a thought out sensation, a reflection in the reflexes. Vice attains the highest degree of consciousness—without the intermediary of philosophy; but the thinker requires a whole lifetime to arrive at this affective lucidity by which the pervert begins. Yet they resemble one another in their propensity to wrest themselves from the others, though the one strives to do so by meditation while the other merely follows the wonders of his inclination.
The Corrupter
“Where have the hours gone? The memory of a gesture, the mark of a passion, the luster of a risk, a lovely, fugitive madness—nothing of all that in your past; no delirium bears your name, no vice honors you. You have slipped through without a trace; but what was your dream, then?
“I should have liked to sow Doubt into the entrails of the globe, to imbue its substance with Doubt, to enthrone Doubt where the mind never penetrated, and before reaching the marrow of mankind, to shake the calm of stones, to introduce there the insecurity and the anguish of the heart. Architect, I would have built a temple to Ruin; preacher, revealed the farce of prayer; king, hoisted the flag of rebellion. As men cherish a secret craving to repudiate themselves, I should have provoked self-betrayal everywhere, plunged innocence into stupor, multiplied disloyalties, kept the multitude from wallowing in the compost heap of certitudes.”
The Architect of the Caves
Theology, ethics, history, and everyday experience teach us that to achieve equilibrium there is not an infinity of secrets; there is only one: submit “Accept a yoke,” these disciplines all repeat, and you will be happy; be something and you shall be released from your labors.” Indeed, all is task here on earth: professionals of time, functionaries of respiration, dignitaries of hope, a job is waiting for us before we are born: our careers are prepared in the wombs of our mothers. Members of an official universe, we have to occupy a place there, by the mechanism of a rigid fate, which is left vacant only in favor of the mad; they, at least, are not constrained to have a belief, to adhere to an institution, to sustain an idea, to pursue an undertaking. Since society was constituted, those who sought to withdraw from it were persecuted or mocked. You are forgiven everything, provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness. No one has the audacity to exclaim: “I don’t want to do anything!” —we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions. To multiply the possibilities of submission, to abdicate his freedom, to kill the vagabond in himself—thus has man refined his slavery and enfeoffed himself to phantoms. Even his scorns and his rebellions have been cultivated only so he can be dominated by them, serf that he is of his attitudes, his gestures, and his moods. Having left the caves, he has kept their superstition; he was their prisoner, and has become their architect. He perpetuates Ms primal condition with more invention and more subtlety, but at bottom, dilating or diminishing his caricature, he plagiarizes himself brazenly enough. A charlatan short of tricks, his contortions, his grimaces still deceive, . . .
Discipline of Atony
Like wax in the sun, I dissolve by day and solidify at night, an alternation which decomposes me and restores me to myself, a metamorphosis in inertia and sloth. . . . Was it here that all I have read and learned was to end, was this the goal of my vigils? Idleness has blunted my enthusiasms, slackened my appetites, enervated my fury. The man who fails to let himself go seems to me a monster: I use up my strength in the apprenticeship to abandon, and train myself in leisure, confronting my whims with the paragraphs of an Art of Putrescence.
Everywhere people who will . . . masquerade of steps hurrying toward mean or mysterious goals; conflicting wills; everyone wills; the mob wills; thousands bent on something, anything. . . . I cannot follow, still less defy them; I stop, stupefied: what marvel inspired them with such energy? Hallucinating mobility: in so little flesh, so much vigor and hysteria! These bacteria that no scruple can calm, that no wisdom can soothe, that no gall can disconcert, . . . They brave dangers with more aplomb than any hero: unconscious apostles of the effective, these saints of the Immediate . . . gods in the carnivals of time. . . .
I turn away, and step off the sidewalks of the world. . . . Yet there was a time when I admired the conquerors and the bees, when I very nearly hoped; but now, movement maddens me, and energy merely grieves. There is more wisdom in letting yourself be carried by the waves than in struggling against them. Posthumous to myself, I remember Time as a kind of child’s play or a lapse of taste. Without desires, without the hours in which to make them bloom, I have only the assurance of having always outlived myself, a fetus devoured by an omniscient idiocy even before his eyelids opened, and stillborn of lucidity. . . .
Supreme Erosion
There is something which rivals the most sordid troll, something dirty, worn, defeated, and which provokes and at the same time disconcerts fury-—a peak of exasperation and an article of every moment: the word, any word, and more precisely the one we make use of. I say: tree, house, me, magnificent, stupid; I could say anything, and I dream of a murderer of all nouns and all adjectives, of all these honorable eructations. Sometimes it seems to me they are dead and no one wants to bury them. Out of cowardice, we still consider them to be alive and go on enduring their smell without holding our noses. Yet they are not, no longer express, anything. When we think of all the mouths they pass through, all the breaths they corrupt, all the occasions on which they were offered, can we still employ a single one without being polluted?
They are tossed to us pre-chewed: yet we would not dream of swallowing food already masticated by others: the material action which corresponds to the use of words turns our stomach; yet all it takes is a moment’s irritation to realize, under any word, an aftertaste of someone else’s saliva.
To refresh language, humanity would have to stop talking: it would resort profitably to signs, or more effectively, to silence. Prostitution of the word is the most visible symptom of its degradation; there is no utterance intact, no pure articulation, and down to the very things signified, everything is corrupted by repetitions. Why would each generation not learn a new idiom, if only to give a new vigor to objects? How love and hate, struggle and suffer with these anemic symbols? “Life,” “death"—metaphysical stereotypes, exhausted enigmas. . . . Man should create another illusion of reality and invent to this end other words, since his own lack blood and, at their stage of agony, there is no transfusion possible.
At the Obsequies of Desire
A tiny cave yawns in each cell . . . We know where diseases set in, their site, the specific weakness of the organs; but this unspecifiable ill . . . this oppression under the weight of a thousand oceans, this desire for an ideally baleful poison. . . .
The vulgarities of renewal, the provocations of the sun, of foliage, of sap. . . . My blood disintegrates when the buds open, when the bird and the beast frolic. . . . I envy the mad, the sleeping dormouse, the bear’s winters, the sage’s dryness; I would exchange for their torpor my agitation, the frenzy of a vague murderer who dreams of crimes this side of blood. And more than them all, how much I envy those emperors of the decadence, sullen and cruel, who were stabbed at the height of their criminal course!
I give myself up to space like a blind man’s tears. Whose will am 1, who wills in me? I wish some demon would- conceive a conspiracy against man: I would join it. Tired of participating in the obsequies of my desires, I should at last have an ideal excuse, for Ennui is the martyrdom of those who live and die for no belief.
Irrefutable Disappointment
Everything confirms it, feeds it; it crowns—knowing, unimpeachable—events, feelings, thoughts; no moment which fails to consecrate it, no impulse which fails to empower it, no reflection which fails to reinforce it. Divinity, whose kingdom is limitless, more powerful than the fatality which serves and illustrates it, hyphen between life and death, it unites, identifies, and feeds on them both. Beside its arguments and verifications, the sciences themselves seem a jumble of whims. Nothing can diminish the fervor of its distastes: what truths, flourishing in a spring of axioms, could defy its visionary dogmatism, its proud insanity? No heat of youth nor even the mind’s derangement resists its certitudes, and its victories are proclaimed with one and the same voice by wisdom and by madness. Before its seamless empire, before its limitless sovereignty, our knees bend: everything begins in ignorance of it, everything ends by yielding to it; no action evades it, none fails to be led back to it. The last word here on earth, it alone does not disappoint. . .
In the Secret of Moralists
When we have stuffed the universe with melancholy, all we have left to light up the mind with is joy, impossible, rare, flashing joy; and it is when we no longer hope that we suffer the fascination of hope. Life—a gift given to the living by those obsessed with death. . . . Since the direction of our thoughts is not that of our hearts, we sustain a secret inclination for all that we trample down. Say a man registers the creaking of the world’s machinery: it is because he has dreamed too much of the resonance of the Spheres; failing to hear them, he abases himself to hear only the din around him. Bitter words emanate from a wounded sensibility, from an offended delicacy. The venom of a La Rochefoucauld, a Chamfort, was the revenge they took on a world designed for brutes. All gall conceals a revenge and is translated into a system: pessimism—that cruelty of the conquered who cannot forgive life for having deceived their expectations.
The gaiety which strikes mortal blows .. . the pleasantry which conceals the dagger under a smile .. . I think of certain ironies of Voltaire, certain retorts of Rivarol, the stinging words of Mme. du Deffand, the jeers which show through so much elegance, the aggressive frivolity of the salons, the sallies which entertain and slaughter, the bitterness contained in an excess of civility. . . . And I think of an ideal moralist—a combination of cynicism and lyric ardor—exalted and icy, vague and incisive, as close to Rousseau’s Reveries as to Lacios' Liaisons, or uniting in himself Vauvenargues and Sade, tact and torment. . . . Observer of mores in himself having no need to seek elsewhere, the least attention on home grounds would show him the contradictions of life, all of whose aspects he would reflect so well that, ashamed of duplication, it would disappear. . . .
No attention whose exercise fails to lead to an act of annihilation: this is the fatality of observation, with all the disadvantages which derive from it for the observer, from the classical moralist down to Proust. Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves A touch of lucidity in the “heart” makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my “neighbor” it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer “myself” if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it. Placed at the antipodes of naïvete, of integral and authentic existence, the moralist exhausts himself in a vis-á-vis with himself and with others: comedian, microcosm of second thoughts, he does not endure the artifice which men, in order to live, spontaneously accept and incorporate in their nature. Everything seems convention: he divulges the motives of feelings and actions, he unmasks the simulacra of civilization, because he suffers at having glimpsed and gone beyond them; for these simulacra give life, they are life, whereas his existence, in contemplating them, strays into the search for a “nature” which does not exist and which, if it did, would be as alien to him as the artifices which have been added to it. All psychological complexity reduced to its elements, explained and dissected, involves an operation much deadlier to the operator than to the victim. We liquidate our feelings by pursuing their detours, and our impulses if we ambush their trajectory; and when we detail the movements of others, it is not they who lose their way. . . . Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.
Monastic Fantasy
Those days when women took the veil to conceal from the world, and as if from themselves, the advances of age, the diminution of their beauty, the fading of their charms . . . when men, weary of fame and ceremony, left the Court to take refuge in devotion. . . . The fashion of conversion for discretion’s sake vanished with the seventeenth century: Pascal’s shadow and Jacqueline’s shade fell, like invisible glamors, over the merest courtesan, over the most frivolous beauty. But Port-Royal has been destroyed forever, and with it, the places favorable to discreet and solitary agonies. No more coquetry of the convent: where now to look, in order to soften our degradations, for a context at once dim and sumptuous? An Epicurean like Saint-Evremond imagined one to his liking, and as comforting and lax as his own savoir-vivre. In those days, one still had to take God into account, adjust Him to disbelief, include Him in solitude. A transaction crammed with charm, irremediably vanished! We lack cloisters as dispossessed, as vacant as our souls, in order to lose ourselves there without the attendance of the heavens, and in a purity of absent ideals, cloisters befitting the disabused angels who, in their fall, by dint of vanquished illusions, would remain still immaculate. We long for a vogue of retreats in an eternity without faith, an assumption of the habit in nothingness, an Order released from mysteries, and from which no “brother” would claim anything, disdaining his salvation even as that of others, an Order of Impossible Salvation. . . .
In Honor of Madness
. . . Better I were distract: So should my thoughts he sever'd front my griefs.
—King Lear
The exclamation is wrung from Gloucester by Lear’s madness. . . . In order to separate ourselves from our griefs, our last resort is delirium; subject to its distractions, we no longer meet our afflictions: parallel to our pains and adjacent to our melancholies, we divagate in a salutary darkness. When we curse that itch called life, and when we are weary of the scabs of duration, the lunatic’s assurance amid his tribulations becomes a temptation and a model: let some kind fate rid us of our reason! No escape so long as the intellect remains attentive to the heart’s impulses, so long as it does not break the habit! I aspire to the idiot’s nights, to his mineral sufferings, to the bliss of groaning with indifference as if they were someone else’s groans, to the calvary in which we are strangers to ourselves, in which our own cries come from elsewhere, to an anonymous hell where we dance and jeer as we destroy ourselves. To live and die in the third person .. . to be exiled - in myself, to dissociate myself from my name, forever distracted from the man I was .. . to attain at last—since life is endurable only at this price—the wisdom of dementia. . . .
My Heroes
When we are young we look for heroes. I have had mine: Kleist, Karoline von Günderode, Nerval, Otto Weininger. . . . Intoxicated by their suicides, I was certain that they alone had gone to the end, that they drew, in death, the right conclusion from their thwarted or fulfilled loves, from their broken minds or philosophic pain. That a man should survive his passion was enough to make him contemptible or abject in my eyes: which is to say that humanity was superfluous. I discovered in it an infinitesimal number of lofty resolutions and so much compromise with life that I turned away from it, determined to put an end to it all before I was thirty. But as the years went by, I lost the pride of youth: each day, like a lesson in humility, I reminded myself that I was still alive, that I was betraying my dreams among men rotten with . . . life. Exasperated by the expectation of no longer existing, I considered it a duty to cleave my flesh when dawn broke after a night of love, and that it was a nameless degradation to sully by memory an excess of sighs. Or, at other moments, how was one to insult duration further, when one had grasped everything in a dilation which enthrones pride in the very heavens? I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life, that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertia of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide. Even now, I have more esteem for a concierge who hangs himself than for a living poet. Man is provisionally exempt from suicide: that is his one glory, his one excuse. But he is not aware of it, and calls cowardice the courage of those who dared to raise themselves by death above themselves. We are bound together by a tacit pact to go on to the last breath: this pact which cements our solidarity dooms us nonetheless—our entire race is stricken by its infamy. Without suicide, no salvation. Strange! that death, though eternal, has not become part of our “behavior": sole reality, it cannot become a vogue. Thus, as living men, we are all retarded. . . .
The Simple-Minded
Consider the accent with which a man utters the word “truth,” the inflection of assurance or reserve he uses, the expression of believing or doubting it, and you will be edified as to the nature of his opinions and the quality of his mind. No word is emptier; yet men make an idol of it and convert its non-meaning at once into a criterion and a goal of thought. This superstition—which excuses the vulgarian and disqualifies the philosopher—results from the encroachment of hope upon logic. You are told over and over: truth is inaccessible; yet it must be searched for, aspired to, fought over. Behold a restriction which fails to separate you from those who declare they have found it: the main thing is to believe it is possible: to possess truth or to aspire to it are two actions which proceed from one and the same attitude. We make an exception of one word as of another: terrible usurpation of language! I call simple-minded any man who speaks of Truth with conviction: it is because he has capital letters in reserve and employs them naively, without deception, without disdain. As for the philosopher, his slightest indulgence in this idolatry exposes him: the citizen in him has won out over the solitary. Hope emerging from a thought—that saddens us, or makes us smile. . . . There is an indecency about putting too much soul in such words: the childishness of any enthusiasm for knowledge. . . . And it is time that philosophy, casting discredit upon Truth, freed itself from all capital letters.
Poverty: Mental Stimulant
To keep the mind vigilant, there is only coffee, disease, insomnia, or the obsession of death; poverty contributes to this condition in equal measure, if not more effectively: terror of tomorrow as much as that of eternity, money troubles as much as metaphysical fears, exclude repose and oblivion. All our humiliations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. We pay dearly for this cowardice. To be dependent on men, without the vocation of beggars! To abase ourselves before these dressed-up, lucky, infatuated marmosets! To be at the mercy of these caricatures unworthy of contempt! It is the shame of seeking anything which excites the desire to annihilate this planet, with its hierarchies and the degradations they involve. Society is not a disease, it is a disaster: what a stupid miracle that one can live in it! When we contemplate it, between rage and indifference, it becomes inexplicable that no one has been able to demolish its structure, that hitherto there have not been minds desperate and decent enough to raze it to the ground without a trace.
There is more than one resemblance between begging for a coin in the city and waiting for an answer from the silence of the universe. Avarice presides over men’s hearts and over matter. Away with this stingy existence! It hoards money and mysteries: purses are as inaccessible as the depths of the Unknown. But—maybe someday that Unknown will reveal itself and open its treasuries; never, so long as there is blood in his veins, will the Rich Man unearth his wealth. . . . He will confess his shames, his vices, his crimes: he will lie about his fortune; he will make you every confidence, hand you his life: you will not share his last secret, his pecuniary secret. . . .
Poverty is not a transitory state: it coincides with the certainty that, whatever happens, you will never have anything, that you are born on the wrong side of the circuit of goods, that you must struggle for even a breath, and conquer air itself, and hope, and sleep, and that even when society disappears, nature will be no less inclement, no less perverted. No paternal principle watched over the Creation; everywhere, buried treasures; behold the Miser as demiurge, the God on high a sly skinflint. It is He who implanted in you the terror of tomorrow: it is scarcely surprising that religion itself should be a form of this terror.
For the paupers of eternity, poverty is a kind of stimulant they have taken once and for all, without the possibility of an antidote, or a kind of innate awareness which, before any knowledge of life, could describe its inferno. . . .
Invocation to Insomnia
I was seventeen, and I believed in philosophy. What did not relate to philosophy seemed to me either a sin or slops: poets? jugglers good for the amusement of trivial women; action? imbecility in delirium; love, death? low excuses rejecting the honor of concepts. Foul odors of a universe unworthy of the mind’s perfume. . . . The concrete, what an abomination! Delight or suffering, what shames! Only abstraction seemed to palpitate with life: I gave myself up to ancillary exploits lest some nobler object might make me infringe my principles and submit to the degradations of the heart. I told myself over and over: only the brothel is compatible with metaphysics; and I coveted—to escape poetry—the eyes of housemaids, the sighs of whores.
. . . when you came, Insomnia, to shake my flesh and my pride, you who transform the childish brute, give nuance to the instincts, focus to dreams, you who in a single night grant more knowledge than days spent in repose, and, to reddened eyelids, reveal yourself a more important event than the nameless diseases or the disasters of time! You made me hear the snore of health, human beings plunged into sonorous oblivion, while my solitude engrossed the surrounding dark and became huger than the night. Everything slept, slept forever. There was no dawn: I shall lie awake this way until the end of time: they will wait for me then to ask me to account for the blank space of my dreams. . . . Each night was like the others, each night was eternal. And I felt one with all those who cannot sleep, with all those unknown brothers. Like the corrupt and the fanatical, I had a secret; like them I belonged to a clan to which everything could be excused, given, sacrificed: the clan of the sleepless. I granted genius to the first-comer whose eyelids were heavy with fatigue, and admired no mind that could sleep, were it the glory of the State, of Art or of Letters. I would have worshipped a tyrant who—to take revenge on his nights—would have forbidden rest, punished oblivion, prescribed disaster and fevers.
And it was then that I appealed to philosophy; but there is no idea which comforts in the dark, no system which resists those vigils. The analyses of insomnia undo all certainties. Weary of such destruction, I came to the point of telling myself: no more vacillation, sleep or die . . . reconquer sleep or disappear. . . .
But this reconquest is no easy matter: when you come close to it, you realize how deeply you have been marked by the nights. You love? . . . your impulses will be forever corrupted; you will emerge from each “ecstasy” like a scarecrow of pleasure; you will confront the glances of your too immediate companion with a criminal countenance; you will answer her sincere gestures with the irritations of an envenomed pleasure; her innocence with a guilty poetry, for everything for you will become poetry, but a poetry of transgression. . . . Crystalline ideas, happy sequence of thoughts? You will not think any more: it will be an explosion, a lava of concepts, without consequence and without order, a vomit of aggressive concepts spewed from your guts, punishments the flesh inflicts upon itself, the mind being a victim of the humors and out of the question. . . . You will suffer from everything, and to excess: the winds will seem gales; every touch a dagger, smiles, slaps; trifles, cataclysms. Waking may come to an end, but its light survives within you; one does not see in the dark with impunity, one does not gather its lessons without danger; there are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover. . . .
Profile of the Wicked Man
What is responsible for his not having done more evil than he might or must, for his not committing murder, wreaking subtler vengeances, for not having obeyed the injunctions of the blood rushing to his head? His moods, his education? Certainly not, and still less a native goodness; but merely the presence of the idea of death. Inclined to forgive no one anything, he pardons all; the slightest insult arouses his instincts; he forgets it the next moment. Enough for him to imagine his own corpse and to apply this method to others in order to be suddenly soothed; the figure of what decomposes makes him good—and cowardly: no wisdom (nor charity) without macabre obsessions. The healthy man, proud of existing, takes his revenge, listens to his blood and his nerves, heeds his prejudices, answers, blow for blow, and kills. But the mind undermined by the fear of death no longer reacts to external solicitations: it sketches out actions and leaves them unfinished; reflects upon honor, and loses it . . . tries out passions, and dissects them. . . . This dread which accompanies its gestures enervates their vigor; its desires expire before the vision of universal insignificance. Filled with hatred by necessity, unable to be so by conviction, the plots and crimes of such a man are halted in mid-course; like all men, he conceals a murderer inside himself, but a murderer imbued with resignation, and too weary to crush his enemies or to create new ones. He dreams, forehead on his dagger, and as though disappointed, before they happen, by every crime; considered a good man by everyone, he would be wicked if he did not find it futile to be so.
Views on Tolerance
Signs of life: cruelty, fanaticism, intolerance; sighs of decadence: amenity, understanding, indulgence. .. . So long as an institution is based on strong instincts, it admits neither enemies nor heretics: it massacres, burns, or imprisons them. Stakes, scaffolds, prisons! it is not wickedness which invented them, but conviction, any utter conviction. Once a belief is established the police will guarantee its “truth” sooner or later. Jesus—once he wanted to triumph among men—should have been able to foresee Torquemada, ineluctable consequence of Christianity translated into history. And if the Lamb failed to anticipate the torturer of the Cross, his future defender, then he deserves his nickname. By the Inquisition, the Church proved that it still possessed enormous vitality; similarly, the kings by their “royal will” All authorities have their Bastille: the more powerful an institution, the less humane. The energy of a period is measured by the beings that suffer in it, and it is by the victims it provokes that a religious or political belief is affirmed, bestiality being the primal characteristic of any success in time. Heads fall where an idea prevails; it can prevail only at the expense of other ideas and of the heads which conceived or defended them.
History confirms skepticism; yet it is and lives only by trampling over it; no event rises out of doubt, but all considerations of events lead to it and justify it. Which is to say that tolerance—supreme good on earth—is at the same time the supreme evil To admit all points of view, the most disparate beliefs, the most contradictory opinions, presupposes a general state of lassitude and sterility. Whence we arrive at this miracle: the adversaries coexist—but precisely because they can no longer be adversaries; opposing doctrines recognize each other’s merits because none has the vigor to assert itself. A religion dies when it tolerates truths which exclude it; and the god in whose name one no longer kills is dead indeed. An absolute perishes: a vague glow of earthly paradise appears, a fugitive gleam, for intolerance constitutes the law of human affairs. Collectivities are reinforced only under tyrannies, and disintegrate in a regime of clemency; then, in a burst of energy, they begin to strangle their liberties and to worship their jailers, crowned or commoners.
The periods of fear predominate over those of calm; man is much more vexed by the absence than by the profusion of events; thus History is the bloody product of his rejection of boredom.
Sartorial Philosophy
With what tenderness, and what jealousy, my thoughts turn toward the desert fathers and toward the cynics! The abjection of owning the merest object: this table, this bed, these rags. . . . Clothes get between us and nothingness. Look at your body in a mirror: you will realize that you are mortal; run your fingers over your ribs as though across a guitar, and you will see how close you are to the grave. It is because we are dressed that we entertain immortality: how can we die when we wear a necktie? The corpse that decks itself out fails to recognize itself, and imagining eternity, appropriates that illusion. Flesh covers the skeleton, clothes cover the flesh: subterfuge of nature and of man, instinctive and conventional deceptions: a gentleman cannot be kneaded of clay and dust. . . . Dignity, decency—so many escapes in the face of the irremediable. And when you put on a hat, who would say that you have sojourned among entrails or that the worms will gorge on your fat?
. . . This is why I shall abandon these rags and, casting away the mask of my days, flee the time when, in collusion with the others, I strive to betray myself. There was a time when solitaries stripped themselves of everything, in order to identify with themselves; in the desert or in the street, delighting in their nakedness, they attained to the supreme fortune: they were the equals of the dead. . . .
Among the Dregs
To console myself for the remorse of sloth, I take the path to the lower depths, impatient to degrade myself and identify with the gutter. I know these grandiloquent, stinking, sneering bums; engulfed in their filth, I take my pleasure in their fetid breath no less than in their verve. Pitiless for those who succeed, their genius for doing nothing compels admiration, though the spectacle they afford is the saddest in the world: poets without talent, whores without clients, businessmen without a penny, lovers without glands, inferno of women no one wants. . . . Behold then, I tell myself, man’s negative fulfillment, behold, laid bare, this being who pretends to a divine lineage, pathetic counterfeiter of the absolute. . . . Here is where he was to end, in this spitting image of himself, mud God never laid a hand on, beast no angel has a part in, infinity begotten in moans, soul risen out of a spasm. .. . I contemplate that dim despair of spermatozoa that have reached their end, these funeral countenances of the race. I am reassured: I have a way to go still. . . . Then I am frightened: shall I too fall so low? And I hate that toothless crone, this rhymer without verses, these impotents of love and affairs, these models of the dishonor of the mind and the flesh. . . . The man’s eyes overwhelm me; I wanted to reap, on contact with these wrecks, a harvest of pride; I take away a shudder like the one a living man would experience who, to delight in not being dead, pilfered a coffin. . . .
On an Entrepreneur of Ideas
He tries everything, and for him everything succeeds; nothing of which he is not the contemporary. So much vigor in the artifices of the intellect, so much readiness to confront all the realms of the mind and of fashion-—from metaphysics to movies—dazzles, must dazzle. No problem resists him, no phenomenon is foreign to him, no temptation leaves him indifferent. He is a conqueror, and has but one secret: his lack of emotion; nothing keeps him from dealing with anything, since he does so with no accent of his own. His constructions are magnificent, but without salt: categories swell with intimate experiences, classified as in a file of disasters or a catalogue of anxieties. Here are ranged the tribulations of man, as well as the poetry of his laceration. The Irremediable has turned into a system, even a side show, displayed like an article of common commerce, a true mass product of anguish. The public delights in it; the nihilism of the boulevard and the bitterness of the café feed on it.
Thinker without fate, infinitely empty and marvelously ample, he exploits his thought, wants it to be on every mouth. No destiny pursues him: born in the age of materialism, he would have followed its facility and given it an unimaginable extension; out of romanticism he would have constituted a Summa of reveries; appearing in the world of theology, he would have wielded God like any other concept. His skill in confronting the great problems is disconcerting: everything is remarkable, except authenticity. Basically non-poet, if he speaks of nothingness, he lacks its shudder; his disgusts are pondered; his exasperations controlled and invented after the fact; but his will, supernaturally effective, is at the same time so lucid, that he could be a poet if he wanted to, and I should add, a saint, if he insisted. . . . Having neither preferences nor oppositions, his opinions are accidents; one regrets that he believes in them; only the movement, the method, of his thought is of interest. Were I to hear Mm preach from the pulpit I would not be surprised, so true is it that he locates himself beyond all truths, masters them, so that none is necessary or organic to him. . . .
Advancing like an explorer, he conquers realm after realm; his steps no less than his thoughts are enterprises; his brain is not the enemy of his instincts; he rises above the rest, having suffered neither fatigue nor that vehement mortification which paralyzes desire. Son of a period, he expresses its contradictions, its futile dilation; and when he flung himself forward in its conquest, he employed so much pertinacity and stubbornness that his success and his renown equal those of the sword and rehabilitate the mind by means which, hitherto, were hateful or unknown to it.
Truths of Temperament
Confronting thinkers without pathos, character, and intensity, who model themselves on the forms of their time, appear others of whom we feel that appearing whenever, they would have been the same, themselves, unconcerned by their age, drawing their thoughts from their own depths, from the specific eternity of their flaws. They take from their environment only the surface, a few peculiarities of style, a few characteristic turns of a given development. In love with their fate, they suggest explosions, tragic and solitary figurations, something between apocalypse and psychiatry. A Kierkegaard, a Nietzsche, had they appeared in the most anodyne age, would have had no less tremulous, no less incendiary an inspiration. They perished in their flames; a few centuries earlier, they would have perished in those of the stake: vis-a-vis general truths, they were predestined to heresy It matters little that one be engulfed in one’s own fire or in that kindled for you: the truths of temperament must be paid for in one way or another. The viscera, the blood, the miseries, and the vices converge to beget them. Impregnated with subjectivity, we perceive a self behind each of them: everything becomes confession: a shriek of the flesh is at the source of the most banal utterance; even a theory of impersonal appearance serves only to betray its author, his secrets, his sufferings: no universality which is not his mask: even logic, everything is an excuse for his autobiography; his “self” has infested ideas, his anguish has been converted into a criterion, into the sole reality.
Flayed Alive
What life is left him robs him of what reason is left him. Trifles or scourges—the passing of a fly or the cramps of the planet—horrify him equally. With his nerves on fire, he would like the earth to be made of glass, to shatter it to smithereens; and with what thirst he would fling himself toward the stars to reduce them to powder, one by one. . . . Crime glistens in his eyeballs; his hands tighten in vain to strangle. Life is transmitted like a leprosy: too many creatures for a single murderer. It is in the nature of the man who cannot kill himself to seek revenge against whatever enjoys existing. And failing, he mopes like a damned soul infuriated by impossible destructions. A discarded Satan, he weeps, pounds his breast, bows his head; the blood he wanted to shed fails to redden his own cheeks whose pallor reflects his disgust with that secretion of hopes produced by the advancing species. His great dream was to destroy the days of Creation .. . he renounces his dream, collapses into himself, and yields to the elegy of his own failure: another order of excess is the result. His skin burns: fever fills the universe; his brain is on fire: the air is inflammable. His ills fill sidereal space; his griefs make the poles tremble. And whatever is allusion to existence, the most imperceptible breath of life, wrings from him a cry which compromises the music of the spheres and the movement of the stars.
Incompatibilities
A mind compels us only by its incompatibilities, by the tension of its movements, by the divorce of its opinions from its inclinations. Marcus Aurelius, engaged on remote expeditions, tends more toward the idea of death than toward that of the Empire; Julian, made emperor, regrets his contemplative life, envies the sages, and wastes his nights polemicizing against the Christians; Luther, with a vandal’s vitality, sinks and mopes in the obsession of sin, and without finding an equilibrium between his delicacies and his crudities; Rousseau, who mistakes his instincts, lives only in the idea of his sincerity; Nietzsche, whose entire oeuvre is nothing but a hymn to power, drags out a sickly existence of a poignant monotony. . . .
For a mind matters only to the degree that it deceives itself as to what it wants, what it loves, or what it hates; being several, it cannot choose itself. A pessimism without raptures, an agitator of hopes without bitterness, deserves only scorn. Only the man who has no regard for his past, for propriety, logic, or consideration is worthy of our attachment: how can we love a conqueror if he fails to plunge into events with a suspicion of failure, or a thinker if he has not conquered his instinct for self-preservation? Man fallen back on his futility is no longer concerned with the desire to have a life. .. . If he were to have one, or were not—would concern the others. . . . Apostle of his fluctuations, he no longer encumbers himself with an ideal identity; his temperament constitutes his sole doctrine, and the whim of the moment his sole knowledge.
Restoration of a Cult
Having eroded my quality as a man, nothing is any longer of any value. Everywhere all I see are animals with an ideal that herd together to bleat their hopes. . . . Even those who did not live together are constrained to do so like ghosts, or else to what end have we conceived the “communion” of saints? In pursuit of a true solitary, I scrutinize the ages, and I find there, and envy there, only the Devil. . . . Reason banishes him, the heart craves him. . . . Spirit of lies, Prince of darkness, the Evil One, the Enemy—how sweet it is to murmur the names that flayed his solitude! And how I cherish him since his daily relegation! If only I could re-establish him in his primal state! I believe in him with all my incapacity to believe. His company is necessary to me: a lonely being tends toward the loneliest being—toward the One. . . . I owe it to myself to tend toward him: my power to admire—fearing to remain unemployed—compels me to it. Behold me confronting my model; attaching myself to him, I punish my solitude for not being total, I forge out of it another which transcends it: it is my way of being humble. . . .
We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .
We Troglodytes
Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation. This is even more the case in the succession of centuries: the Renaissance could not “save” the depth, the phantoms, the genre of savagery of the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment in its turn preserved only the sense of the universal from the Renaissance, without the pathos which marked its physiognomy. The modern illusion has plunged man into the swoons of becoming: he has lost his footing in eternity, his “substance.” Every conquest, spiritual or political, implies a loss; every conquest is an affirmation . . . but a murderous one. In the realm of art—the only one in which we can speak of the life of the mind—an “ideal” is established only on the ruins of its predecessor: each true artist is a traitor to his forebears. . . . There is no superiority in history: republic-monarchy; romanticism-classicism; liberalism-autocracy; naturalism-abstraction; irrationalism-intellectualism—institutions, like currents of thought and feeling, are of equal worth. No form of mind can assume another; we are something only by exclusion: no one can reconcile order and disorder, abstraction and immediacy, impulse and fatality. The periods of synthesis are not creative: they summarize the fervor of the others, a confused, chaotic résumé—every eclecticism being an indication of an ending.
Every step forward is followed by a step back: this is the unfruitful oscillation of history—a stationary . . . becoming. That man should have let himself be duped by the mirage of Progress is what renders his claims to subtlety absurd. Progress? Perhaps we can find it in hygiene. . . . But anywhere else? In scientific discoveries? After all, no more than deadly glories. . . . Who, in good faith, could choose between the stone age and the age of modern weapons? As close to the ape in one as in the other, we scale the clouds for the same reasons we shinnied up trees: the means of our curiosity pure or criminal are all that have changed, and—with disguised reflexes—we are more diversely rapacious. A mere whim to accept or reject a period: we must accept or reject history en bloc. The notion of progress makes us all dolts on the pinnacles of time; but these pinnacles do not exist: the troglodyte who trembled with fear in the caves still trembles in the skyscrapers. Our capital of misery remains intact down through the ages; yet we have one advantage over our ancestors: that of having invested our capital better, since our disaster is better organized.
Physiognomy of a Failure
Monstrous dreams inhabit groceries and churches: I have come across no one who did not live in delirium. Since the merest desire conceals a source of insanity, it is enough to conform to the instinct of self-preservation to deserve the asylum. Life—a fit of lunacy throttling matter. .. . I breathe: enough to be put away. . . . Incapable of attaining to the lucidities of death, I crawl in the shadow of the days, and I yet am only by the will no longer to be. . . .
Once I thought I could crush space with a blow of my fist, play with the stars, halt time or wield it according to my whim. The great captains seemed to me the great cowards, the poets, wretched stammerers; not knowing the resistance things, men, and words offer us, and supposing I felt more than the universe allowed, I gave myself up to a suspect infinity, to a cosmogony resulting from a puberty unfit to end itself. . . . How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind! And with how many illusions must I have been born in order to be able to lose one every day! Life is a miracle bitterness destroys.
The interval separating me from my corpse is a wound; yet I aspire in vain to the seductions of the grave: unable to rid myself of anything, to cease breathing either, everything in me suggests that the worms will be out of work when they get to my instincts As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad. . . .
Procession of Sub-Men
Committed beyond his means, beyond his instincts, man has ended up in an impasse. He has burned his bridges . . . to catch up with his conclusion; animal without a future, he has foundered in his ideal, he has worsted himself at his own game. Having ceaselessly sought to transcend himself, he is paralyzed; and his only remaining resource is to recapitulate his follies, to expiate them, and to commit a few more. . . .
Yet there are some to whom even this resource remains forbidden: “Unaccustomed to being men,” they murmur, “do we still belong to a tribe, a race, a breed? So long as we had the prejudice of life, we espoused an error which kept us on a footing with the others. . . . But we have escaped the race. . . . Our lucidity, crumbling our skeleton, has reduced us to a limp existence—invertebrate rabble stretching out on matter to corrupt it with slobber. Behold us among the slime, behold us at that laughable end where we pay for having misused our faculties and our dreams. . . . Life was not our lot: at the very moments when we were drunk with life, all our joys came from our transports above it; taking revenge, life lugs us toward its lower depths: procession of sub-men toward a sub-life. . . ”
Quousque Eadem?
Forever be accursed the star under which I was born, may no sky protect it, let it crumble in space like a dust without honor! And let the traitorous moment that cast me among the creatures be forever erased from the lists of Time! My desires can no longer deal with this mixture of life and death in which eternity daily rots. Weary of the future, I have traversed its days, and yet I am tormented by the intemperance of unknown thirsts. Like a frenzied sage, dead to the world and frantic against it, I invalidate my illusions only to irritate them the more. This exasperation in an unforeseeable universe— where nonetheless everything repeats itself—will it never come to an end? How long must I keep telling myself: “I loathe this life I idolize?” The nullity of our deliriums makes us all so many gods subject to an insipid fatality. Why rebel any longer against the symmetry of this world when Chaos itself can only be a system of disorders? Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain.
E. M. CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
