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| Emile M. Cioran
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself. A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society. A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and it's tomb. A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech. Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen. Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. Balkans - that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire the last primitives in Europe.Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy. Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves. Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact. Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis. Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul. I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. and what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next. I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers. If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them. Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself. In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws. In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary. It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions? It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy. Man is unacceptable. Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil. Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness. Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us. No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it. No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one. Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition. One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other. One hardly saves a world without ruling it. Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while. Our first intuitions are the true ones. Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough. Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors. Reality is a creation of our excesses. Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness. Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them. Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it. Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth. Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have. That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit. The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth. The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others. The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility. The Universal view melts things into a blur. There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be. To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being. To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camoflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts. To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. Truths begin by a conflict with the police- and end by calling them in. Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise. Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself. Under each formula lies a corpse. Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism. We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void. We derive our vitality from our store of madness. We inhabit a language rather than a country. Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence. What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name- and moving on. What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death? Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire. Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone. You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the "mystery" of life. |
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