A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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a b c Knapp, Nathan (2019). "E. M. Cioran: A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY". Times Literary Supplement. 6067 (12): 31 – via Gale. [ permanent dead link] The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception. The heart’s void confronting time’s: two mirrors, reflecting each other’s absence, one and the same image of nullity. .. . As though by the effect of a dreamy idiocy, everything is leveled: no more peaks, no more plunges. . . . Where to locate the poetry of lies, the goad of an enigma?

And yet this search is pitiable. The poverty of expression which is the mind’s poverty, is manifest in the indigence of words, in their exhaustion and their degradation: the attributes by which we determine things and sensations finally lie before us like so much verbal carrion. And we glance regretfully at the time when they gave off no more than an odor of confinement. All Alexandrianism begins with the need to ventilate words, to make up for their blemishes by a lively refinement; but it ends in a lassitude in which mind and word are mingled and decompose. [Ideally, the final stage of a literature and of a civilization: imagine a Valéry with the soul of a Nero. . . .] Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion? Love’s one function is to help us endure those cruel and incommensurable Sunday afternoons which torment us for the rest of the week—and for eternity. Once, when Teresa, patron saint of Spain and of your soul, prescribed a course of temptations and intoxications, the transcendent abyss amazed you like a fall into the heavens. But those heavens have vanished—like the temptations and intoxications—and in the cold heart the fevers of Avila are extinguished forever.Cioran, Emil (1992) [Originally published in 1934]. On the Heights of Despair. Translated by Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. University of Chicago Press. pp.127–128. ISBN 9780226106717. The panting civilizations exhaust themselves faster than those that loll in eternity. China alone, thriving for millennia in the flower of her old age, offers an example to be followed; China alone long since arrived at a refined wisdom superior to philosophy: Taoism surpasses all the mind has conceived by way of detachment. We count by generations: it is the curse of scarcely century-old civilizations to have lost, in their rushed cadence, the atemporal consciousness. This is how the stain the soul spread over the mind has been removed-—the only thing which reminded it that it was alive.

The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer.

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We must be thankful to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of seriousness, which have played with values and taken their pleasure in begetting and destroying them. Who knows, outside of the Greek and French civilizations, a more lucidly facetious proof of the elegant nothingness of things? The age of Alcibiades and the eighteenth century in France are two sources of consolation. While it is only at their final stages, at the dissolution of a whole system of behavior and belief, that the other civilizations could enjoy that lively exercise which lends a flavor of futility to life, it was in full ripeness, in full possession of their powers and of the future that these two epochs knew the tedium heedless of everything and permeable to everything. What better symbol than that of Madame du Deffand, old, blind, and perspicacious, who even while execrating life, nonetheless relished to the last its every amenity of gall? With the exception of the Greek skeptics and the Roman emperors of the Decadence, all minds seem enslaved by a municipal vocation. Only these two groups are emancipated, the former by doubt, the latter by dementia, from the insipid obsession of being useful. Having promoted the arbitrary to the rank of drill or delirium, depending on whether they were philosophers or disabused scions of the old conquerors, they were attached to nothing: in this regard, they suggest the saints. But while the saints were never to collapse, these others found themselves at the mercy of their own game, masters and victims of their whims—true solitaries, since their solitude was sterile. No one has followed their example and they themselves proposed no such thing; hence they communicated with their “kind” only by irony and terror. . . By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of putrefaction; its odors shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition. How imagine other people’s lives, when our own seems scarcely conceivable? We meet someone, we see him plunged into an impenetrable and unjustifiable world, in a mass of desires and convictions superimposed on reality like a morbid structure. Having made a system of mistakes for himself, he suffers for reasons whose nullity alarms the mind and surrenders himself to values whose absurdity leaps to the eye. What are his undertakings but trifles, and is the feverish symmetry of his concerns any better built than an architecture of twaddle? To the outside observer, the absolute of each life looks interchangeable, and every fate, however fixed in its essence, arbitrary. When our convictions seem the fruit of a frivolous lunacy, how tolerate other people’s passions for themselves and for their own multiplication in each day’s utopia? By what necessity does this man shut himself up in a particular world of predilections, and that man in another?

Thus “destiny,” which can will nothing, is what has willed what happens to us. . . . Infatuated with the Irrational as the sole mode of explanation, we watch it tip the scale of our fate, which weighs only negative elements. Where find the pride to provoke the forces which have so decreed, and what is more, are not to be held responsible for this decree? Against whom wage the struggle, and where lead the assault when injustice haunts the air of our lungs, the space of our thoughts, the silence and the stupor of the stars? Our revolt is as ill conceived as the world which provokes it. How take it on ourselves to right wrongs when, like Don Quixote on his deathbed, we have lost—madness at its end, exhausted—vigor and illusion to confront the highroads, combats, and defeats? And how regain the energy of that seditious angel who, still at time’s start, knew nothing of that pestilential wisdom in which our impulses asphyxiate? Where find enough verve and presumption to stigmatize the herd of the other angels, while here on earth to follow their colleague is to cast oneself still lower, while men’s injustice imitates God’s, and all rebellion sets the soul against infinity and breaks it there? The anonymous angels—huddled under their ageless wings, eternally victors and vanquished in God, numb to the deadly curiosities, dreamers parallel to the earthly griefs—who would dare to cast the first stone at them and, in defiance, divide their sleep? Revolt, the pride of downfall, takes its nobility only from its uselessness: sufferings awaken it and then abandon it; frenzy exalts it and disappointment denies it. . . . Revolt cannot have a meaning in a non-valid universe. . . . Within the circle which encloses human beings in a community of interests and hopes, the mind opposed to mirages clears a path from the center toward the periphery. It can no longer hear at close range the hum of humanity; it wants to consider from as far away as possible the accursed symmetry which links men together. It sees martyrs everywhere: some sacrificing themselves for visible needs, others for inestimable necessities, all ready to bury their names under a certitude; and, since not all of them can succeed, the majority expiate by banality the overflow of blood they have dreamed of . . . their lives consist of an enormous freedom to die which they have not taken advantage of: inexpressive holocaust of history, the boneyard swallows them up. No one achieves frivolity straight off. It is a privilege and an art; it is the pursuit of the superficial by those who, having discerned the impossibility of any certitude, have conceived a disgust for such things; it is the escape far from one abyss or another which, being by nature bottomless, can lead nowhere. Neither concept nor ecstasy are functional. When music plunges us into the “inwardness” of being, we rapidly return to the surface: the effects of the illusion scatter and our knowledge admits its nullity. That the French should have refused to feel and above all to cultivate the imperfection of the indefinite is certainly suggestive. In a collective form, this disease does not exist in France: what the French call cafard has no metaphysical quality and ennui is managed angularly. The French repel all complacency toward the Possible; their language itself eliminates any complicity with its dangers. Is there any other nation which finds itself more at ease in the world, for which being chez soi has more meaning and more weight, for which immanence offers more attractions?Though his books are well-regarded today, and though he received many literary prizes for them (nearly all of which he refused), Cioran always held the worlds of literature and philosophy at arm’s length. His willful experiment with style has largely prevented his work from being easily recognized: neither philosophy nor poetry, neither essay nor novel, neither manifesto nor confession. Perhaps he preferred it this way. Of course, in our digital age is quite easy to find Cioran’s books. The real question is why one would read them. In this sense, perhaps the only way to encounter Cioran is to stumble across him, as if by accident or by fate.