Anathemas and Admirations

by E. M. Cioran

  However distinct Eliade’s taste for huge syntheses, it is just as clear that he might also have excelled in the fragment, in the brief and brilliant essay; indeed, he has done so: witness his first productions, that multitude of succinct texts he published both before his departure for India and after his return. In 1927 and 1928, he contributed regularly to a. Bucharest daily. I was living in a provincial town, where I was completing my secondary studies; the paper was delivered there at eleven in the morning. During recess I would rush to the kiosk to buy it, and that was how I became familiar with the more or less exotic names of Asvaghosha, Ksoma of Koros, Buonaiutti, Eugenio d’Ors, and so many more. I much preferred the articles about foreigners because their works, not to be found in my little town, seemed so mysterious and definitive; happiness for me was the hope of reading them someday. Eventual disappointment was therefore remote, whereas it was within arm’s reach with the native writers. How much erudition, how much vigor and verve were poured out in those fugitive articles! I am sure that they were throbbing with life, with interest, and that I am not exaggerating their value by the distortions of memory. I read them as an enthusiast, it is true, but as a lucid enthusiast. What I particularly valued was the young Eliade’s gift for making every idea vivid, contagious, for investing each with a halo of hysteria — but a hysteria that was positive, stimulating, healthy. It is clear that this gift is entirely that of a certain time of life, and that even if one still possesses it beyond that time, one prefers to display it only when one takes up the history of religions. . . . Nowhere was it more evident than in those “Letters to a Provincial Reader” that Eliade wrote after his return from India and that appeared in installments in the same daily. I don’t think I missed a single one of those letters; I read them all — indeed, we all read them, for they concerned us, they were addressed to us. Most often we were taken to task, and each of us waited our turn. One day mine came. I was invited to do nothing less than liquidate my obsessions, cease invading the periodicals with my grim notions, deal with other problems than that of death, my fixation then as always. Would I yield to such a challenge? I had no intention of doing so. I was reluctant to admit that one could address any problem other than this one: I had just published a text on the “vision of death in northern art,” and I planned to persevere in the same direction. In my heart of hearts I blamed my friend for not identifying himself with something, indeed for identifying himself with nothing, for trying to be everything since he was unable to be something — for being, in short, incapable of fanaticism, of delirium, of “depth,” by which I meant the faculty of giving oneself up to an obsession and standing by it. I imagined that to be something was to assume an attitude totally, and therefore to reject availability, entertainment, any perpetual renewal To create a world for oneself, a limited absolute, and to cling to it with all one’s might — that seemed to me the ultimate intellectual duty. It was the notion of commitment, of engagement, if you will, but engagement that had the inner life as its sole object, a commitment to myself and not to others. I reproached Eliade for being elusive because he was so open, so mobile, so enthusiastic. I also reproached him for not being interested exclusively in India; it seemed to me that India could effectively replace all the rest, and that it was a falling-off to be concerned with anything else. All these grievances were embodied in an article with the aggressive title “The Man without a Destiny,” in which I assailed the instability of this figure I so admired, his inability to be a man of one idea; I set forth the negative aspect of each of his virtues (which is the classical way of being unjust and disloyal to someone), I blamed him for mastering his moods and his passions, for being able to use them as he liked, for spiriting away the tragic, and for being unaware of “fatality.” This formal attack had the defect of being too general: it might have been launched against anyone. Why should a theoretical mind, a man absorbed by problems, figure as a hero or a monster? There is no affinity of substance between ideas and tragedy. But at the time I thought that every idea must incarnate itself or turn into a lyric cry. Convinced that discouragement was the very sign of awakening, of awareness, I castigated my friend for being too optimistic, for being interested in too many things, and for manifesting an activity incompatible with the demands of true knowledge. Because I was abulic, I believed myself more advanced than he, as if my abulic were the result of a spiritual conquest or a will-to-wisdom. I remember telling him once that in a previous life he must have fed entirely on greens, to be able to preserve so much freshness and trust, and so much innocence, too. I could not forgive him for the fact that I felt older than he; I held him responsible for my acrimony and my fiascos, and it seemed to me that he had acquired his hopes at the expense of mine. How could he function in so many different sectors? It was his curiosity — in which I saw a demon or, with Saint Augustine, a “disease” — that was my invariable grievance. But in him curiosity was not a disease; on the contrary, it was a sign of health. And I blamed him for that health and envied it at the same time. But here I must be permitted a little indiscretion.

  I should probably not have dared to write “The Man without a Destiny” if a special circumstance had not determined me to do so. We had a mutual friend, an actress of great talent who, unfortunately for her, was obsessed with metaphysical problems. This obsession eventually compromised both her talent and her career. On the stage, right in the middle of a scene, her essential preoccupations would overwhelm her, invade her, seize her mind, so that what she was saying suddenly seemed of an intolerable inanity. Her performances suffered; she was much too obsessed to be able to change, or to want to change. She was not dismissed, merely given minor parts that would cause her no difficulties at all She took advantage of this to devote herself to her interrogations and her speculative tastes, bringing to them all the passion she had deployed in the theater. Seeking answers, she turned in her confusion to Eliade, then — less inspired — to me. One day, unable to stand it anymore, he sent her away and refused to see her again. She came to tell me her disappointments, and after that I saw her often, listening as she talked. She was dazzling, it is true, but so all-absorbing, so wearing, so insistent, that after each of our meetings I would go to the nearest bistro and get drunk, exasperated and fascinated. A peasant girl (for she was an autodidact who had grown up in a godforsaken village) who talked to you about Nothingness with such brio, such fervor! She had learned several languages, dabbled in theosophy, read the great poets, experienced a good number of disappointments, though none had affected her so much as the last. Her merits, like her torments, were such that at the beginning of my friendship with her, it seemed to me inexplicable and inadmissible that Eliade should have treated her so cavalierly. Regarding his behavior toward her as inexcusable, I wrote, to avenge her, “The Man without a Destiny.” When the article appeared on the first page of a monthly, she was delighted by it, read it aloud in my presence as if it were some glamorous tirade, and then proceeded to analyze it paragraph by paragraph. “You’ve never written anything better,” she told me — misplaced praise she was actually bestowing on herself, for was it not she who had somehow provoked the article and provided me with its elements? Subsequently I understood Eliade’s weariness and exasperation with her, and the absurdity of my excessive attack, which he never held against me, which even amused him. This character trait deserves note, for experience has taught me that writers — all afflicted with prodigious memory — are incapable of forgetting an overly wounding impertinence.

  It was during this same period that he began teaching at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest. I attended his lectures whenever I could. The fervor he lavished on his articles was fortunately recognizable in his lectures, the most animated, the most vibrant I have ever heard. Without notes, without anything, swept on by a vertigo of lyric erudition, he was a fountain of convulsed yet coherent words, underlined by the spasmodic movements of his hands. An hour of tension, after which, miraculously, he did not seem tired and perhaps, indeed, was not.
It was as if he possessed the art of indefinitely postponing fatigue. Everything negative, everything that incites to self-destruction on the physical as well as the spiritual plane, was then, and is now, alien to him — whence his inaptitude for resignation, for remorse, for all the sentiments that imply impasse, stagnation, non-future. Once again I may be speaking out of turn, but I believe that if he has a perfect comprehension of sin, he has no sense of it: he is too febrile for that, too dynamic, too hurried, too full of projects, too intoxicated by the possible. Only those have such a sense who endlessly ruminate upon their past, who fasten themselves to it and are unable to tear themselves away, who invent defects out of a need for moral torment and delight in the memory of any shameful or irreparable action they have committed or, above all, wanted to commit. Obsessives, to speak of them further. They alone have time to descend into the abysses of remorse, to sojourn there, to wallow there; they alone are kneaded of that substance out of which the authentic Christian is made — that is, someone ravaged, corroded from within, suffering the morbid desire to be a reprobate and ending all the same by overcoming that desire, such a victory, never complete, being what he calls “having faith.” Since Pascal and Kierkegaard, we can no longer conceive of “salvation” without a procession of infirmities, and without the secret pleasures of the interior drama. Today especially, since “malediction” is in vogue — it is literature we are discussing — we would have everyone live in anguish and anathema. But can a man of learning be accursed? And why should he be? Does he not know too much to condescend to hell and its narrow circles? It is virtually certain that only the dark aspects of Christianity still rouse a certain echo in us. Perhaps Christianity, if we would regain its essence, must be seen, in fact, en noir. If this image, this vision, is correct, Eliade is from all appearances marginal to this religion. But perhaps he is marginal to all religions, as much by profession as by conviction: is he not one of the most brilliant representatives of a new Alexandrianism that, after the fashion of the old, puts all beliefs on the same level, without being able to adopt any? Once we refuse to hierarchize them, which are we to prefer, which adopt, and which divinity invoke? One does not imagine a specialist in the history of religions at prayer. Or if indeed he does pray, then he belies his teaching, contradicts himself, ruins his Treatises, in which no true god figures, in which all gods are on equal footing. Though he describes and discusses them with all the talent in the world, he cannot inspire them with life; he will have extracted all their sap, he will have compared them to each other, scoured them against each other, to their great detriment, and what will be left of them is anemic symbols with which a believer can do nothing — if at this stage of erudition, of disillusion and of irony, there can still be someone who truly believes. We are all, Eliade first of all, ci-devant believers; we are all religious spirits without religion.

  11

  That Fatal Perspicacity

  EACH EVENT is only one more bad sign, Occasionally, though, an exception does occur — which the chronicler exaggerates to create the illusion of the unexpected.

  That envy is universal is best proved by the fact that it breaks out among the mad themselves in their brief intervals of lucidity.

  Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.

  Standing, one readily admits that every passing moment vanishes forever; prone, this obvious point seems so inadmissible that we long never to get up again.

  Progress and the Eternal Return: two meaningless things. What remains? Resignation to becoming, to surprises that are no such things to calamities that pretend to be uncommon.

  If we began by doing away with all those who can breathe only on a platform!

  Vehement by nature, vacillating by choice. Which way to tend? With whom to side? What self to join?

  Our virtues and our vices must be tenacious to keep themselves on the surface, to safeguard that enterprising style we need in order to resist the glamour of destruction or despair.

  “You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use,” an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it!

  In the still of certain nights, for lack of a confidant, we are reduced to the One who played this part for centuries, for millennia.

  Irony, that nuanced, rancorous impertinence, is the art of being able to stop. The merest probe beneath the surface destroys it. If you have a tendency to insist, you run the risk of capsizing with it.

  What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

  Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

  To inquire into the basis of anything makes one long to throw oneself on the ground. In any case, that is how I used to answer the crucial questions, questions without an answer.

  Opening this textbook on prehistory, I come across some specimens of our ancestors, as grim as could be. Doubtless they had to be so. Disgusted and ashamed, I quickly close the book, realizing I will open it again whenever I want to dwell on the genesis of our horrors and our filth.

  The secret life of anti-life, and this chemical comedy, instead of inclining us to smile, gnaws at our vitals and maddens us.

  The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

  If fury were an attribute of the Almighty, I should long since have transcended my mortal status.

  Existence might be justified if each of us behaved as if he were the last man alive.

  Ignatius of Loyola, tormented by scruples whose nature he does not specify, tells us that he considered destroying himself. Even he! This temptation is certainly more wide-spread and more deeply rooted than is realized. It is in fact the honor of mankind, until it becomes the duty.

  To create: only someone mistaken about himself, someone ignorant of the secret motives behind his actions, creates. Once the creator is transparent to himself, he no longer creates. Self-knowledge antagonizes the demon. Here is where we must seek out the reason that Socrates wrote nothing.

  That we can be wounded by the very people we despise discredits pride.

  In a work admirably translated from English, just one blemish: “les abîmes du scepticism,” for which the translator should have supplied doute, for in French the word skepticism has a nuance of dilettantism, even frivolity, not to be associated with the notion of the abyss.

  A taste for formula goes along with a weakness for definitions, for whatever has least relation to reality.

  Everything that can be classified is perishable. Only what is susceptible to several interpretations endures.