Anathemas and Admirations

by E. M. Cioran

To confront the blank page — what a Waterloo prospect!

  In conversation with someone, whatever his merits may be, never forget for a moment that in his profound reactions he is no different from ordinary mortals. For discretion’s sake, you must handle him carefully, for like anyone else, he will not tolerate frankness, direct cause of almost all quarrels and grudges.

  To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

  We haven’t a single letter of Shakespeare’s. Didn’t he write any? One would have liked to hear Hamlet complain about his mail.

  The eminent virtue of calumny is that it produces a vacuum around you without your having to raise a finger.

  Desperate disgust in the presence of a crowd, whether high-spirited or sullen.

  Everything is in decline, and always has been. Once this diagnosis is well established, you can utter any enormity; you are even obliged to.

  If you are almost always overcome by events, it is because you need merely wait in order to realize that you have been guilty of naïveté.

  The passion for music is in itself an admission. We know more about a stranger who abandons himself to it than about someone indifferent to it whom we deal with every day.

  Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.

  To side with things testifies to an upsetting perturbation. To say “living” is to say “partial”: objectivity, a belated phenomenon, an alarming symptom, is the first stage of capitulation.

  One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

  A neophyte’s virtues are accentuated and reinforced under the effect of his new convictions. He knows this; what he does not know is that his faults increase proportionately. The source of his chimeras and his vainglory.

  “My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.

  Every life is the story of a collapse. If biographies are so fascinating, it is because the heroes, and the cowards quite as much, strive to innovate in the art of debacle.

  Disappointed by everyone, it is inevitable that we should eventually be so by ourselves — unless that is how we began.

  “Since I first began to observe men, I have learned only to love them more,” writes Lavater, a contemporary of Chamfort. Such a remark, normal for an inhabitant of a Swiss village, might have seemed of an indecorous simplicity to a frequenter of Parisian salons.

  Regret at not having been deceived like all the rest, rage at having seen clearly: such is the secret misery of more than one enlightened person.

  How could I resign myself even for a moment to what is not eternal? Yet this happens to me — at this very moment, for example.

  Each of us clings as best he can to his unlucky star.

  The older one grows, the more clearly one realizes that though one believes oneself liberated from everything, in reality one is liberated from nothing.

  On a gangrened planet, we should abstain from making plans, but we make them still, optimism being, as we know, a dying man’s reflex.

  Meditation is a waking state sustained by a dim disturbance, which is at once ravage and benediction.

  He could not put up with living in God’s wake.

  Original Sin and Transmigration: both identify destiny with an expiation, and it is of no matter whether we are talking about Adam’s sin or those we committed in our previous existences.

  The last leaves dance as they fall It takes a big dose of insensitivity to confront autumn.

  We imagine we are advancing toward some goal, forgetting that we really advance only toward The Goal itself, toward the discomfiture of all the others.

  Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

  Despondency. This English word, charged with all the nuances of collapse, will have been the key to my years, the emblem of my moments, of my negative courage, of my invalidation of all tomorrows.

  When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, that Providence of the abulic.

  The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

  Once we are grazed by certainty, we no longer mistrust ourselves and others. Confidence, in all its forms, is a source of action, hence of error.

  When we encounter someone actual our surprise is such that we wonder if we are not the victim of some vertigo.

  What is the use of combing works of consolation, since they are legion and since only two or three count?

  If you don’t want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

  Whatever follows the laws of life — hence whatever decays — inspires me with reflections so contradictory that they border on mental confusion.

  To live in fear of being bored to death everywhere, even in God: this obsession with boredom imposes limits; in it I see the reason for my spiritual unfulfillment.

  Between Epicurism and Stoicism, which are we to choose? I shift from one to the other and most often am faithful to both at once — which is my way of espousing the maxims Antiquity preferred to the swarming of dogmas.

  It is to our inertia that we owe our rescue from the inflation into which more than one man falls out of an excess of vanity, labor, or talent. If it is not comforting, it is in any case flattering to tell ourselves that we shall die without having given our measure.

  To have shouted one’s doubts from the rooftops, even while siding with that school of discretion which is skepticism.

  The considerable service done us by pests, thieves of our time, who keep us from leaving behind a complete image of our capacities.

  It is praiseworthy for us to love anything and anyone except our kind, precisely because they resemble ourselves. This phenomenon suffices to explain why history is what it is.

  Most of our evils issue from a great distance, from this or that ancestor ruined by his excesses. We are punished for his dissipations: no need to drink, he will have drunk in our place. That hangover which so surprises us is the price we pay for his euphorias.

  Thirty years of ecstasy at the altar of the Cigarette. Now, when I see others sacrifice to my former idol, I do not understand them, I regard them as unhinged or defective. If a “vice” we have conquered becomes alien to us to such a degree, how can we fail to be astounded by those we have not practiced?

  In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

  The desire to work comes over me only when I have an appointment. I always go off feeling certain I am missing a unique opportunity to outdo myself.

  “I cannot do without the things I care nothing for,” the Duchess du Maine liked to say. Frivolity, to this degree, is a prelude to renunciation.

  If the Almighty could realize how burdensome the merest action is to me on some occasions, He would not fail, in an impulse of pity, to yield me His place.

  Not knowing which way to turn, preferring a discontinuous reflection, image of time broken into pieces. . . .

  What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

  Returning home after a cremation: instant devaluation of Eternity and all the other great words.

  Nameless prostration, then dilation beyond the limits of the world and the resistance of the mind.

  The thought of death enslaves those whom it haunts. It liberates only at the beginning; then it degenerates into an obsession, thereby ceasing to be a thought.

  The world is an accident of God, accidens Dei. How right
the formula of Albertus Magnus seems!

  By virtue of depression we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

  In our veins flows the blood of monkeys. If we were to think of it often, we should end by giving up. No more theology, no more metaphysics — which comes down to saying no more divagations, no more arrogance, no more excess, no more anything. . . .

  Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

  Tolstoy’s excuse as a preacher is that he had two disciples who derived the practical consequences of his homilies: Wittgenstein and Gandhi, The first gave away his possessions; the second had none to give away.

  The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it, Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

  There comes a moment when one imitates nothing more than oneself.

  When you waken with a start and long to get back to sleep, you must dismiss every impulse of thought, any shadow of an idea. For it is the formulated idea, the distinct idea, that is sleep’s worst enemy.

  A hair-raising figure, the misunderstood man brings everything back to himself. His sneers fail to counterbalance the praises that he never ceases to grant himself and that exceed those not offered him. O for the lucky ones — rare, it is true — who, having triumphed, are able on occasion to stand aside! In any case, they do not exhaust themselves in recriminations, and their vanity consoles us for the arrogance of the misunderstood.

  If from time to time we are tempted by faith, it is because faith proposes an alternative humiliation: it is, after all, preferable to find oneself in a position of inferiority before a god than before a hominid.

  We can console someone only by following the direction of his affliction, to the point where the afflicted man can endure being so no longer.

  So many memories that loom up without apparent necessity — of what use are they, except to show us that with age we are becoming external to our own life, that these remote “events” no longer have anything to do with us, and that one day the same will be true of this life itself?

  The mystic’s “all is nothing” is merely a preliminary to the absorption in that all which becomes miraculously existent— that is, really all. This conversion was not to function in me, the positive, luminous portion of mysticism having been denied me.

  Between the demand to be clear and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

  Having scrutinized those we must envy, to realize we would willingly exchange fates with no one: everyone reacts in this way. Then how explain that envy is the oldest and least threadbare of infirmities?

  Not easy to avoid resentment of a friend who has insulted you during a fit of madness. Though you keep telling yourself that he was not himself you react as if, for once, he had revealed a well-kept secret.

  If Time were a patrimony, a possession, death would be the worst form of theft.

  Not taking revenge only half flatters us, considering that we never know whether our behavior is based on nobility or on cowardice.

  Knowledge, or the crime of indiscretion.

  No use counting on the windfall of being alone — always escorted by oneself!

  Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

  We come to terms one way or another with any fiasco, with the exception of death, fiasco itself.

  When we have committed some vile action, we hesitate to take it on ourselves, to designate the party responsible; we waste ourselves in endless ruminations, which are only a further vileness, though attenuated by the acrobatics of shame and remorse.

  The relief of discovering on the threshold of dawn that it is futile to get to the heart of anything at all

  If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?

  Every victory is more or less a lie; it touches us only on the surface, whereas a defeat, however trivial, affects us in the deepest part of ourselves, where it will make sure it is not forgotten. Thus, whatever happens, we can count on its company.

  The amount of emptiness I have accumulated, while keeping my individual status — the miracle of not having exploded under the weight of so much nonexistence!

  Without the perfume of the Incurable that it trails after it, boredom would be the most insupportable of all scourges.

  Consciousness of my indignity was crushing me. No argument came to oppose, to weaken it. Though I invoked this or that exploit, nothing availed. “You are merely a supernumerary,” a self-assured voice kept repeating. Finally, beside myself, I answered with the right panache: “No need to treat me this way; is it really my responsibility to be the sworn enemy of the planet — indeed, of the macrocosm?”

  To die is to prove one knows one’s own interest.

  The moment that separates itself from all others, that liberates itself from them and betrays them — with what joy do we hail its infidelity!

  If we knew the hour of our brain!

  Unless everything is changed — which never happens — no one can resolve his contradictions. Death alone helps here, and it is here that it scores points and outclasses life.

  To have invented the murderous smile. . . .

  For thousands of years, we were merely mortal. At last we are promoted to the rank of the moribund.

  To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

  On this immaculate page, a gnat was making a dash for it, “Why be in such a hurry? Where are you going, what are you looking for? Relax!” I screamed out in the middle of the night. I would have been so pleased to see it collapse! It’s harder than you think to gain disciples.

  To have nothing in common with the Universe, and to wonder by virtue of what disorder one belongs to it.

  “Why fragments?” one young philosopher reproached me.

  “Out of laziness, out of frivolity, out of disgust — but also for other reasons. . . .”And since I was finding none of these, I launched into prolix explanations that sounded serious to him and that ended by convincing him.

  French: the ideal idiom for translating equivocal sentiments with some delicacy.

  In a borrowed language, you are conscious of words; they exist not in you but outside of you. This interval between yourself and your means of expression explains why it is difficulty even impossible, to be a poet in another language besides your own. How extract a substance from words that are not rooted in you? The newcomer lives on the surface of language; he cannot, in a tongue belatedly learned, translate that subterranean agony from which poetry issues.

  Devoured by a nostalgia for paradise, without having known a single attack of true faith. . . .

  Bach in his grave. So I shall have seen him (like so many others) by one of those indiscretions so familiar to grave-diggers and journalists; since then I keep thinking of those skulls that have nothing original about them except that they proclaim the nothingness he denied.

  So long as there is a single god standing, man’s task is not done.

  The kingdom of the Insoluble extends as far as the eye can see. Our satisfaction therein is mitigated, however. What better proof that we are contaminated by hope from the start?

  After all, I have not wasted my time, I too have fidgeted, like anyone else, in this aberrant universe.

  12

  Caillois

  Fascination of the Mineral

  CAILLOIS’S EARLY STUDIES were entirely comme il faut, to the point of acknowledging his reactions as a disciple — witness the pains he takes in the 1939 foreword to Man and the Sacred to reassure his masters, asking them to ignore the last pages of the book, where, exceeding the limits of “positive knowle
dge.” he permits himself several metaphysical developments,, Since at this time he appeared to believe in the history of religions, in sociology and ethnology, he might normally have confined himself to one of these fields and ended his career as a scientist and a scholar. That he took another path was due largely to external circumstances, but as always, they do not account for what is essential It is important to know why, at the outset, he already inclined toward the fragment rather than toward the system, and why, too, he exhibited that horror of massive constructions, that concern for elegance, that felicity of expression, that touch of breathlessness in demonstration, that proportion, finally, of reasoning and rhythm, of theory and seduction. These superior infirmities, these flaws, he might have camouflaged, provided he sacrificed himself, abdicated his singularity (like more than one possessor of “positive knowledge”). Not being disposed to do so, he was to deviate from his first preoccupations, betray or disappoint his masters, follow a personal path, choose diversity, turn away, in short, from science, accessible only to those who know and endure the intoxication of monotony. He would traverse a number of subjects and disciplines — poetry, Marxism, psychoanalysis, dreams, games — never as a dilettante but as an impatient and greedy spirit condemned by irony to inadhesion and, frequently, to injustice. One can readily imagine him raging against a theme he has seized upon, a problem he has elucidated, which he will abandon to the scrupulous or the obsessive, as spending any more time on it would strike him as indecent. This exasperation, based on lassitude, exigence, or tact, is the key to his permanent renewal, to his intellectual peregrinations. One cannot help thinking here of a converse procedure, such as that of a Maurice Blanchot, who in the analysis of literary phenomena has brought to the point of heroism or asphyxia the superstition of depth in a rumination that combines the advantages of the vague and the abyss.