by E. M. Cioran
I used to see him often (I knew him during the Occupation), always planning to stay no more than an hour, and I would end up spending the afternoon — it was my fault, of course, but his as well: he loved to talk, and I lacked the courage and still more the desire to interrupt a monologue that left me exhausted and enthralled. Yet it was I who was the garrulous one during my first visit, which I had paid with the intention of asking him some questions about Shestov. Probably out of a need to show off, I asked none at all, preferring to set forth the reasons for my own interest in the Russian philosopher of whom Fondane was the disciple — though less faithful than inspired. It may be apposite to note here that between the two wars Shestov was very well known in Rumania, and that his books were read more fervently there than elsewhere. Fondane had no idea of this and was greatly surprised to learn that in the country of his birth, we had followed the same trajectory as he. . . . Wasn’t there something disturbing about this, and much more than a coincidence? Many readers of Fondane’s Baudelaire have been struck by the chapter on boredom. I myself have always linked his predilection for this theme to his Moldavian origins. A paradise of neurasthenia, Moldavia is a province of an unendurable dreary charm; in 1936 I spent two weeks in Jassy, the capital, where if it had not been for alcohol I would have foundered in the most dissolving of depressions. Fondane loved to quote lines by Bacovia, the laureate of Moldavian ennui, a boredom less refined but much more corrosive than Baudelaire’s “spleen.” It is an enigma to me that so many people manage not to die of it. The experience of the “abyss” has, as we see, remote sources.
Like Shestov, Fondane liked to start with a quotation, a simple pretext to which he kept referring and from which he drew unexpected conclusions. In his developments there was always, despite their subtlety, something alluring; subtle he certainly was, he even abused his subtlety, it was his patent vice. In general, he couldn’t stop — he had the genius of variation — and it seemed, when one listened to him, that he had a horror of the period. This was glaringly apparent in his improvisations, as it was in his books, especially Baudelaire. On several occasions he told me he ought to cut a good many pages, and it is incomprehensible that he did not do so when we realize that he was living in the quasi-certainty of an imminent disaster. He believed himself to be threatened, and indeed he was, but it may be that inwardly he was resigned to the victim’s lot, for without that mysterious complicity with the Ineluctable, and without a certain fascination with tragedy, there is no explanation for his rejection of all precautions, the most elementary of which was that of changing residences. (He was betrayed by his concierge!) A strange “unconcern” on the part of someone who was anything but naive, and whose psychological and political judgments testified to an exceptional perspicacity. I still have a very exact memory of one of my first visits, during which, after enumerating Hitler’s dizzying faults and flaws, he launched into a visionary description of Germany’s collapse, and this in such detail that I was convinced then and there that I was witnessing a delirium. It was only an anticipation of the facts.
In literary matters, I did not always share his tastes. He insistently recommended Hugo’s book on Shakespeare, a virtually unreadable work that reminds me of a phrase recently used by an American critic to describe the style of Tristes Tropiques: “the aristocracy of bombast.” The expression is a striking one, though unfair in that instance.
I understood better his partiality for Nietzsche, in whom he loved the foreshortenings that were so much denser than those of Novalis, about whom he had reservations. In truth he was always less interested in what an author said than in what he might have said, in what he concealed; in this he adopted Shestov’s method — that is, the peregrination through souls much more than through doctrines. Uniquely sensitive to extreme cases, to the beguiling twists and turns in certain sensibilities, he once told me about a White Russian who had suffered in silence for eighteen years because he thought his wife was cheating on him. After so many years of mute torment, one day, unable to bear it any longer, he had it out with her, whereupon, after acquiring the certitude that all his suspicions had been false, incapable of enduring the notion that he had tortured himself for nothing over such a long period, he went into the next room and blew his brains out.
On another occasion, when he was describing his years in Bucharest, Fondane gave me an abject article attacking him, written by Tudor Arghezi, a great poet but a still greater pamphleteer, in prison at the time for political reasons (this was just after the First World War). Fondane, then a very young man, had managed to visit him there for some sort of interview. In return, the poet had proceeded to write a caricatural portrait so unspeakable that I have never been able to understand how Fondane could have shown it to me. He had his moments of detachment. . . . Usually indulgent, he ceased to be so toward those who supposed they had found . . .— those, in short, who converted to anything at all. He greatly esteemed Boris de Schloezer and was terrible disappointed to learn that the magisterial translator of Shestov could have shifted to Catholicism. He couldn’t get over it and identified the occasion with a betrayal. To search was for him more than a necessity or an obsession — to search without stopping was a fatality, his fatality, perceptible even in his way of speaking, especially when he was enthusiastic or would vacillate continually between irony and breathless-ness. I will forever blame myself for not having written down his remarks, his trouvailles, the leaps of a mind turning in all directions, constantly in combat with tyranny and the nullity of facts, greedy for contradictions and somehow in dread of succeeding.
I see him now, rolling cigarette after cigarette. Nothing, he used to say over and over again, equaled the pleasure of lighting up on an empty stomach. He kept on doing so despite a gastric ulcer that he proposed to deal with later, in a future about which he nursed no illusions. . . . The wife of his oldest friend told me at the time that she could not love him because of what she called his “sickly look,” On his face he did not, it is true, bear the signs of prosperity, but everything in him was beyond sickness and health as if both were merely stages he had transcended. Whereby he resembled an ascetic, an ascetic of a prodigious vivacity and verve that made one forget, while he was talking, his fragility, his vulnerability. But when he stopped talking — he who in spite of everything had mastered his fate — he gave the impression of dragging around something pitiful and, at certain moments, lost. The British poet David Gascoyne (who was also to suffer, under other circumstances, a tragic fate) told me that he had been haunted for months by the image of Fondane after he encountered him by chance on the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the day of Shestov’s death. It will readily be understood why, even after thirty-three years, a being so fascinating is singularly present in my mind, and why, too, I never pass by Number 6 Rue Rollin without a pang.
1978
15
Borges
Letter to Fernando Savater
Paris, December 10, 1976
Dear Friend.
In November, during your visit to Paris, you asked me to collaborate on a volume of tributes to Borges- My first reaction was negative; my second . . . as well. What is the use of celebrating him when the universities themselves are doing so? The misfortune of being recognized has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home. Consecration is the worst of punishments — for a writer in general, and particularly for a writer of his kind. Once everyone starts quoting him, you must leave off; if you do not, you feel you are merely swelling the ranks of his “admirers,” of his enemies. Those who want to do him justice at all costs are merely hastening his downfall. I shall stop here, for if I continue in this style I shall end by pitying his fate. And there is every reason to suppose he can do that on his own.
I think I have already told you that if I was so interested in him, it was because he represented a vanishing specimen of humanity: he embodies the paradox of a
sedentary man without an intellectual patrie, a stay-at-home adventurer at ease in several civilizations and literatures, a splendid and doomed monster. In Europe, as a kindred example, we may cite that friend of Rilke’s, Rudolf Kassner, who early in this century published a work of the very first order about English poetry (it was after reading that book during the last war that I began to learn English . . .) and who spoke with admirable acuity of Sterne, of Gogol, of Kierkegaard, as well as of the Maghreb or of India. Normally depth and erudition do not go together but he somehow reconciled them: a universal mind, lacking only grace, only seduction. It is here that Borges’s superiority appears: incomparably seductive, he has managed to put a touch of the impalpable, the aerial, a wisp of lace, on everything, even on the most arduous reasoning. For in Borges everything is transfigured by the spirit of play, by a dance of dazzling trouvailles and delicious sophistries.
I have never been attracted by minds confined to a single form of culture. “Not to take root, not to belong to any community”: such has been and such is my motto. Oriented toward other horizons, I have always wanted to know what was happening elsewhere; by the time I was twenty, the Balkan skyline had nothing more to offer me. This is the drama, and also the advantage, of being born in a minor “cultural” space. The foreign had become my god — whence that thirst to travel through literatures and philosophies, to devour them with a morbid ardor. What is happening in Eastern Europe must inevitably happen in the countries of Latin America, and I have noticed that its representatives are infinitely better informed, more “cultivated,” than the incurably provincial Westerners. Neither in France nor in England do I see anyone who has a curiosity comparable to Borges’s, a curiosity hypertrophied to the point of mania, to vice — I say “vice.” for in matters of art and reflection, whatever does not turn into a somewhat perverse fervor is superficial, hence unreal.
As a student, I was led to investigate the disciples of Schopenhauer. Among them was a certain Philipp Mainlander, who particularly attracted me. Author of a Philosophy of Deliverance, he enjoyed the additional distinction, in my eyes, of having committed suicide. This completely forgotten philosopher, I flattered myself belonged to me alone — not that there was any particular merit in my preoccupation: my studies had inevitably brought me to him. But imagine my astonishment when, much later, I came across a text by Borges that plucked him, precisely, out of oblivion! If I cite this example, it is because from that moment I began thinking more seriously than before about the condition of Borges, fated — reduced — to universality, constrained to exercise his mind in all directions, if only to escape the Argentine asphyxia. It is the South American void that makes the writers of an entire continent more open, more alive, and more diverse than those of Western Europe, paralyzed by their traditions and incapable of shaking off their prestigious sclerosis.
Since you ask what I like most about Borges, I have no hesitation in answering that it is his freedom in the most varied realms, his faculty of speaking with an equal subtlety of the Eternal Return and the Tango. For him everything is equally worthwhile, from the moment he is the center of everything. Universal curiosity is a sign of vitality only if it bears the absolute mark of a self, a self from which everything emanates and where everything ends up: sovereignty of the arbitrary, beginning and end that can be interpreted according to the most capricious criteria. Where is reality in all this? The Self — that supreme farce. . . . Borges’s playfulness reminds me of a certain romantic irony, the metaphysical exploration of illusion juggling with the Infinite. Friedrich Schlegel, today, has his back to Patagonia. . . .
Once again, one can only deplore that an Encyclopédie smile and a vision so refined should provoke general approbation, with all that implies. . . . But after all, Borges might become the symbol of a humanity without dogmas or systems, and if there is a utopia to which I should gladly subscribe, it would be the one where we all model ourselves on him — on one of the least ponderous minds that ever was, the last to give its true meaning to the word select.
16
Maria Zambrano
A Decisive Presence
AS SOON as a woman takes up philosophy, she becomes vain and aggressive, with all the reactions of a parvenu. Arrogant yet uncertain, visibly dumbfounded, she is not, evidently, in her element. How does it happen that the uneasiness inspired by such a case is never felt in the presence of Maria Zambrano? I have often asked myself the question, and I believe I can answer it: Maria Zambrano has not sold her soul to the Idea, she has safeguarded her unique essence by setting the experience of the Insoluble above reflection upon it, in short she has transcended philosophy. . . . In her eyes, only what precedes or follows the formulated is true, only the word wrested from the shackles of expression, or, as she herself says magnificently, La palabra liberada del lenguaje.
She is one of those beings whom one regrets meeting only too rarely but of whom one cannot stop thinking and whom one longs to understand or at least to surmise. An inner fire that eludes, an ardor that conceals itself beneath an ironic resignation: everything in Maria Zambrano leads to something else, everything involves an elsewhere, everything. Though one can discuss anything at all with her, one is nonetheless sure to slide sooner or later toward crucial interrogations without necessarily following the meanders of reasoning. Hence a style of conversation unblemished by objectivity, a dialogue in which she leads one toward oneself, toward one’s ill-defined pursuits, one’s virtual perplexities. I remember precisely the moment when, at the Café de Flore, I made the decision to explore Utopia. On this subject, which we had mentioned in passing, she quoted a remark of Ortega’s that she quite casually developed; I determined then and there to commit myself to the regret or the longing for the golden age — which I did not fail to do subsequently with a frenetic curiosity that little by little was to wear itself out or, rather, turn into exasperation. Nonetheless, readings extending over two or three years had their origin in that conversation.
Who, so much as she, has the gift, in anticipating one’s anxiety, one’s search, of dropping the unforeseeable and decisive word, the pregnant answer? And that is the reason one would like to consult her at life’s turning points — on the threshold of a conversion, of a breakup, of a betrayal, at the moment of ultimate confidences, the heavy and compromising kind — so that she might offer one, somehow, a speculative absolution, and reconcile one as much to one’s impurities as to one’s impasses, one’s stupors.
17
Weininger
Letter to Jacques Le Rider
Paris December 16, 1982
Reading your book about my old and distant idol, I could not help remembering what an event Geschlecht und Charakter had been for me. This was in 1928; I was seventeen, and hungering for every form of excess and heresy, I delighted in deriving the ultimate consequences from an idea, extending rigor to aberration, to provocation, conferring upon frenzy the dignity of a system. In other words, I was passionate about everything, with the exception of nuance. In Weininger it was the dizzying exaggeration that fascinated me, the infinity of negation, the denial of common sense, the murderous intransigence, the search for an absolute position, the craving to carry a piece of reasoning to the point where it destroyed itself and ruined the structure to which it belonged. Add to this the obsession with the criminal and the epileptic (particularly in Über die letzten Dinge), the cult of the inspired formula and the arbitrary excommunication, the identification of woman with Nothing and even with something less. . . . To this devastating affirmation my adherence was complete from the start. The object of my letter is to acquaint you with the circumstance that incited me to espouse these extreme theses on the aforesaid Nothing. A banal circumstance if ever there was one, yet it dictated my conduct for several years. I was still in the Lycée, mad about philosophy and about a girl in the Lycée as well. One important detail: I did not know her personally, though she belonged to the same milieu as I (the bourgeoisie of Sibiu, in Transylvania). As often happens with adole
scents, I was both insolent and timid, but my timidity prevailed over my insolence. For over a year this torment lasted, culminating one day when I happened to be reading some book or other, leaning against a tree in the town park. Suddenly I heard giggling. Turning around, I saw — who? Her, accompanied by one of the boys in my class, the one scorned by us all and nicknamed The Louse. After more than fifty years, I remember perfectly how I felt at that moment. I forgo the details. The fact remains that I vowed on the spot to abjure “sentiments.” And that was how I became a frequenter of brothels. A year after this radical and commonplace disappointment, I discovered Weininger. And found myself in the ideal situation to understand him. His splendid enormities concerning women intoxicated me. How could I have been beguiled by a subbeing? I kept asking myself. Why this torment, this calvary, on account of a fiction, a zero incarnate? A fated figure had come at last to deliver me. But that deliverance was to cast me into a superstition that he himself condemned, for I was drifting toward that “Romantik der Prostitution™ incomprehensible to serious minds and a specialty of eastern and southeastern Europe. In any case, my student life was passed under the spell of the Whore, in the shadow of her protective, cordial, even maternal, abasement. Weininger, by supplying me with the philosophical reasons for detesting an “honest” woman, cured me of “love” during the proudest and most frenetic period I have experienced in my life. I did not foresee a time when his indictments and his verdicts would no longer count for me except insofar as they would occasionally make me regret the madman I had been.