Anathemas and Admirations

by E. M. Cioran

  Reading Le Silence du corps, I was reminded several times of Huysmans, particularly of his biography of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam. Except in the essentials, sanctity is answerable to the aberrations of the organs, to a series of anomalies, to an inexhaustible variety of disorders, and this is true of whatever is profound, intense, unique. No interior excesses without an inadmissible substratum; the most ethereal ecstasy recalls in certain aspects the most crass. Is Guido a connoisseur of derangements disguised as a man of erudition? Sometimes I think so, but ultimately not. For if he has an evident weakness for corruption, on the other hand he is equally solicited by what is purest in the visionary or despairing wisdom of the Old Testament. Has he not — admirably — translated Job, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah? Here we are no longer in pestilence and horror, but in lamentation and outcry. Here is someone who lives, according to a profound necessity and sometimes according to his moods, on different spiritual levels. His last book (La Vie apparente) illustrates these contradictory temptations, preoccupations that are both immediate and timeless. What one most loves in him is the avowal of his defeats: “I am a failed ascetic,” he confides, rather embarrassed. A providential failure, for on its account we are sure of understanding each other, of really belonging to the perduta gente. Had he taken the decisive step toward salvation (how easy it is to conceive of him as a monk!), we should have been deprived of a delicious companion, filled with imperfections, manias, and moods, one whose elegiac inflections match his vision of a world so obviously doomed. Just listen to him: “How can a pregnant woman read a newspaper without immediately aborting?” “How can we judge abnormal and mentally diseased those who are terrified by the human face?”

  If you were to ask me what ordeals he passed through, I would not be in a position to answer. All I can tell you is that the impression he gives is of someone wounded — like all those, I am tempted to add, to whom the gift of illusion has been denied.

  Do not be afraid of meeting him: of all creatures, the least intolerable are those who hate human beings. Never run away from a misanthrope.

  20

  She Was

  Not of Their World . . .

  I ONLY MET HER TWICE. Seldom enough. But the extraordinary is not to be measured in terms of time. I was instantly conquered by her air of absence and bewilderment, her whisperings (she didn’t speak), her uncertain gestures, her glances that did not adhere to people or things, her quality of being an adorable specter. . . . “Who are you? Where do you come from?” were the questions you wanted to ask her right away. She wouldn’t have been able to answer, so identified was she with her mystery, so reluctant to betray it. No one will ever know how she managed to breathe — by what aberration she yielded to the claims of breath — nor what she was seeking among us. The one sure thing is that she was not from here, and that if she shared our fallen state it was merely out of politeness or some morbid curiosity. Only angels and incurables inspire a sentiment analogous to the one you felt in her presence. Fascination, supernatural malaise!

  The first moment I saw her, I fell in love with her timidity, a unique, unforgettable timidity that gave her the appearance of a vestal exhausted in the service of a secret god, or else of a mystic ravaged by the nostalgia or the abuse of ecstasy, forever unfit to reinstate the surfaces of life!

  Overwhelmed by possessions, fortunate according to the worlds she nonetheless seemed utterly destitute, on the threshold of an ideal beggary, doomed to murmur her poverty at the heart of the Imperceptible. Moreover, what could she own and utter, when silence stood for her soul and perplexity for the universe? And did she not suggest those creatures of lunar light that Rozanov speaks of? The more you thought about her, the less you were inclined to regard her according to the tastes and views of time. An unreal kind of malediction weighed upon her. Fortunately, her charm itself was inscribed within the past. She should have been born elsewhere, and in another age, in the mist and desolation of the moors around Haworth, beside the Brontë sisters. . . .

  Knowing anything about faces, you could readily see in hers that she was not doomed to endure, that she would be spared the nightmare of the years. Alive, she seemed so little the accomplice of life that you could not look at her without thinking you would never see her again. Adieu was the sign and the law of her nature, the flash of her predestination, the mark of her passage on earth; hence she bore it like a nimbus, not by indiscretion, but by solidarity with the invisible.

  21

  Foreshortened Confession

  I WANT TO WRITE only in an explosive state, in a fever or under great nervous tension, in an atmosphere of settling accounts, where invectives replace blows and slaps. It usually begins this way: a faint trembling that becomes stronger and stronger, as after an insult one has swallowed without responding. Expression means a belated reply, or else postponed aggression: I write in order not to take action, to avoid a crisis. Expression is relief, the indirect revenge of one who cannot endure shame and who rebels in words against his kind, against himself. Indignation is not so much a moral as a literary impulse; it is, indeed, the wellspring of inspiration. And wisdom? Just the opposite. The sage in us ruins all our best impulses; he is the saboteur who diminishes and paralyzes us, who lies in wait for the madman within in order to calm and compromise him, in order to dishonor him. Inspiration? A sudden disequilibrium, an inordinate pleasure in affirming or destroying oneself. I have not written a single line at my normal temperature. And yet for years on end I regarded myself as the one individual exempt from flaws. Such pride did me good: it allowed me to blacken paper. I virtually ceased producing when my delirium abated and I became the victim of a pernicious modesty, deadly to that ferment from which intuitions and truths derive. I can produce only if, the sense of absurdity having suddenly abandoned me, I esteem myself the beginning and the end. . . .

  Writing is a provocation, a fortunately false view of reality that sets us above what is and what seems to be. . . . To rival God, even to exceed Him by the mere virtue of language: such is the feat of the writer, an ambiguous specimen, torn and infatuated, who, having forsaken his natural condition, has given himself up to a splendid vertigo, always dismaying, sometimes odious. Nothing more wretched than the word, yet it is by the word that one mounts to sensations of felicity, to an ultimate dilation where one is completely alone, without the slightest feeling of oppression. The Supreme achieved by syllables, by the very symbol of fragility! It can also be achieved, oddly, by irony, on the condition that the latter, carrying its demolition work to extremes, dispenses shudders of a god in reverse. Words as agents of an ecstasy inside out. . . . Everything that is truly intense partakes of paradise and hell, with this difference, that the former we can only glimpse, whereas we have the luck to perceive and, better still, to feel the latter. There exists an even more notable advantage, on which the writer has a monopoly — that of ridding himself of his dangers. Without the faculty of blackening pages, I wonder what I would have become. To write is to get free of one’s remorse and one’s rancors, to vomit up one’s secrets. The writer is an unbalanced being who uses those words to cure himself. How many disorders, how many grim attacks have I not triumphed over thanks to these insubstantial remedies!

  Writing is a vice one can weary of. In truth, I write less and less, and I shall doubtless end up no longer writing at all, no longer finding the least charm in this combat with others and with myself.

  When one attacks a subject, however ordinary, one experiences a feeling of plenitude, accompanied by a touch of arrogance. A phenomenon stranger still: that sensation of superiority when one describes a figure one admires. In the middle of a sentence, how easily one believes oneself the center of the world! Writing and worship do not go together: like it or not, to speak of God is to regard Him from on high. Writing is the creature’s revenge, and his answer to a botched Creation.

  22

  Rereading . . .

  Translated into German by Paul Celan, my Précis de Décomposition (A Short History o
f Decay) was published by Rowohlt in 1953. When it was republished in Germany in 1978, the editor of Akzente asked me to introduce it to the magazine’s readers. That is the origin of this text.

  REREADING THIS BOOK, which is now over thirty years old, I try to recognize the person I was — a person who escapes me to some degree. My gods were Shakespeare and Shelley. I still frequent the former; the latter, rarely. I cite him to indicate the kind of poetry that intoxicated me. An untidy lyricism matched my dispositions; unfortunately, I discern traces of it in all my efforts of the period. Who can still read a poem like Epipsychidion? I used to read it, in any case, with delight. Shelley’s hysterical Platonism repels me now, and to effusion, whatever its form, I prefer concision, rigor, a deliberate coldness. My vision of things has not fundamentally changed; what certainly has changed is the tone. The content of thought is rarely modified in any real way; what does undergo a metamorphosis, on the other hand, is the turn of phrase, appearance, rhythm. Growing old, I have noticed that poetry is less and less necessary to me: perhaps one’s taste for it is linked to a surplus of vitality? I have an increasing tendency — fatigue must have a lot to do with it — toward dryness, toward laconism, at the expense of explosion. Now, the Précis was an explosion. Writing it, I had the impression I was escaping a sense of oppression, with which I could not have continued for long: I had to breathe, I had to break out. I felt the need to come to decisive terms, not so much with men as with existence as such, which I would have liked to provoke to single combat, if only to see which of us would win. I had, to be frank, a quasi-certitude that I would gain the upper hand, that it would be impossible for existence to triumph. To corner existence, to force it into its last hiding places, to reduce it to nothingness by frenzied reasonings and accents recalling Macbeth or Kirilov: such was my ambition, my intention, my dream, the program of my every moment. One of the first chapters is called “The Anti-Prophet.” As a matter of fact, I reacted as a prophet, assigned myself a mission — a corrosive one, if you like, but a mission all the same. By attacking the prophets, I was attacking myself and . . . God, according to my principle in those days, which was that one should be concerned solely with Him and with oneself. Whence the uniformly violent tone of an ultimatum (not succinct, as it should have been, but verbose, diffuse, insistent), of a challenge addressed to Heaven and earth, to God and to God’s ersatz — in short, to everything. In the desperate fury of those pages, where it would be bootless to look for a grain of modesty, of serene and resigned reflection, of acceptance and respite, of smiling fatalism, it is the unbridled madness of my youth as well as an incoercible love of denial that attain their apogee. What has always beguiled me in negation is the power of substituting oneself for everyone and everything, of being a sort of demiurge, of possessing the worlds as if one had collaborated in its advent and then had the right, even the duty, to precipitate its ruin. Destruction immediate consequence of the spirit of negation, corresponds to a profound instinct, to a type of jealousy that each of us must experience in his heart of hearts with regard to the First Beings, to His position and the idea He represents and symbolizes. However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.

  After the Spanish publication of the Précis, two Andalusian students asked me if it was possible to live without “fundamentación.” I answered that it was true that I had found no solid basis anywhere and that I had nonetheless managed to endure, for with the years one got used to everything, even vertigo. Then, too, one does not constantly keep watch and interrogate oneself, absolute lucidity being incompatible with breathing. If one were at every moment conscious of what one knew — if, for example, the sentiment of foundationlessness were both continual and intense — one would kill oneself or allow oneself to slip into imbecility. One exists thanks to the moments when one forgets certain truths; this is because during such intervals one accumulates energy, and it is energy that permits one to confront those selfsame truths. When I despise myself, I tell myself, in order to shore up my confidence, that, after all, I have managed to maintain myself in being or in a semblance of being, with a perception of things that very few could have endured. Several young people in France have told me that the chapter that most attracted them was “The Automaton,” that intolerable quintessence. In my way I must be a fighter, since I have not succumbed to my ruminations.

  The two students also asked me why I had not stopped writing and publishing. Not everyone has the luck to die young, was my answer. My first book, with its sonorous title — On the Summits of Despair — I wrote in Rumanian at the age of twenty-one, while promising myself never to begin another. Then I committed a second, with the same promise subsequently. The farce has been repeated for over forty years. Why? Because writing, however little, has helped me pass from one year to the next, the expressed obsessions being weakened and — halfway— overcome. To produce is an extraordinary comfort. And to publish, another. To have a book coming out, that is your life, or a part of your life that becomes external to you, that no longer belongs to you, that has ceased to torment you. Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow. When you detest someone to the point of wanting to liquidate him, the best thing is to take a sheet of paper and to write on it any number of times that X is a bastard, a fool, a monster, and you ‘will immediately discover that you hate him less and that you are no longer thinking quite so much about vengeance. This is more or less what I did with regard to myself and the world. The Précis I drew from my lower depths in order to insult life and insult myself. The result? I have endured myself a little better, as I have better endured life. You look after yourself as best you can.

  The first version of the book was written very quickly in 1947 and was called “Negative Exercises.” I showed it to a friend, who gave it back to me a few days later, saying “You have to rewrite the whole thing,” I deeply resented his advice, but luckily I took it. In fact, I rewrote the thing three times, for on no account did I want it to be considered as the work of a foreigner. My ambition was nothing less than to compete with the natives. Where could such effrontery have come from? My parents, who spoke only Rumanian and Hungarian and a little German, knew no French words except bonjour and merci This was the case with almost everyone in Transylvania. When I went to Bucharest in 1929 for some sort of studies, I realized that most intellectuals there spoke French fluently; this produced in me, who read French and no more, a fury that would last for a long time and that still endures, in another form: since reaching Paris, I have never been able to rid myself of my Wallachian accent. If I cannot speak like the natives, at least I shall try to write like them: this must have been my unconscious reasoning; otherwise, how explain my desperate eagerness to do as well as they and even — insane presumption — better than they?

  The efforts we expend to assert ourselves, to measure ourselves against our kind and, if possible, to outstrip them, have vile, inadmissible, hence powerful, reasons. The noble resolutions, on the contrary, issuing from a desire for effacement, inevitably lack vigor, and we quickly abandon them, with or without regret. Everything by which we excel proceeds from a murky and suspect source — from our depths, in fact.

  And there is also this: I should have chosen any other language than French, for I have little in common with its distinguished vaunt; it is at the antipodes of my nature, of my outbursts, of my true self and my kind of wretchedness. In its rigidity, in the quantity of elegant constraints that it represents, French seems to me an exercise in ascesis or, rather, the combination of a straitjacket and a salon. Yet it is precisely on account of this incompatibility that I have attached myself to this language, to the point of exulting when the great New York scholar Erwin Chargaff (born, like Paul Celan, in Czernowitz) confided
to me one day that for him only what was expressed in French deserved to exist . . .