A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Others praised it for precisely these reasons (in his review of the book, Maurice Nadeau proclaimed Cioran “the one whose arrival has been prepared by all the philosophers of the void and of the absurd, harbinger of bad news par excellence").

We need merely proceed to an investigation of ourselves, only undertake the archaeology of our alarms. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own. My mother used to read a lot of books when I was a child and I saw how much enjoyment these books would bring her. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything. He wrote A Short History of Decay in French, so me picking up an English translation made no difference to me picking up a Romanian translation.

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. Hell is a haven next to this displacement in time, this empty and prostrate languor in which nothing stops us but the spectacle of the universe decaying before our eyes. Thereby we find more prestige in expression than in the soul which supports it, in grace than in intuition; emotion itself becomes polite. Doctrineless, they have only whims and interests, accommodating vices a thousand times more endurable than the ravages provoked by principled despotism; for all of life’s evils come from a “conception of life.

When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verification of the disease. stationary movement, the richest expenditure of energy without gesture, the hostile and impassioned expectation of an irreparable lightning bolt. Of course, one might have reservations about some of the opinions, but still quite enjoyable on the whole.

If Sunday afternoons were extended for months, where would humanity get to, liberated from sweat, from the weight of the first curse? 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. When, on so many brinks and byroads, our eyes refused to drown in themselves, their dryness preserved the object which amazed them. The man who has the misfortune to belong to a period of creation and fecundity suffers its limitations and its ruts; slave of a unilateral vision, he is enclosed within a limited horizon.