March 12, 1960 Spent the afternoon in a state of acute nostalgia, for everything, for my country, for my youth, for all that I have wasted, for all the pointless years, for all the days I have not wept… “Life” does not suit me. I was made for a savage existence, for absolute solitude, out …
Author Archives: E. M. Cioran
1960-02-24
February 25, 1960. Today, in writing my name on a form, it was as if I had written it for the first item, as if I did not recognize it. The day, the year of my birth, all of it seemed new to me, and inexplicable, without a single relationship with me. Psychiatrists call the …
1960-01-20
I swear never to speak of things that I don’t know well, not to improvise for anything in the world, not to be unworthy of a subject that I treat, not to discredit myself in my own eyes. (Oath sworn at the end of a conference with M., particularly superficial.)January the 20th, 1960. The French …
1960-01-11
January 11. Entire day devoured by conversation. All natural deaths are compromising. If the story of the fall is so beautiful, it is because the author describes there figures that are neither symbolic nor mythological: he sees a God of flesh and blood in the garden, not an entity. One day man will abolish knowledge …
1960-01-06
January 6, 1960 I had spoken to Camus only a single time, in 1950, I think; I have spoken ill of him a great deal, and now I feel myself under the blow of a terrible and unjustified remorse. I lose all my means before a cadaver, especially when he is so respectable. Sorrow without …
1960-01-01
January 1st, 1960. For years, I no longer read Baudelaire, but I think of him as if I gave my daily lecture on him. Is it because he alone seems to me to have gone farther than me in the experience of “depression”? Chance meeting with X — always that puzzling blend of crook and …
1959-12-31
December 31, 1959 Midnight. I should spend my life alone, and think without lapsing into Time.
1959-12-25
For one skeptic to be born, a thousand believers must proliferate. the order December 25, 1959 I received a greeting card from a Spanish poet, depicting a rat, symbol, he wrote me, of all that we can “hope” for in the year 1960. Suffered from a cold six months a year! I should write a …
1959-12-20
December 20This afternoon, wanting to write on fame, and not finding anything to say, I went to bed. Often my grand enterprises have led me to bed, a lamentable end to my ambitions. Mind quick and yet irresolute. My pathological taste for Tacitus, the need I have to feed on horrors. Then, the eloquence and …
1959-12-19
December 19, 1959I understand mystics, for indeed like them, I am consumed by concupiscence, while detesting the flesh. One can die of the torments of sensuality, “temptations”.