December 16, 1959French moralists, it is Manichaeism by anecdoteor: anecdotal Manichaeismor: at the “socialite” level. Divinity of Prose. The farther I go, the less verse touches me. Melodie dried up, soul obstructed. One always has someone above one; even beyond God looms Nothingness. What is that Visigoth king who, in the sixth century, wrote a …
Author Archives: E. M. Cioran
1959-12-12
December 12, 1959 There are some nights, I had a dream that I cannot forget: a theory of serpents passed before me, marched rather, and each one, as its turn came, reared up to look at me with blazing eyes that dilated: one might say they were two suns in miniature. What distorts everything is …
1959-11-29
November 29, 1959There is nothing more disappointing, more fragile, and more false than a brilliant mind. Prefer the bores: they respect banality; what is eternal in things or in ideas. I do not understand X: he is boring without being banal. It’s boredom that gets free from the search for originality, from the pursuit of …
1959-11-18
Nov. 18, 1959Afternoon sleep. On waking, for a second I had felt what seemed like death. It was like the brilliant illumination of a cadaver. If every day I had the courage to yell for a quarter of an hour, I would enjoy perfect equilibrium. All my “writings” are only, in the end, exercises in …
1959-09-12
Sept. 27, 1959From malaise to malaise, from illness to illness; where am I going? Feeling of radical impotence above all. Born impoverished. The Bad has the same title as the Good to be a creative force. Of the two, though, it is the more active. For too often the Good idles. There was a time …
1959-04-24
Friday April 24, 1959 — Since January, virtually sick; impossible to work; moved from one infirmity to another; it seems that each organ waited its turn… Nature experimented on me, and I helped, incapable of opposing with the least resistance. The “good usage of maladies”, — I am far from that. This winter, one day …
1959-04-06
Yesterday, April 5, I spent the afternoon in a little woods near Trappes, thinking of revenge, an inexhaustible theme. — Not to take revenge poisons the soul as much as, if not more, than to avenge.Has one the right not to take revenge? Concert for the birthday (fifty years) of O. Messiaen. I found myself …
1959-03-30
March 30, 1959 Handel’s Messiah. — There must be a paradise, or at least that it had existed — otherwise what reason for so much of the sublime? Bells of Bruges, remembering you stirs vestiges of heaven in me, you make me go back before my fall. Since the age of seventeen, I have been …
1959-03-26
March 26, 1959 Second bout of flu in three months! Complete exhaustion, oppression, near total impossibility of breathing. Have I already passed to the other side? For so many years my body has weighed me down. If I have ever understood anything in my life, I owe it to my illnesses. I have always been …
1959-03-12
March 12, 1959 It is unbelievable how much everything in me, absolutely everything, primarily ideas, emanates from my physiology. My body is my thought, or rather my thought is my body. For 25 years, I lived in hotels. That involves an advantage: one is not fixed anywhere, one holds onto nothing, one leads a life …