January 12, 1959Death of Susanna Socca. I am not sorrowful, but I am tired Of everything that I ever desired. How many times, great Gods, have I repeated these words of Dowson to myself! My life is filled with them. The pleasure of the unfinished, even better: of the un-started, of non-beginning. I come back …
Author Archives: E. M. Cioran
1958-12-08
8 XII 1958 Lord, have pity on my sterility, rouse my absent spirit, help me in this extremity of abandon and numbness! A spineless and demoralized angel, frozen in remorse of his fall. Only one thing redeems me from the fear of my downfall and the will to escape from it. Pity, the vice of …
1958-11-28
Certain mornings, poorly wakened, poorly reconciled with the day, I seem to hear my name pronounced by passers-by, carried by the air. Today, November 28, at the post office on the Rue de Vaugirard, an old woman telephoned in a booth, and I heard: Cioran… Even she spoke of me. It is ridiculous and terrible. What a …
1958-10-29
October 29, 1958 To be like that primordial Unity, outside of which there is nothing, which the tenth hymn of the Rig Veda said “breathes itself without breath”. He was a past master in the art of exterminating by praise. To hand over “the keys of my will” (to use the metaphor of Theresa of …
1958-09-14
September 14 Return to the Île de Ré. A pure week. Sensation of a terrestrial paradise. Return to Paris, such a downfall! I roam the streets like someone under hallucination. What do I seek there? I feel separated from everything. Not a single point of contact with anyone. Ah! that pleasure on a beach of …
1958-08-22
August 22 I do not conceal from myself that there there is a mixture of journalism and metaphysics in all that I do. To live is to compose. Every man who does not die of hunger is suspect.
1958-08-08
August 8 I agree to be the last man, if to be a man is to be like the others. I hung on the wall an old engraving depicting the hanging of the Armagnac partisans, looking at which partakes of sniggers and hilarity. It’s a spectacle with which I cannot manage to be sated. As …
1958-07-27
July 27 Ahriman is my principle and my god. It is said that after 12,000 years of combat with Ormuzd, the latter will sweep him away. Meanwhile… I should atone for the liberty that I enjoy. I pay for this luxury of exile with real or imagined misfortunes.
1958-07-13
July 13 Cruel Sunday, not without reminding me of all those in whom I have experienced the total inanity of everything. So far have I deepened my emptiness, have hollowed it out and have dwelt on it at length, that nothing remains of it, it seems to me nothing more: I have exhausted it, I …
1958-06-27
June 27, 1958 Melancholy is a regret from another world, but I have never known which world this was. Even God would not know how to put a limit on my contradictions. I have introduced the sigh into the economy of the intellect. In concern for decency I have toned down my cries; without doing …