June 25, 1958 When young, I had thought so much about death that I have nothing more to say about it now that I am old: hackneyed fright. June 25, 1958 4:00 pm Sensation of an extraordinary happiness. Where could it have come from? How mysterious and insane it all is! There is nothing more …
Author Archives: E. M. Cioran
1958-06-24
June 24 I feel I am going to be reconciled with poetry. It could not be otherwise: I can only think of myself. The abdication of Charles V is the moment in history dearest to my heart. I have literally lived in Yuste in the company of the gouty emperor. I have aspired for a …
1958-06-21
Saturday, June 21, 1958 My father has been dead for exactly six months. Boredom captures me again, the same boredom that I knew on certain Saturdays in my childhood, and the one that then devastated my adolescence. An emptiness that drains space, against which only alcohol could defend me. But alcohol is forbidden to me, …
1958-06-09
June 9, 1958 The universe explodes in my brain. Intolerable fever! I am a finger’s breadth away from Chaos. The elements are unleashed. I lose ground. Who will reconcile me with what this may be? A fixed point, I seek a fixed point, and find only incertitude and mud, and an uncontrollable delirium. Being is …
1958-06-08
June 8, 1958 Depressing Sunday. I come to raise the eyelid of God. The same Sunday. For thirty years I felt in my legs everyday a billion ants which persist ceaselessly. A billion pricks daily, sometimes scarcely perceptible, sometimes painful. A mixture of discomfort and disaster. To create a work, a minimum of faith is …
1958-06-07
June 7, 1958 Found in a corner a bit of cheese, thrown there long ago. An army of black insects all around. One might imagine these same insects consuming the last remains of a brain. Thinking of one’s own corpse, of the horrible metamorphoses to which it will be submitted, is somewhat calming: it inures …
1958-06-04
June 4, 1958 Everyone believes that what he does is important, except for me; plus I can do nothing anyway… Read some poems of Alexander Blok. — Ah! these Russians — how close they are to me! — My form of boredom is completely Slavonic. God knows from what steppe my ancestors came. I have …
1958-02-24
February 24, 1958 For several days the idea of suicide keeps coming back to me. I think of it often, it is true; but thinking of it is one thing, submitting to its domination is another. Terrible bout of black obsessions! By my own means, it is impossible to remain thus for long. I have …
1958-02-20
I thought today, February 20, 1958, of the state of putrefaction of my dead friends and my father, and I dreamed of my own putrefaction. Work alone could save me, but work I cannot. My will was achieved upon my birth. Infinite, chimerical projects, out of proportion to my capacities.Something in me cripples me, has …
1958-02-19
February 19, 1958 Intolerable happiness! Thousands of planets expand in the limitlessness of consciousness! Terrifying happiness! Poor sorts of sensations — and sensations of a god — I have not known any other kinds. Minuscule and infinite, my dimensions, my modes of existence. If the sensation of the vanity of all things could by itself …