Cioran: Notebooks 1957-1972

December 16, 1959
French moralists, it is Manichaeism by anecdote
or: anecdotal Manichaeism
or: 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 commentary on the Apocalypse? The manuscript has been published, by whom and when? Vague memory of a card hastily read in I don’t know which library.

Before each insult, we oscillate between the slap and the coup de grâce; and this oscillation, which makes us lose precious time, sanctions our cowardice.

The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. The most beautiful title one could ever find. What does it matter that the book is unreadable?

Every man who has a conviction, whatever it may be, has a god; what am I saying, he believes in God. For all conviction postulates the absolute or stands in for it.

One doesn’t demand liberty, but the illusion of liberty. It is for this illusion that humanity struggles for millenia.
Besides, liberty being, as it is said, a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing to be free?

A book to read: Tratado de Tribulación by Father Ribadeneira, a contemporary of Saint Theresa.

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 historical culture. One can no longer wonder about God, but on the forms of god; on the religious sensibility and experience, and no longer on the object that justifies either.

November 29, 1959
There 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 the unusual, from permanent and useless surprise.

Nothing offends so much as a thinker who believes it his duty to solve everything that is posed, who submerges every problem with words. Volubility — a sin against mind. The greatest have not escaped it.

The kind of man I admire: Rancé.

A god begins a false future the moment someone deigns to be killed for him.

From what interior trouble do my cosmological obsessions emerge! It is understandable that they would be so frequent among madmen.

Tacitus, my favorite writer. I entirely concur with Hume’s judgement that he was the most profound mind in Antiquity.

It is not the happiness, but the merit of other people that bothers and troubles us.

Prayer surges from my state of depression which exults.

I am only attached to minds wasted by sterility; or: who excel in sterility. Joubert even seems to me sometimes too fecund.

A religion is finished the moment it bears only heresies.

Nov. 18, 1959
Afternoon 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 anti-utopia.

Whoever assures me that he knows no resentment, I am always tempted to slap him in the face, to show him that he is mistaken.

On the whole, life is an extraordinary thing.

Sept. 27, 1959
From 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 when I did not pass a single day without several hours of music or without reading a poem. Right now, prose holds first place for me. Such a diminution, such a downfall!

The only problem that captures my heart: that of the monster.

To neutralize the effects of Creation.

The least act poses for me the problem of all acts; life is converted for me in Life; that complicates the task of breathing up to the point of suffocation.

Fit of anger from morning to evening. I quarreled with shopkeepers, with everyone. After each outburst, a feeling of humiliation. Reactions from “odious” individuals, and, by way of consequence, self-disgust.
All people who sell something put me beside myself.

After a sleepless night, a cigarette has a funereal taste.

I am a write who doesn’t write. Feeling of falseness to my nights, to my “destiny”, of betraying it, of throwing away my hours.
Oppression. Certitude of being uncalled.

In my moments of “epilepsy”, I feel disagreeably close to Saint Paul. My affinities with violent one, with all those I detest. Who more than I ever resembled his enemies more?

Enthusiasts, violent ones are in general stunted, “deflated”. They live in perpetual combustion, at the expense of their bodies.

If I do not progress on a single plan, and if I produce nothing, it’s because I seek the unfindable, or, as it used to be said, the truth. Lacking the ability to obtain it, I hop up and down, I wait, I wait.

I am a frantic skeptic.

In the first centuries of the Christian Era, I would have been a Manichaean, more precisely a disciple of Marcion.

Pity: a depraved kindness.

I no longer know who defined himself: “I am the locus of my states.” This definition suits me integrally, and nearly exhausts my nature.

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 while stricken with the flu, from my bed I looked at the sky, looking more desolated than one could imagine, I noticed two birds (what could they have been?) pursuing each other, in full amorous chase in front of this mournful backdrop. Such a spectacle reconciles you with death, and perhaps even life.

I will give all poets for Emily Dickinson.

I dine in town — and my “soul” is buried.

Diogenes Laertius speaks of the charm of the Epicurean doctrine and that it had, so to speak, the sweetness of the sirens.

Sorrow has destroyed all my talents.

I am a Mongol devastated by melancholy.

Sunday the 17th — Jardin des Plantes. More and more fascinated by reptiles. The eyes of pythons. No animal more mysterious, more distant from “life”. All of that returns to Chaos in the end. Sensation of making a backward leap, of returning to eternity.

Tacitus, my favorite historian.
I know nothing finer than the fall of Vitellius, Histories, paragraphs LXVII-LXVIII. “No one could forget human vicissitudes to the point of not being moved in seeing such a spectacle: a Roman emperor, recently master of the world…”

Happiness without predicate, to speak as in the Logic manuals.

I saw in an eternal false inspiration: not surprising that nothing came out of it. But isn’t that the secret of my sterility?

Everything turns sour in my entrails and in my spirit.

I have an infinite capacity to transform everything into suffering, or rather to aggravate all my sufferings.
Generation of pains.

I do not advance truths, but half-convictions, inconsequential heresies, which have done neither evil nor good to anyone. I will forever be a man without disciples, and it is my intention to have none. One is followed only if decides things, if one assumes an attitude or if one speaks in the name of men or of gods. But none of these apply to me. I am alone and I complain about it.

A tramp, whom I value for his defects and his imbalance, who sleeps for years under the stars, said to me the other day: “I am free to the utmost degree”.

Who has pity for himself has the same pity for God.

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 behind the musician, but I could see him in profile. He listened religiously: his works were truly a universe — for him alone. I listened elsewhere; and I thought that each is enclosed in his own world, and what one does is nothing for the other. We exist only for our enemies — and for a few friends who do not love us.

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 affected by a secret pain, undetectable, but which has ruined by thoughts and my illusions: a tingling in the nerves, night and day, et which does not permit me, except when sleeping, a single moment of forgetting. Feeling of subjection to an eternal treatment or eternal torture.

I have read too much… Reading has devoured my thought. When I read, I have the impression of “doing” something, of justifying myself before “society”, of having a job, of escaping the shame of being an idle ——-, a useless and unusable man.

One forgets all pains, but one does not forget a single humiliation.

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 half sick, even when I am well.

Crisis of tears. I happened to read a bad book on Mlle de Lavallière. The scene of the dinner with the king and Mme de Montespan, before the departure for the convent devastated me… Everything devastates me, it is true. Extreme frailty turns us away from everything, and, paradoxically, confers at the same time an extraordinary sense for trifles, or for past events which have no direct significance for our lives. I feel sorry for just about anything, I shake like a little girl. Perhaps it is from the impossibility of crying for myself.

Broken nerves for seventeen years already! It is unbelievable that I have held on until now.

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 of passing. Sentiment of always being in the point of departure, perception of a supremely provisional reality.