Cioran: Notebooks 1957-1972

January 12, 1959
Death 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 to the Vedas, to the Upanishads, time after time. Every year, I have access to Indianity.

When Spanish leaves the sublime, it becomes ridiculous.

Every Hindu philosophy comes down to the horror, not of death, but of birth.

The only profound experience that I have had in my life is boredom. On earth there is for me neither “occupation” nor “diversion” to tell the truth. I have even gone beyond the void: that is why it is impossible for me to kill myself.

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 kindness.
Pity or kindness as vice…

The impoliteness of being “profound”.

There was a time when, believing myself to be the most normal one who ever was, I became afraid, and spent a winter reading psychiatric books.

To live in eternal destitution, to beg at the door of each instant, to humiliate myself in order to breathe. One destitute of breath!

I proceed like the painters: I draw, I like to say, I write the outlines of a text; then I fill it out, I proceed by successive layers; this necessarily entails contradictions, incompatibilities, disparities; it is a risk to take, that I take.
But what does a coherent mind do? It sets out a definition and refuses to give it up; it violate the problem that it treats, it tortures it in any case; logic gains from it; life suffers from it. It too takes its risks.

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 symptom!

There still happen to be people who believe that I am “usable”, no, I cannot get over it!

There is no madness in my family; otherwise, I would live in constant fear.

A skeptic and one all wrapped together…

To remain forever in an unstable equilibrium.

I have the sentiment of nothingness, but I have no humility. The sentiment of nothingness is the contrary of humility.
He who hates himself is not humble.

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 Ávila) to “our” Lord.

Reread some pages of my poor Syllogisms; they are scraps of sonnets, of poetic ideas annihilated by derision.

I devour book after book, for the sole aim of eluding problems, of no longer thinking of them. In the midst of helplessness, the absolute certainty of my solitude.

It is in moments of weakness and doubt where truth and even the idea of truth seem to us so inaccessible and inconceivable that the least plausibility appears to us like an unhoped-for prospect.

I have overcome the appetite for but not the idea of suicide. Quieted by being undone.

I often tend to think, with the Stoics, that all sensation is an alteration, and all affection is a sickness of the soul.

A philosopher is one who charges ahead; but hindered by a thousand doubts, what am I to assert, toward what am I to throw myself? Skepticism dries up the vigor of the mind; or rather: a dry mind lapses into skepticism, and is devoted to it out of dryness, out of emptiness.

At the height of my doubts I must suspect the absolute, a hint of god.

“If I must recount in detail the conduct of Our Lord in my regard…” — thus speaks Saint Theresa; — how I envy these “souls” who think that God or Jesus watches over them, and is concerned with them.

Up close, every living thing, the least insect, seems charged with mystery; from afar, nullity without limit.
There is a distance that suppresses metaphysics; to be a philosopher is thus to be an accomplice of the world.

The autobiography of Theresa of Ávila — how many times have I read it? If I have not caught the faith after so many readings, it is because it was written that I would never have it.

Such a horror I have of the flesh! Our daily downfall is accomplished by an infinite number of falls. If there were a god, he would exempt us from the drudgery of accumulating rot, of dragging a body along.

If ever I throw myself at God’s feet, it would be out of fury, or from a supreme disgust with myself.

Never has boredom resembled anything other than my vitriol. Everything on which I cast my gaze is disfigured forever. My squint is communicated to things.

A medical treatise from the time of Hippocrites was called: On the Flesh. That’s a book according to my heart, and how I could write on the subjective tone.

“Weltlosigkeit” — another word according to my heart, untranslatable like all foreign words that seduce and satisfy me.

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 not wanting! One could escape from “life” there (I blush just using such a word).
Decidedly, I was not made to struggle among men. Suffering each instance. What progress I could make in a career of tears!

There is a bit of venom in me that nothing could tame or neutralize.

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.

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 far as I remember, I have never believed in the virtues of fever.

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.

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 have dried up the source of it.

The more I think of emptiness, the more I realize that I have made a mystical concept of it, or a substitute for the Infinite, perhaps for God.

To wriggle beast-like on a spoilt planet.

“… laziness is like a beatitude of the soul; that consoles it of all its losses, and that takes the place of all goods.” (La Rochefoucauld)

Paradise is everything, and I sometimes know this everything.

Boredom: empty suffering, diffused torment. One cannot be bored in hell, one is bored only in paradise. (To expand in the commentary on the “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” –)

Boredom in God.
One who does not know the voluptuousness of abandoning a project never knew boredom.

I have tried my best, but I cannot accept this universe without feeling guilty of fraud.

I am marvelously apt at imagining the despair of a hyena.

To describe those moments where life is suddenly emptied of all feeling, where satiety overwhelms you and puts an end to the effervescence of spirit.

I would love to have lived in a corrupt court, to be the skeptic of a prince…

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 that I had been a subject of terror to others, not least of whom to myself.

I listen in myself to the appeals and the tearing of Chaos, to the extent that I can descend there, before being converted or degraded in universe…

Let’s attack reality at it root, let’s change the composition and the meaning of it.

X is so false and selfish that he is incapable of the least spontaneous movement. Everything in him is premeditation and plan: one could say that he breathes by calculation.

Tapping on an out of tune piano: waves of melancholy sink in me.

My article on Utopia, published in the July issue of the N.R.F., is so bad that I should just go to bed — from despair. — I cannot write without stimulants; and stimulants are forbidden to me. The café is the secret to everything.

Motionless vertigo, supernatural laziness.

To say a flashing no to all things, to contribute one’s best to the increase of general perplexity.

One cannot imagine two more different people than my mother and my father. I have not succeeded in neutralizing their irreducible characters in me; thus a double and irreconcilable heredity is balanced in my spirit.

Hatred without object, pure hatred, is a form of despair, perhaps the worst kind. But how can that be explained?

I owe the best and the worst of myself to my insomnia.

His out-dated smile.

X: an inanimate writer.