Know Thyself Nothing in Excess |
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Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:23 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "All that we build beyond raw existence, all the many powers which give the world a physiognomy, we owe to Misfortune—architect of diversity, intelligible instrument of our actions." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:24 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "No one would perform the merest action without the feeling that this action is the one and only reality. Such blindness is the absolute basis, the indisputable principle, of all that exists. The man who argues merely proves that he is less, that doubt has sapped his vitality. . . . But amid his very doubts, he must feel the importance of his progress toward negation. To know that nothing is worth the trouble becomes implicitly a belief, hence a possibility of action; this is because even a trifle of existence presupposes an unavowed faith; a simple step—even toward a mock-up of reality—is an apostasy with regard to nothingness; breathing itself proceeds from an implicit fanaticism, like any participation in movement. . ." [Deecay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:24 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "To be afraid is to think of yourself continually, to be unable to imagine an objective course of events. The sensation of the terrible, the sensation that it is all happening against you, supposes a world conceived without indifferent dangers. The frightened man—victim of an exaggerated subjectivity — believes, himself to be, much more than the rest of his kind, the target of hostile events. He encounters the brave man in this error, for the brave man, at the antipodes, sees only invulnerability everywhere. Both have attained the extremity of a self-infatuated consciousness: everything conspires against the one; to the other, everything is favorable. (The brave man is only a braggart who embraces the danger, who flees toward the danger.) One establishes himself negatively at the center of the world, the other positively; but their illusion is the same, their knowledge having an identical point of departure:
danger as the only reality. One fears it, the other seeks it out: they cannot conceive a lucid scorn of things, they both relate everything to themselves, they are over-agitated (and all the evil in the world comes from the excess of agitation, from the dynamic fictions of bravery and cowardice). Thus these antinomic and equal examples are the agents of all our troubles, the disturbers of the march of time; they give an affective tinge to the least event and project their fevered intentions upon a universe which-—without an abandonment to calm disgusts—is degrading and intolerable. Courage and fear, two poles of the same disease, which consists in granting an abusive sense and seriousness to life . . . It is the lack of nonchalant bitterness which makes men into sectarian beasts; the subtlest and the crudest crimes are perpetrated by those who take things seriously. Only the dilettante has no taste for blood, he alone is no scoundrel…" [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:25 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief. His existence eliminates any notion of an escape; the paths which do not lead him to death are dead ends to him; he works at his “biography"; he tends to his denouement and instinctively manages everything to bring about events fatal to himself Fatality being his vital juice, every way out can be no more than a disloyalty to his destruction. Thus the man of destiny is never converted to any belief whatever: he would thereby spoil his end." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:25 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "The time is past when man thought of himself in terms of a dawn; behold him resting on an anemic matter, open to his true duty, the duty of studying his loss, and of rushing into it . . . behold him on the threshold of a new epoch: the epoch of Self-Pity. And this Pity is his second fall, more distinct and more humiliating than the first: it is a fall without redemption. Vainly he inspects the horizons: a thousand saviors are silhouetted there, humbug saviors, themselves unconsoled. He turns away in order to prepare himself, in his overripe soul, for the sweetness of corruption. . . . Having reached the intimacy of his autumn, he wavers between Appearance and Nothingness, between the deceptive form of Being and its absence: vibration between two unrealities. . . .
Consciousness occupies the void which follows the mind’s erosion of existence. It takes the obnubilation of an idiot or a believer to participate in “reality,” which collapses at the approach of the slightest doubt, a suspicion of improbability, or a shudder of anguish—so many rudiments which prefigure consciousness and which, once developed, beget it, define and exasperate it. Under the effect of this consciousness, of this incurable presence, man gains access to his highest privilege: that of destroying himself. Nature’s privileged patient, man corrupts her sap; abstract vice of the instincts, he destroys their vigor. The universe withers at his touch and time decamps. . . . He could fulfill himself—and descend the further slope—only on the wreck of the elements. His work completed, he is ripe for disappearance; through how many centuries more will his death rattle sound?" [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:26 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- Tribulations of an Alien
"Offspring of some wretched tribe, he prowls the boulevards of the West. Cherishing one country after the next, he no longer hopes for any; stuck in a timeless twilight citizen of the world—and of no world —he is ineffectual, nameless, powerless. . . . Peoples without a destiny cannot give one to their sons who, thirsting for other horizons, attach themselves to a fate and ultimately exhaust it to finish their days as ghosts of their admirations and their exhaustions. Having nothing to love at home, they locate their love elsewhere, in other lands, where their fervor astonishes the natives. Overworked, the feelings erode and disintegrate, admiration first of all. . . . And the Alien who dispersed himself on so many highways of the world, exclaims: “I have set up countless idols for myself, have raised too many altars everywhere, and I have knelt before a host of gods. Now, weary of worship, I have squandered my share of delirium. One has resources only for the absolutes of one’s breed; a soul — like a country — flourishes only within its frontiers. I am paying for having crossed them, for having made the Indefinite into a fatherland, and foreign divinities into a cult, for having prostrated myself before ages which excluded my ancestors. Where I come from I can no longer say: in the temples I am without belief; in the cities, without ardor; among my kind, without curiosity; on the earth, without certitudes. Give me a specific desire and I could shake the world to its foundations. Release me from this shame of actions which makes me perform, every morning, the farce of resurrection and, every night, that of entombment; in the interval, nothing but this torment in the shroud of ennui. .. . I dream of wanting—and all I want seems to me worthless. Like a vandal corroded by melancholy, I proceed without a goal, self without a self, toward some unknown corner . . . in order to discover an abandoned god, a god who is his own atheist, and to fall asleep in the shadow of his last doubts and his last miracles.”" [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:26 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "A conformist, I live, I try to live, by imitation, by respect for the rules of the game, by horror of originality. An automaton’s resignation: to affect a pretense of fervor and secretly to laugh at it; to bow to conventions only to repudiate them on the sly; to be numbered in every ledger but to have no residence in time; to save face whereas it would be only duty to lose it. . . .
The man who scorns everything must assume an air of perfect dignity, deceive the others and even himself: thereby he will the more easily accomplish his task of counterfeit living. What use displaying your failure when you can feign prosperity? Hell lacks manners: it is the exasperated image of a frank and uncouth man, it is the earth conceived without one superstition of elegance and civility.
I accept life out of politeness: perpetual rebellion is in bad taste, as is the sublimity of suicide. At twenty we rage against the heavens and the filth they hide; then we grow tired of it. The tragic attitude suits only an extended and ridiculous puberty; but it takes a thousand ordeals to achieve the histrionics of detachment.
The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the “pleasure” of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an “I” without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us from carrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth. . . .
Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . " [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:27 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. In vain we call upon the Lord of Shades, the bestower of a precise curse: we are invalids without disease, and reprobates without vices. Melancholy is the dream state of egoism: no longer any object outside oneself, no reason for hate or love, but that same fall into a languid mud, that same circling of the damned without a hell, those same reiterations of a zeal to perish. . . . Whereas sadness is content with a circumstantial context, melancholy requires a debauch of space, an infinite landscape in order to spread out its sullen and vaporous grace, its shapeless evil, which, fearing to recover, dreads any limit to its dissolution and its undulation. It expands—strangest flower of self-love—among the poisons from which it extracts its vital juices and the vigor of all its failures. Feeding on what corrupts it, melancholy hides, under its melodious name, Self-Commiseration and the Pride of Defeat." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:27 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Owners and beggars: two categories which oppose any change, any renewing disorder. Placed at the two extremities of the social ladder, they fear any modification in good and evil: they are equally settled the former in opulence, the latter in destitution. Between diem are located—anonymous sweat, the basis of society—those who strive, labor, persevere, and cultivate the absurdity of hope. The State feeds on their anemia; the notion of citizen would have neither content nor reality without them, any more than luxury and alms: the rich man and the beggar are parasites of the poor, the Pauper’s dependents.
If misery has a thousand remedies, poverty has none. How succor those who persist in not dying of hunger? God himself could not correct their lot. Between fortune’s darlings and the tatterdemalion circulate these honorable starvelings, exploited by splendor and by rags, pillaged by those who, loathing labor, settle, according to their luck or their vocation, in the salon or the gutter. And so humanity advances: with a few rich men, with a few beggars—and with all its poor. . . " [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:28 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "In decadence, affective drying-up permits only two modalities of feeling and understanding: sensation and idea. Now, it is by affectivity that we participate in the world of values, that we project a vitality into categories and norms. The activity of a productive civilization consists in drawing ideas out of their abstract nothingness, in transforming concepts into myths. The transition from the anonymous individual to the conscious individual has not yet been made; yet it is inevitable. Measure it: in Greece, from Homer to the sophists; in Rome, from the austere old Republic to the “wisdoms” of the Empire; in the modern world, from the cathedrals to eighteenth-century lace.
A nation cannot create indefinitely. It is oiled upon to give expression and meaning to a sum of values which are exhausted with the soul which has begotten them. The citizen wakens from a productive hypnosis; the reign of lucidity begins; the masses wield no more than empty categories. Myths turn back into concepts: that is decadence. And the consequences make themselves felt: the individual wants to live, he converts life into finality, he elevates himself to the rank of a minor exception. The ledger of these exceptions, constituting the deficit of a civilization, prefigures its effacement." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.*
Last edited by Lyssa on Wed Aug 03, 2016 9:07 am; edited 1 time in total |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:28 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "When an entire nation, at various levels, is in search of rare sensations, when, by the subtleties of taste, it complicates its reflexes, it has acceded to a fatal pitch of superiority. Decadence is merely instinct gone impure under the action of consciousness. Hence we cannot overestimate the importance of gastronomy in the existence of a collectivity. The conscious act of eating is an Alexandrian phenomenon; barbarism feeds. Intellectual and religious eclecticism, sensual ingenuity, aestheticism, and the learned obsession of good living are the various signs of one and the same form of mind. When Gabius Apicius explored the African coast for lobsters, without settling anywhere because he found none to his taste, he was a contemporary of the uneasy souls who worshipped the host of alien gods without finding satisfaction or rest among them. Rare sensations —diverse deities, parallel fruits of the same dryness, of the same curiosity without inner resources. Christianity appeared: a single God—and fasting. And an age of triviality and the Sublime began. . . .
A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence. But if one of these monsters prevails, another world sets itself in motion, crude, dim, intolerant, until it exhausts its god and emancipates itself from him; for man is free—and sterile—only in the interval when the gods die; slave—and creative—only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.
To meditate upon one’s sensations—to know one is eating—is an accession of consciousness by which an elementary action transcends its immediate goal. Alongside intellectual disgust develops another, deeper and more dangerous: emanating from the viscera, it ends at the severest form of nihilism, the nihilism of repletion. The bitterest considerations cannot compare, in their effects, with the vision following an opulent banquet. Every meal which exceeds, in time, a few minutes and, in dishes, the necessities disintegrates our certitudes. Culinary abuse and satiety destroyed the Empire more pitilessly than the Oriental sects and the ill-assimilated Greek doctrines. We experience an authentic shudder of skepticism only around a copious table. The Kingdom of Heaven must have represented a temptation after such excesses or a deliciously perverse surprise in the monotony of digestion. Hunger seeks a way to salvation in religion; satiety, a poison. To be “saved” by viruses, and, in the indiscrimination of prayers and vices, to flee the world and wallow in it by the same action . . . that is indeed the apex of acrimony and of Alexandrianism.
There is a plenitude of decline in every overripe civilization. Instincts slacken; pleasures dilate and no longer correspond to their biological function; the voluptuous becomes an end in itself, its prolongation an art, the avoidance of orgasm a technique, sexuality a science. Methods and literary inspirations to multiply the channels of desire, the imagination tormented in order to diversify the preliminaries of release, the mind itself involved in a realm alien to its nature and over which it should have no purchase—all so many symptoms of the impoverishment of the blood and the morbid intellectualization of the flesh. Love conceived as a ritual makes the intelligence sovereign in the empire of stupidity. Our automatisms suffer for it; shackled, they lose that impatience to let loose an inadmissible contortion; the nerves become the theater of lucid discomforts and shudders, sensation in short extends beyond its crude duration thanks to the skill of two torturers of studied voluptuousness. They are the individual who deceives the species and the blood too tepid to stun the mind, the blood chilled and thinned by ideas, the rational blood. . . . Instincts eroded by conversation. . . ." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:29 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Nothing monumental has ever emerged from dialogue, nothing explosive, nothing “great.” If humanity had not indulged in discussing its own strength, it would never have exceeded Homer’s vision, and his models. But dialectics, ravaging the spontaneity of reflexes and the spirit of myths, has reduced the hero to a tottering example. Today’s Achilles has more than a heel to worry about. . . .
Vulnerability, once partial and of no consequence, has become the accursed privilege, the essence of each being. Consciousness has made its way everywhere, residing in the very marrow of our bones; hence man no longer lives in existence, but in the theory of existence. . . " [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:29 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "The clear-sighted person who understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and dominates his actions will never make a memorable gesture. Psychology is the hero’s grave. The millennia of religion and reasoning have weakened muscles, decisions, and the impulse of risk. How keep from scorning the enterprises of glory? Every act over which the mind’s luminous malediction fails to preside represents a vestige of ancestral stupidity. Ideologies were invented only to give a luster to the leftover barbarism which has survived down through the ages, to cover up the murderous tendencies common to all men. Today we kill in the name of something; we no longer dare do so spontaneously; so that the very executioners must invoke motives, and, heroism being obsolete, the man who is tempted by it solves a problem more than he performs a sacrifice. Abstraction has insinuated itself into life—and into death; the “complexes” seize great and small alike. From the Iliad to psychopathobgy—there you have all of human history." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:30 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "This was toward the end of the fourth century; already the lugubrious stupidity of the Cross was casting its shadows across the Mind. Around the same period, Palladas the grammarian could write: “We Greeks are no more than ashes today. Our hopes are buried like those of the dead.” And this is true for all intellects of that time.
The apostles have left their stigmata in men’s souls and multiplied their ravages in the cities. The age of the great Ugliness begins; hysteria without quality spreads over the world.
Saint Paul—the most considerable vote-canvasser of all time—has made his tours, infesting the clarity of the ancient twilight with his epistles. An epileptic triumphs over five centuries of philosophy! Reason is confiscated by the fathers of the Church! And if I were to look for the most mortifying date for the mind’s pride, if I were to scan the inventory of intolerances, I would find nothing comparable to the year 529, when, following Justinian’s decree, the School of Athens was closed. The right to decadence being officially suppressed, to believe became an obligation. . . . This is the most painful moment in the history of Doubt. When a nation no longer has any prejudice in its blood, its sole resource remains its will to disintegrate. Imitating music, that discipline of dissolution, it makes its farewells to the passions, to lyric waste, to sentimentality, to blindness. Henceforth it can no longer worship without irony: the sense of distances will be its lot forever. Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself but accumulated by generations and transmitted: we cannot rid ourselves of it with impunity. The nation that renounces it heedlessly will then renounce itself until it has nothing left to give up. The duration of a collectivity and its consistency coincide with the duration and consistency of its prejudices." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:30 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Alexandrianism is a period of skilful negations, a style of in-utility and refusal, a display of erudition and sarcasm above the confusion of values and beliefs. Its ideal space would be at the intersection of Hellas and bygone Paris, the meeting place of the agora and the salon." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:30 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Man was born with the vocation of fatigue: when he adopted the vertical posture and thereby diminished his possibilities of support, he was doomed to weaknesses unknown to the animal he was. To carry on two legs so much substance and all the disgusts related to it! The generations accumulate weariness and transmit it; our fathers bequeath to us a patrimony of anemia, reserves of discouragement, resources of decomposition, and an energy in dying which becomes more powerful than our instincts to live. And it is in this fashion that the habitude of disappearing, propped on our capital of fatigue, will permit us to realize, in the prolix flesh, neurasthenia—our essence. . . .
We are the great invalids, overwhelmed by old dreams, forever incapable of utopia, technicians of lassitude, gravediggers of the future, horrified by the avatars of the Old Adam. The Tree of Life will no longer have spring as one of its seasons: so much dry wood; out of it will be made coffins for our bones, our dreams, and our griefs. Our flesh inherited the smell of lovely carrion scattered in the millennia. Their glory fascinated us; we exhausted it. In the Mind’s graveyard lie the principles and the formulas: the Beautiful is defined, and interred there. And like it the True, the Good, Knowledge, and the Gods—they are all rotting there. (History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them.
I stroll there. Under this cross Truth sleeps its last sleep; beside it, Charm; further on, Rigor; and over a host of slabs covered with deliriums and hypotheses rises the mausoleum of the Absolute; in it lie the false consolations and the deceptive zeniths of the soul. But, still higher, crowning this silence, soars Error—and halts the steps of the funereal sophist.
The imagination readily conceives a future in which men will exclaim in chorus: “We are the last: weary of the future, and even wearier of ourselves, we have squeezed out the juice from the earth and stripped bare the heavens Neither spirit nor matter can still nourish our dreams: this universe is as desiccated as our hearts No substance remains anywhere: our ancestors bequeathed us their tattered soul and their worm-eaten marrow. The venture is at an end; consciousness is expiring; our songs have fallen still; there gleams the sun of the dying!”" [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:31 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "If, by accident or miracle, words were to disappear, we should be plunged into an intolerable anguish and stupor. Such sudden dumbness would expose us to the crudest torment. It is the use of concepts which makes us masters of our fears. We say: Death—and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptizing events and things, we elude the Inexplicable: the mind’s activity is a salutary deception, a conjuring trick; it allows us to circulate in a tempered reality, comfortable and inexact. To ¡earn to wield concepts—unlearn to look at things. . . . Reflection was born on a day of evasion; the consequence was verbal splendor. But when we return to ourselves and we are alone—-without the company of words—we rediscover the unqualified universe, the pure object, the naked event; where find the boldness to face them? We no longer speculate about death, we are death; instead of embellishing life and assigning it goals, we strip it of its finery and reduce it to its true meaning: a euphemism for Evil The grand expressions—fate, misfortune, disgrace—lose their luster; and it is then that we see the creature at grips with failing organs, vanquished under a prostrate and dumbfounded substance. Take the lie of Misery away from man, give him the power to look under this word: he cannot, for one moment, endure his misery. It is abstraction, sonorities without content, swollen and dilapidated, which have kept him from foundering, and not his religions and instincts.
When Adam was expelled from paradise, instead of vituperating his persecutor, he busied himself baptizing things: this was his sole way of accommodating himself to them and forgetting them; the basis of idealism was established. And what was only a gesture, a defense reaction in the first stammerer became theory in Plato, Kant, and Hegel.
In order not to be overwhelmed by our accident, we convert even our name into an entity: how can we die when we are called Peter or Paul? Each of us, more attentive to the immutable appearance of his name than to the fragility of his being, gives himself up to an illusion of immortality; once the articulation blurs, we are quite alone; the mystic who weds silence has renounced his creature condition. Imagine him, further, without faith—a nihilist mystic—and we have the disastrous consummation of the earthly venture.
.. . It is only too natural to think that man, weary of words, impatient with the iterations of time, will debaptize things and cast their names and his own into a great auto-da-fé that will engulf his hopes. We all race toward this final model, toward man mute and naked. . ." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:31 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Universe of grimaces, jubilation of the mole, the hyena, and the louse. . . . No horizon left, except for monsters and vermin. Everything makes for disgust and gangrene: this globe suppurating while the living display their wounds under the beams of that luminous chancre. . ." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:32 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Each nation translates the divine attributes into process in its own way, yet Spain’s ardor remains unique; had the rest of the world shared it, God would be exhausted, drained, and deprived of Himself. It is in order not to vanish that he makes atheism prosper in His countries—out of selfdefense. Fearing the flames He has inspired, He reacts against His sons, against their frenzy which diminishes Him; their love undermines His power and His authority; only unbelief leaves Him intact; it is not doubts which erode God, but faith. For centuries the Church has trivialized His prestige, and by making Him accessible, is preparing for Him, thanks to theology, a death without enigmas, a glossed, enlightened agony: overwhelmed by the weight of prayers, how could He help being still more so by that of explanations? He dreads Spain as He dreads Russia—and multiplies atheists in both. Their attacks at least let Him retain the illusion of omnipotence: still an attribute preserved! But the believers! Dostoyevsky, El Greco: has He ever had more feverish enemies? And how could He keep from preferring Baudelaire to John of the Cross? He fears those who see Him and those through whom He sees.
All sanctity is more or less Spanish: if God were a cyclops, Spain would be His eye." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:32 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "The man who believes he can still die has not known certain solitudes, nor the inevitability of immortality perceived in certain pangs. . ." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:33 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "In vain you search for your model among human beings; from those who have gone farther than you, you have borrowed only the compromising and harmful aspect: from the sage, sloth; from the saint, incoherence; from the aesthete, rancor; from the poet, profligacy—and from all, disagreement with yourself, ambiguity in everyday things and hatred for what lives simply to live. Bitterness, principle of your determination, your mode of action, and understanding, is the one fixed point in your oscillation between disgust for the world and self-pity." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:33 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "The notion that I could—like everyone else—be sincerely Christian, if only a second, casts me into perplexity. The Savior bores me. I dream of a universe exempt from celestial intoxications, of a universe with neither Cross nor faith. Who can fail to see the moment coming when there will be no more religion, when man, lucid and empty, will have no word on hand to designate his abyss? The Unknown will be as dull as the known; everything will lack interest and flavor. On the ruins of Knowledge, a sepulchral lethargy will make us all into specters, lunar heroes of Incuriosity…" [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:34 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "To think of God, to seek Him, to invoke or to endure Him—movements of a disordered body and a defeated mind! The nobly superficial ages—the Renaissance, the eighteenth century—scorned religion, dismissed its rudimentary frolics. But alas! There is a plebeian melancholy in us which darkens our fervors and our concepts. Vainly we dream of a lace universe; God, product of our depths, our gangrene, profanes this dream of beauty." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:34 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves “advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts.
Knowledge—if it is profound—never changes: only its decor varies. Love continues without Venus, war without Mars, and if the gods no longer intervene in events, those events are neither more explicable nor less disconcerting: the paraphernalia of formulas merely replaces the pomp of the old legends, without the constants of human life being thereby modified, science apprehending them no more intimately than poetic narratives. modern philosophy adds nothing to Chinese, Hindu, or Greek philosophy. Moreover, there cannot be a new problem, despite our naïvete or our infatuation which would like to persuade us to the contrary. In the play of ideas, who ever equaled a Chinese or a Greek sophist, who was ever bolder in abstraction? All the extremities of thought were reached from the first—and in all civilizations. Seduced by the demon of the Unpublished, we forget too quickly that we are the epigones of the first pithecanthropus who bothered to reflect. Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses? Becoming excludes an absolute fulfillment, a goal: the temporal adventure unfolds without an aim external to itself, and will end when its possibilities of movement are exhausted." [Decay] _________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.*
Last edited by Lyssa on Wed Aug 03, 2016 9:06 am; edited 1 time in total |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:35 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "All thinkers are action’s eunuchs who take revenge for their failure by the intermediary of concepts. Born this side of the deed, they exalt or decry it, depending on whether they aspire to humanity’s gratitude or that other form of fame: its hatred; they unduly erect their own deficiencies, their own miseries to the rank of laws, their futility to the level of a principle. Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
| | | Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
| Subject: Re: Cioran Wed Aug 03, 2016 6:35 am | |
| - Cioran wrote:
- "Like wax in the sun, I dissolve by day and solidify at night, an alternation which decomposes me and restores me to myself, a metamorphosis in inertia and sloth." [Decay]
- Cioran wrote:
- "Our fate being to rot with the continents and the stars, we drag on, like resigned sick men, and to the end of time, the curiosity of a denouement that is foreseen, frightful, and vain." [Decay]
_________________ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus] "All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus] "The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.] *Become clean, my friends.* |
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