The Book of Delusions
E. M. Cioran
Page II
Densiture (Chapter 5)
Have you ever felt the beginning of motion, have you ever been tormented by the first departure of the world from itself? Have you ever touched the first pure shiver of motion, the prime ecstasy of becoming, the initial vortex of time? Have you never felt that moment of the first confusion, in the iridescent fever of your body and your soul? It is as if in a moment of forgetfulness and eternity, a spark that comes out of nowhere lights fires in space and projects lights onto the dark immensity, and makes strange contours against the gray background of space. This is the feel of the first motion! Do we not, then, live as the source of motion, as the first bumping flip of the world? And does it not exist in our fever, that concentration of motion, the centering of becoming in our impetus? He who has not felt how the worldʼs motion was gathering in him in a whirl, in whose bubbling unending and unknown worlds roam, will never understand why, after such moments, man becomes essentially an other, a being taken out of beings; likewise, nor will he understand how one single day containing such uninterrupted moments of lightning would be enough to consume his being completely.
—Only the angels can comfort me now. These non-beings, each of whom “lives” by losing itself in the otherʼs ecstasy. A world of mutual ecstasies… (1) My memories, with images by Botticelli and harmonies by Mozart, of returning from a far away place, of the time when my tears were acts of worshiping the sun… All these melancholies awaken my angelic places of the past, solitary and silent scenery, the scenery of grand recollections and grand forgetfulness; all my melancholies bring my distances closer to one another; they ravish deeply all the springs of my childhood and bring to light the uncertainty of some distant memory or a regret about a world whose tears are like mirrors of the soul. Melancholic confessions: they are the only proof of the lost paradise.
—Just like when during daytime, when we close our eyes to immerse ourselves in the sudden darkness we discover points of light and bands of color which remind us of the other part of the world, when likewise we descend into the vast and dark depths of our soul, when what is revealed onto us, in the margins of darkness, we find the reflections of an unsuspected golden world. Can these reflections be a calling to our soul or a regret?
—Although space resists us more greatly, more directly and more fatally, it is nonetheless a less essential problem to us than time. Space never becomes a problem of existence or personal relationship. The more we immerse ourselves within our ego, the more space loses its reality, because time persists in our consciousness, and when we have become essentials we move further and further away from time as we did from space.
Space doesnʼt give us an intimate feeling of relativity; it only makes us seemingly reflective, on the outside. There are people and even cultures (the Egyptian) who perceive eternity as it is bound up with space, and who do not feel time and its relation to eternity. In their consciousness non-motion and the boundlessness of space exhaust the essential content of the world.
Space overwhelms us; but it doesnʼt go through us, even though we are closer to it than we are to time. Only time goes through us, only time leaves us awash, only time do we feel as belonging to us. Time discloses music and music discloses time to us, just as space unveils plasticity to us. But between the plastic and the musical, what soul goes for the first?
What is most essential in us struggles with time. It is impossible to not accept space; it is too great a piece of evidence. But there is a moment from which you donʼt want to accept time. The dramatic moment of the individual existence culminates always in the struggle with time. This struggle, however, is without escape, because the being touched by temporality, once having conquered eternity, inevitably regrets time. The desire to flee from time is found only in people ill with time, people who are tied too strongly by the bonds of fleeting moments. Redemption is such an inconsistent aspiration because of the regret experienced by those who are after the joys, surprises, and tragedies that the world, which lives and dies in the meanwhile, has to offer. If there is a temporal pressure, there is also, none the smaller, an infinity pressure.
Man aspires to infinity, but loves time more. As this life that we live and consume is the only value that we are given, it is impossible not to conceive of eternity as a loss, which we nonetheless respect. The only thing one can love is life itself, which I detest. It is absolutely impossible to get rid of time, without getting rid of life at the same time. Wherever you position yourself, time is the biggest temptation: a greater temptation than life itself, because if death is not in time, then time will become the occasion of death. This is why the pure ecstasy of time reveals to us such bizarre mysteries and it introduces us to the secrets that bind the two worlds.
When man wouldnʼt know the access to eternity through absolute living in the moment, when he wouldnʼt be able to leap through eternity already living in the temporal whirlpool and would be forced to choose one of the two for eternity, would he then not hesitate to prefer time? Or when, also for ever, he would have to choose between Cleopatra and Saint Therese, would he hide his predilection for the first?
—For the one for whom life is a supreme reality, without it being a piece of evidence, what question can torment him other than the one pertaining to this dilemma: can we or can we not love life? This uncertainty is unclear and delicious; but nonetheless it demands an answer. It is both charming and bitter not to know whether you love or donʼt love life. You would like not to say either a yes or a no, if only for the pleasure of not clearing a pleasant uneasiness. A yes means a renunciation to imagining and feeling an other life; a no is fear of the illusion of other worlds. —Nietzsche got it wrong when, caught in the revelation of life, he discovered in the will to power the central problem and the essential modality to being. Man facing life wants to know if life gives him his last approval. The will to power is not manʼs essential problem; he can be strong also when he has nothing. The will to power originates many times over in people who donʼt love life. Who knows if the will to power is not a necessity vis-à-vis life! The first question facing life coincides with an appeal to our sincerity. Because afterwards, if we want power or not becomes redundant. People seek power to play the last card of life.
No one is genuine in his love of life, just like no one is genuine in his love of death. What is certain is that life is granted more approval from us: no one can hate life; but there are so many who have a brutish hatred of death. All of us are more sincere and categorical about death, so that in the doubts that life awakens in us we can allow ourselves to sense and foresee the unsuspected.
But then again, it is strange that the one who looked death in its face is ashamed to admit that he loves life and is thus condemned for the rest of his life to avoid life. As there exists in the final moments of everyoneʼs existence an explosion of sincerity, can man, then, stop the avalanche of tears of gratitude, unknown to life until that moment? Itʼs not written anywhere that the last tears are also the most bitter, but it is written on all the gates and the walls of the universe, both visible and invisible, that the most intimate regret and the most hidden is not to have loved life.
—All philosophers should end their days at Pythiaʼs feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
—The desire to embrace the stars! Why are truths so cold? When rationality was born, the sun was long since shining. And rationality is not born out of the sun.
—To suffer is the supreme modality of taking the world seriously. Thus is born the conflict between the feeling of suffering, which confers an absolute value on the outside causes and the world, and theoretical perspective, arisen out of suffering, for which the world is nothing. Out of this paradox of suffering there is no escape.
—There is a region of ultimate alternatives, which ends in the simultaneous temptation of sainthood and of crime. Why is it that humanity produced more criminals than saints? If man really looked for happiness as insistently as they say, why is it that he chooses with such violent passion the downwards paths? Man respects happiness and goodness more, but is even more attracted to unhappiness and evil. Three quarters of humanity could have become sacred, if it wanted. But one cannot know, alas, who revealed it to people that there is no other life than the one in hell…
—Sainthood is the victorious struggle with time. The way in which the saint manages to kill time within himself is mind-boggling and beyond everything. To be in time means living in this everything. Time is the frame around this everything, and works as everything. Sainthood: to be beyond everything, but in and with love. How monotonous the life of saints, because they can only be saints. Sainthood: existence lived in one single absolute dimension. Saints can also hear the voices of the world; but they only speak of the pains that have become love; these are the voices of a single world. Let me turn to the music in which the worlds speak, the other worlds…
—Which solitude is the one in which the snake caresses us and licks our cheeks and our lips? How far have we distanced ourselves from being, when only the snake can be with us?
—Two things that I donʼt understand: nostalgia in a stupid man, and the death of a ridiculous man.
—All men must destroy their lives. And according to the way in which they do it they call themselves winners or losers.
—Music is the medium through which time speaks to us. Music makes us feel timeʼs passing, and it reveals time to us as a frame for all that passes.
There are musical moments which we can fondle. When music talks to us about eternity, it does it as an organ of time. The desire for infinity in music is a fugue from time. It is neither a present eternity, the continuous actuality, nor eternity beyond time.
Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be!
—A decomposed corpse in its unending cells; every cell containing a sum of vibrations; all the cells whirling in a vortex; the detachment of all the organs in the tremor of individuation; the return of life to its prime material, to the first memories…
I only love the one who goes beyond there is; the one who can feel his beginnings and the things that precede them; the one who remembers the times when he was not him, the one who jumps in anticipation of individuation. He who has not trembled realizing the deep meaning of individuation, has understood nothing of this world, because he will never have sensed the zones of his beginnings, nor will he able to foresee the moment of his own end. Individuation reveals our birth as an isolation and death as a return. The one who doesnʼt cultivate this isolation doesnʼt love life, nor does the one who doesnʼt fear return, love life. The fact that almost no one loves return proves something else, namely that this is the path towards the world in which we have no name. Individuation gives life a name. We all have a name; the world which precedes individuation is the life without a name, it is the life without a shape. Only individuation gives life a shape. This is why the crashing of individuation in death is a disfiguring. Man doesnʼt love his face, which is an accident, but its shape, which is a metaphysical sign. The trembling of individuation is an antecedent of disfiguring, it is the suspicion about losing our world. Man is a world within a world. —The way to re-returning goes through death, or who knows?—re-return ends in death. We make our connection to what preceded individuation by going down the spiral of our natural character, dwelling in ourselves, conquering the isolation of our shape, trans-figuring ourselves towards our beginnings, but not transfiguring ourselves by losing the figural sense of our individuation, in death. The life that was before we were we, we love through return; our eyes are turned towards our beginnings, towards the initial anonymity. We return to where we havenʼt been before, but where everything else was; we go towards the infinite potentiality of life, from which actuality and the inherent margin of individuation got us out. We return every time we love life with an infinite passion and we are dissatisfied with the barriers of individuation; every time we discover to our enthusiasm the roots beyond our figural finitude. Return is a vital transfiguration; re-return a metaphysical disfiguring. Return is a mysticism of the vital sources; re-return is a horror of final loses.
Life is behind us, because we came of it; life is the supreme memory. Individuation got us out of the world of beginnings, that is, out of potentiality, out of the infinite becoming, from a world in which the roots are trees, and not ephemeral sources of the illusionary trees, of being…
—How should I fence off my soul, what walls to erect around it so that I donʼt lose myself? My dreams take me too far away, too far away music and tears take me. I canʼt contain myself anymore, and I donʼt have space for myself in myself anymore; how can I contain others then, how can I make space for them? Do we love from plenitude or from poverty? When I canʼt contain myself anymore, can an other approach my center? Will the soul which dies from its life love? The soul full of holes fills them through love; seeks others from poverty. Love is begging, it is the terror of its own smallness. How much contempt and generosity there is in the love that comes from plenitude. Then you love to get rid of yourself, you throw away love! You worship Eros to get rid of yourself, your surpluses and excesses: you adore the liberation from your tempest.
No one can enter me, no one can siege me. Contempt, hatred, and magnanimity, I shall turn them into a love which I need, not one which they need. Why couldnʼt love be a weapon, an instrument, a pretext? Convinced in love shall be the naked souls, the begging souls, raised in the shadow. The one who never hated love, never loved. Any love, of people, of women, has something muddy, dirty, and slithering in it. Arenʼt you disgusted to know that there is an other, that there is a you, that there are other beings, that after you, in your expansion was the being? I canʼt contain myself anymore.
—Music transposes us anytime in spring time or autumn time. Like spring or like autumn it shatters our soul and body. There is no music for either summer or winter. Or why is it that every music is a sickness…
—Absolute evil: a being thirsty for ruining our nature would uproot all the trees in spring, it would eat up all the buds, it would poison the springs to kill all the living beings in them, it would stop up all the wells to hear the hoarse voices of the birds, it would cover all the flowers so that it would see them dry and fade, and bent sadly over the ground. It would kick the pregnant women in their bellies to kill the beginning of life, the fruit, all that is fruit, and the virginsʼ smiles, it would freeze them into a grimace. To the lovers, in their sexual spasm, it would throw a cadaver, and to the newborns, even before they opened their eyes, it would fix black glasses into their orbs. On a black board the size of the world, it would leap towards the sun to stop its rays, make it laugh into an eternal night, without stars, a sun in mourning, forever dressed up in black. And this being passes ironically by humanity which waits in agony for the return of sunrays, and it smiles coldly to prayers raised towards the beclouded sky.
—Evil is hatred against all that is fruit.
—History must mean for you nothing other than the history of humanity within you. If everything that has been big so far, and everything that will be big in the future is not in you either memory or fruit, then you lose history and you are nothing. What man is he who will not remake and anticipate history on his own? Or better put: why is he not a man, the one who will not remake and anticipate history on his own?
Thus should you live, to be indifferent towards the forms in which the world dresses up indifferent towards epochs, styles and historical turns. Live as if before you there was nothing and as if nothing will follow you. You have to be disgusted at the idea of being a link in a chain, or perfecting or destroying an inheritance. There are no forerunners, nor followers of absolute thoughts. Only we die beneath them.
—Why do we not want to grant saints the privilege of madness? Is it because their madness ends in light, instead of darkness?
—All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
—Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
—The first and last chapter of an anthropodicy: about tears.
—Only hatred strengthens life, and destructive hatred maintains constructive life. In it we feel strong, able to kick up everything; in it all of our limbs burn; hatred calls us to action, it encourages us to make a gesture and act. This is not the interested hatred, provoked by mean causes and oriented towards an immediate act of revenge, but the grand passionate hatred, under which everything trembles. Hatred is the main spring of prophecy; hatred makes every prophet talk passionately about love. Prophecy is a hatred that is both destructive and creative. The Jews would have perished a long time ago if they hadnʼt the divine gift of hatred. To the chosen people God ensured eternity through hatred. To us, the Christians, God gave a transitory existence through the curse of love. Jesus came for the Jews, not for us. Their God sent us the great seducer. How inspired were the Jews when they refused the Messiah.
—Thought that doesnʼt express the struggle of an existence is pure theory. To think without a destiny, this is the fate of the theoretical man. All those that donʼt want to change themselves and the world, those that do no remake everything and sense what will come theorize. They amount to zero, all those thoughts that donʼt grow on a soul and a body, and so do all pure ideas; it is futile, the knowledge that comes for free. Let steam come out of thought; sparks from ideas; from knowledge fire. Let other dimensions give things the fever of this thought. Let this thinking proceed from a will to reform the world, from the passion to overturn all orders, visible and invisible. Let this strong thinking bust the natural laws, give the cosmic basis another depth, and let the columns of the world gain another height through it. Let the world lean on us; let our resistance mean more than it meant for Atlas. Let our thoughts be the shoulders on which the endless worlds would lean. Earthquakes will create endless unease, and the flames will carry like halos the endless worlds. If everything that is in time and space did not contain our dimensions, why would we then think about space and time? If everything that lives and dies did not live and die within ourselves, why would we then think about life and death?
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