/lit/ - Literature

>>20989761
Develop an extreme fear of death

>A vernal annihilation, culmination rather than chasm, death dizzies us only to raise us all the more readily above our customary selves, with the same privilege as love’s, to which it is related in more than one respect: both love and death, applying an explosive pressure upon the framework of our lives, disintegrate us, fortify us, ruin us by the distractions of plenitude. As irreducible as they are inseparable, their elements constitute a fundamental equivocation. If, to a certain point, love destroys us, with what sensations of expansion and pride it does its work! And if death destroys us altogether, what frissons does it not employ! Sensations, shudders by which we transcend the man within us, and the accidents of the self.

The Temptation to Exist, Emil Cioran