/lit/ - Literature

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs — something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

>Talks about suicide in a positive light.
>Never does it himself.

>Boredom has made me into a speechifier ashamed of raising his voice, a THEORETICIAN FOR THE SENILE AND ADOLESCENT, for metaphysical menopauses, a vestige of a creature, a hallucinated clown
Cioran btfo'd all his fans and they still eat his shit up like little bitches lmao

>>21224750
>"What spoils the French Revolution for me is that it all happens on stage, that it promoters are born actors, that the guillotine is merely a decor. The history of France, as a whole, seems a bespoke history, an acted history: everything in it is perfect from the theatrical point of view. It is a performance, a series of gestures and events which are watched rather than suffered, a spectacle that takes ten centuries to put on. Whence the impression of frivolity which even the Terror affords, seen from a distance.
- Emil Cioran

>I accumulate the past, constantly making out of it and casting into it the present, without giving it a chance to exhaust its own duration. To live is to suffer the sorcery of the possible; but when I see in the possible itself the past that is to come, then every-thing turns into potential bygones, and there is no longer any present, any future. What I discern in each moment is its exhaustion, its death-rattle, and not the transition to the next moment. I generate dead time, wallowing in the asphyxia of becoming.

The Fall Into Time, Cioran

>>20970972
Cioran was writing the whole End of History thing way before this plagiarist hack

"After History"

>The end of history is inscribed in its beginnings—history, man at grips with time, bearing the stigmata that define both time and man.
>Interrupted imbalance, ceaselessly dislocated being, time is in itself a drama of which history represents the most notable episode. For what is history, really, if not an imbalance, a swift, intense dislocation of time itself, a rush toward a future where nothing ever becomes again?
>Just as theologians rightly speak of ours as a post-Christian age, some day we shall hear of the splendors and miseries of living in a posthistorical epoch. Despite everything, it would be sweet to know that twilight success in which we might escape the succession of generations and the parade of tomorrows, and when, on the ruins of historical time, existence, at last identical with itself, will again become what it was before turning into history. Historical time is so tense, so strained, that it is hard to see how it can keep from exploding. At each of its moments it gives the impression that it is on the point of breaking. Perhaps the accident will occur less precipitately than we hope. But it cannot fail to occur. And it is only then, after it has happened, that the beneficiaries, the epicures of posthistory will know what history was made of. “Henceforth there will be no more events!” they will exclaim. A chapter—the most curious of the entire cosmic unfolding—will thus be closed.
>Obviously such a cry is conceivable only on terms of an imperfect disaster. Complete success would involve a radical simplification, in fact the suppression of the future. Rare are the catastrophes without a hitch: that should reassure the impatient, the feverish, the amateurs of great occasions, though in this case resignation is certainly de rigueur. Not to everyone was it granted to observe the Deluge at close range. One imagines the humor of those who, having anticipated it, did not live long enough to be able to witness it.

Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

https://coronzon.com/pdf/cioran/The_Evil_Demiurge_Cioran.pdf

>The criminal injunction of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply," could not have issued from the mouth of a good god. "Be sparse" is more likely what he would have said, if he had had any say in the chapter. Nor would it ever have been in him to add those baleful words, "replenish the earth and subdue it." We
should drop everything at once and erase them, purging the Bible
of the guilt it incurred by accepting them in the first place.
Flesh is spreading apace, like gangrene, over the surface of the
globe. It doesn't know enough to observe limits, it keeps raging
despite its orgies, it mistakes its defeats for conquests: it will
never learn. It belongs above all to the dominion of the creator,
and into it he projected all his wanton instincts. Logically, observers of the flesh should stand less chance of being smitten by it
than those who help it endure, who assure its continuation. That
is not the case, because they do not know with what perversion
they are allied. One day pregnant women will be stoned, the maternal instinct banned, sterility acclaimed. Those sects that looked
askance at fertility, the Bogomils and the Cathars, were right to
condemn marriage, an abominable institution which societies
have always defended, to the huge despair of those who resist the
common hypnosis.

The philosopher, disappointed with systems and superstitions but still persevering in the ways of the world, should imitate the sidewalk Pyrrhonism exhibited by the least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute. Detached from everything and open to everything; espousing her client’s mood and ideas; changing tone and face on each occasion; ready to be sad or gay, being indifferent; lavishing sighs out of commercial concern; casting upon the frolic of her superimposed and sincere neighbor an enlightened and artificial gaze—she proposes to the mind a model of behavior which vies with that of the sages. To be without convictions in regard to men and oneself, such is the high lesson of prostitution, peripatetic academy of lucidity, marginal to society—as is philosophy. “Everything I know I learned in the School of Whores!” should be die exclamation of the thinker who accepts everything and rejects everything, when, following their example, he has specialized in the weary smile, when men are to him merely clients, and die world’s sidewalks the marketplace where he sells his bitterness, as his companions sell their bodies.

>waaaa I’m so sad that I was born in the 20th century with wealthy parents and no real problems besides my own choice not to sleep waaaaaaaaaa muh heckin ennui
Grow up. Get a job. Get married. Reproduce.

Cioran said no, because you kill yourself later on anyways. But if we all are going to die one day, Is it really worth it to spend 70-80 years struggling? What is the award for endurance? Where lies the comfort of life?

>There was a time when time did not yet exist…. The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

If the Pessimist was present at the event of creation, the Pessimist would have told God to go back.

What is the proper order to read Cioran? Do you need to read anything prior to Cioran to understand him?

To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve….” I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.

>>20578371
Did he plagiarize The Trouble with Being Born?

Cioran is a pretentious, self-indulgent writer who is more concerned with style than substance. His work is often opaque and difficult to understand, and even when it is comprehensible, it is often banal and uninspiring. He frequently repeats himself, and his writing is often marred by clichés and platitudes. In short, Cioran is a writer who is more concerned with sounding deep and profound than actually saying anything of value.

Cioran's 'A Short History of Decay' is a tedious, self-indulgent mess of a book. The author's pretentious, affected writing style is grating and difficult to plow through, and his repetitive, meandering thoughts offer little in the way of insights or entertainment. Worse still, Cioran seems to take perverse pleasure in wallowing in his own misery, and the book as a whole is suffused with a nihilistic, misanthropic worldview that is profoundly depressing. Avoid this one at all cost.

"What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?"

What did he mean by this?

"I long to be free -- desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free."

Couldn't say better.

"I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free."

I think I'm losing it again, bros.

>In your predictions you go very far. You foresee that one day the Jews will convert to Christianity. >— 'You know, that's the only prophecy I'm really proud of. Christ was a Jew. They betrayed him. When everybody has left Christianity, the Jews will convert to it, they will accept Christ once more, and they will be hated again, and persecuted, for that reason. I really believe it will be like that.'

>>20499052

>The true meaning of agony, which is not a struggle of pure passion or gratuitous fantasy, but life's hopeless struggle in the claws of death, is revealed in this feeling of great weariness. One cannot separate the thought of agony from that of weariness and death. Agony as struggle? But with whom and for what? The interpretation of agony as an ardor exalted by its own futility, or as a battle whose aim is itself, is absolutely false. In fact, agony means a battle between life and death. Since death is immanent in life, almost all of life is an agony. I call agonic only those dramatic moments in the battle between life and death when the presence of death is experienced consciously and painfully. True agony occurs when you pass into nothingness through death, when a feeling of weariness consumes you irrevocably and death wins. In every true agony there is a triumph of death, even though you may continue to live after those moments of weariness.
Agonybros...

Was Cioran a fascist? I genuinely can’t tell from his works. I hope he was.

>Sexuality is a great leveler; better, it strips us of our mystery. Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.
>Abstinence - voluntary or forced - sets the individual both above and below the Species, makes him into an alloy of Saint and Imbecile that intrigues and abashes us. Whence our equivocal hatred for the Monk, as for any man who has renounced woman, who has renounced being like us. We shall never forgive him his solitude: it degrades as much as it disgusts us; it is a provocation.