/lit/ - Literature

>>21953816
>For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

Cioran, All Gall is Divided

>At this very moment, almost everywhere, thousands and thousands are dying, while, clutching my pen, I vainly search for a word to annotate their agony.

Cioran, The New Gods

>After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

>>21471693
No man understood him better than Cioran.

>His crises would lead him not to mysticism or to a final despair or to suicide, but to disillusion. “The sign CAVE CANEM is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.” He was enough of an aesthete to modify his misanthropy with irony and to introduce a note of elegance into the economy of his disasters. His casual style lets us glimpse what we might call the charm of a broken life. I should even add that one is “modern” to the degree that one is sensitive to this charm. Reaction of the disabused, no doubt — of individuals who, incapable of resorting to a metaphysical background or to a transcendent form of salvation, cling to their woes with complacency, as to accepted defeats. Disillusion is the equilibrium of the defeated. And it was as a defeated man that Fitzgerald, after conceiving the pitiless truths of The Crack-Up, went to Hollywood to look for success — always success — in which, moreover, he could no longer believe. At the end of a Pascalian experience, to write screenplays! In his last years, it was as if he no longer aspired to anything but compromising his abysses, swallowing his neuroses — as if, in his heart of hearts, he felt himself unworthy of the downfall he had just suffered. “I speak with the authority of failure,” he had said one day. Except that with time, he degraded this failure, stripped it of all its spiritual value. Nor should we be surprised: in the “real dark night of the soul,” he struggled more as a victim than as a hero. The same is true of all those who live their drama solely in terms of psychology; unsuited to perceiving an exterior absolute to combat or to yield to, they eternally relapse into themselves in order to vegetate, ultimately, beneath the truths they have glimpsed. They are, once again, disillusioned, for disillusion — retreat after a defeat — is characteristic of the individual who cannot destroy himself by a disaster, nor endure it to the end in order to triumph over it. Disillusion is the “semi-tragic” hypostatized. And since Fitzgerald could not remain worthy of his own drama, we cannot count him among those of high anguish. The interest he offers for us consists precisely in that disproportion between the inadequacy of his means and the extent of anxiety that he experienced.

Cioran, Fitzgerald
The Pascalian Experience of an American Novelist, Anathemas and Admirations

>>21441170
>Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

Emil Cioran

Kino times ahead, pal.

>>21404118
He was complicated

>Devoured by a nostalgia for paradise, without having known a single attack of true faith. . . .

>If He who is called God were not the symbol par excellence of solitude, I should never have paid Him the slightest attention. But ever intrigued by monsters, how could I neglect their adversary, more alone than any of them?

>Out in the street, suddenly overcome by the “mystery” of Time, I told myself that Saint Augustine was quite right to deal with such a theme by addressing himself directly to God: with whom else to discuss it?

>To frequent the Desert Fathers and yet to be moved by the latest news! In the first centuries of our era, I would have belonged among those eremites of whom it is said that after a certain time they were “wearied with seeking God.”

>There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

>“You speak of God frequently. It is a word I no longer use,” an ex-nun writes me. Not everyone has the good fortune to be disgusted by it!

>To live in fear of being bored to death everywhere, even in God: this obsession with boredom imposes limits; in it I see the reason for my spiritual unfulfillment.

>If I had been born a Buddhist, I should have remained one; born a Christian, I ceased being one in early youth when, much more so than today, I would have abounded in the sense of Goethe’s blasphemy when he wrote — the very year of his death — to Zelter, “The Cross is the most hideous image on this earth.”

Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

>>21278650
>>21278662
>>21278674
>>21278675
>>21278697
>>21278733
>>21278742
>"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."

Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist


>"He who has not contradicted his instincts, who has not imposed upon himself a long period of sexual deprivation or has not known the depravities of abstinence, will be inaccessible to the language of crime and to that of ecstasy: he will never understand the obsessions of the Marquis de Sade nor those of Saint John of the Cross."

The Trouble with Being Born

>“My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.

Anathemas and Admirations

>>20864817
>In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single disinterested reflection on death. . . . I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.

Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

>>20671395
Cioran for me summed up women

>“My children, salt comes from water, and if it comes in contact with water, it dissolves and vanishes. In the same way, the monk is born of woman, and if he approaches a woman, he dissolves and ceases to be a monk.” This Jean Moschus, in the seventh century, seems to have understood better than either Strindberg or Weininger the danger already pointed out in Genesis.

Anathemas and Admirations

>Woman mattered as long as she simulated shame, reserve. What inadequacy she reveals by no longer playing the game! Already she is worth nothing, now that she resembles us. Thus vanishes one of the last lies that made existence tolerable.

Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations