/lit/ - Literature

Ennui of Conquerors
>Paris weighed on Napoleon, by his own admission, like a “leaden garment": for which ten million men were to die. This is the balance sheet of the mal du siède when a René on horseback becomes its agent. Born of the idleness of the eighteenth-century salons, this disease, in the indolence of an over-lucid aristocracy, extended its ravages deep into the countryside: peasants were to pay with their blood for a mode of sensibility alien to their nature and, with them, a whole continent. The exceptional natures in which Ennui insinuated itself, horrified by any one place and obsessed by a perpetual elsewhere, exploited the enthusiasm of the nations only to multiply their graveyards. This condottière who wept over Werther and Ossian, this Obermann who projected his void into space and who, according to Josephine, was capable of no more than a few moments of abandon, had as his unavowed mission to depopulate the earth. The dreaming conqueror is the greatest calamity for men; they are no less eager to idolize him, fascinated as they are by distorted projects, ruinous ideals, unhealthy ambitions. No reasonable being was ever the object of worship, left a name, or marked a single event with his individual stamp. Imperturbable before a precise conception or a transparent idol, the mob is roused by the unverifiable, by false mysteries. Who ever died in the name of rigor? Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it. It is nonetheless true that the victims were willing enough to be immolated once they believed in glory, in that victory of one man alone, that defeat of all. . . .
Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish. Reigns in which citizens died in their sleep do not figure in history, nor the wise prince, inveterately scorned by his subjects; the crowd loves the fictive, even at its expense, the scandal of behavior constituting the web of human curiosity and the underground current of every event. The unfaithful woman and the cuckold provide comedy and tragedy, even the epic, the quasi-totality of their motifs. Since virtue has neither biography nor charm, from the Iliad to vaudeville, only the luster of dishonor has entertained and intrigued. Hence it is quite natural that humanity should have offered itself up to the conquerors, that it should seek to be trampled underfoot, that a nation without tyrants should never be talked about, that the sum of iniquities a people commits should be the sole index of its presence and of its vitality. A nation which no longer rapes is in its decadence; the number of rapes reveals its instincts, and its future. Find out in which war it has stopped practicing, on a large scale, this variety of crime: you will have found the first symbol of its decline; find out at what moment love has become for a nation a ceremonial, and the bed a condition of orgasm, and you will identify the beginning of its deficiencies and the end of its barbaric inheritance.

>>19594435
Cioran was right about this pathetic cunt.

>Were you reading Nietzsche then?

CIORAN: When I was studying philosophy I wasn’t reading Nietzsche. I read “serious” philosophers. It’s when I finished studying it, at the point when I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realized that he wasn’t a philosopher, he was more: a temperament. So, I read him but never systematically. Now and then I’d read things by him, but really I don’t read him anymore. What I consider his most authentic work is his letters, because in them he’s truthful, while in his other work he’s prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he’s just a poor guy, that he’s ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed.

>You write in The Trouble with Being Born that you stopped reading him because you found him “too naïve.”

CIORAN:That’s a bit excessive, yes. It’s because that whole vision, of the will to power and all that, he imposed that grandiose vision on himself because he was a pitiful invalid. Its whole basis was false, nonexistent. His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he’s pathetic, it’s very touching, like a character out of Chekhov. I was attached to him in my youth, but not after. He’s a great writer, though, a great stylist.

Few aphorism from "The Trouble with Being Born"

>"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.
>Marcus Aurelius Is much closer to me. Not a moment’s hesitation between the lyricism of frenzy and the prose of acceptance: I find more comfort, more hope even, in the weary emperor than in the thundering prophet."

>"In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients."

>>19587119
I have posted this in the other thread

4th method, Sublimation. Plus some manly outdoor activity like Zapffe was a mountain climber.

Here an introduction that Cioran wrote for his book "A Short History of Decay". it's from the chapter "Rereading..." in Anathemas and Admirations. I would say to read the whole chapter.

>The two students also asked me why I had not stopped writing and publishing. Not everyone has the luck to die young, was my answer. My first book, with its sonorous title — On the Summits of Despair — I wrote in Rumanian at the age of twenty-one, while promising myself never to begin another. Then I committed a second, with the same promise subsequently. The farce has been repeated for over forty years. Why? Because writing, however little, has helped me pass from one year to the next, the expressed obsessions being weakened and — halfway— overcome. To produce is an extraordinary comfort. And to publish, another. To have a book coming out, that is your life, or a part of your life that becomes external to you, that no longer belongs to you, that has ceased to torment you. Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation. It drains you, hence it saves you, it strips you of an encumbering overflow. When you detest someone to the point of wanting to liquidate him, the best thing is to take a sheet of paper and to write on it any number of times that X is a bastard, a fool, a monster, and you ‘will immediately discover that you hate him less and that you are no longer thinking quite so much about vengeance. This is more or less what I did with regard to myself and the world. The Précis I drew from my lower depths in order to insult life and insult myself. The result? I have endured myself a little better, as I have better endured life. You look after yourself as best you can.

>"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

Emil Cioran

Pessimism is Perennial Truth

Wisdom Of Silenus:
>"You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into a better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: 'you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.' It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living."

Hegesias of Cyrene, Death by Starvation:
>The book was called Death by Starvation or The Death-Persuader. According to the Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC), the entire book was essentially an argument for why everyone should just give up on life and kill themselves.

Ecclesiastes 4:1
>Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed-- and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors-- and they have no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 4:2
>And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.
Ecclesiastes 4:3
>But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.


THE DIALOGUE OF PESSIMISM, MESOPOTAMIAN WISDOM
>What then is good? To have my neck and yours broken, Or to be thrown into the river, is that good?
>Who is so tall as to ascend to heaven? Who is so broad as to encompass the entire world?

First Two Noble Truth of Buddhism:
>dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara;
>samudaya (origin, arising) of this dukkha, which arises or "comes together" with taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment")

>>19275410
You have got your buck broken by Persuasion and Rhetoric so don't preach your schizophrenia to us ye, copelord. I take refuge in the ruin of Cioran.

Wisdom Of Silenus:
>"You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into a better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: 'you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.' It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living."

Hegesias of Cyrene, Death by Starvation:
>The book was called Death by Starvation or The Death-Persuader. According to the Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC), the entire book was essentially an argument for why everyone should just give up on life and kill themselves.

Ecclesiastes 4:1
>Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed-- and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors-- and they have no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 4:2
>And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.
Ecclesiastes 4:3
>But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.


THE DIALOGUE OF PESSIMISM, MESOPOTAMIAN WISDOM
>What then is good? To have my neck and yours broken, Or to be thrown into the river, is that good?
>Who is so tall as to ascend to heaven? Who is so broad as to encompass the entire world?

First Two Noble Truth of Buddhism:
>dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara;
>samudaya (origin, arising) of this dukkha, which arises or "comes together" with taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment")

>We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion, … Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.

-Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Fucking hell bros, Cioran was a monster.

>>19152934
>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

What the actual fuck is going on ITT? He never hated suicide you dumb cunts. The suicide that he hated was the one which resulted after some petty societal bullshit like waaahhh waaahhh roasties don't fuck me, waaahh waahh my gf left me, waaahhh waaahhh I have no friend and other types of societal fears. He was in the favour of suicide which resulted after the philosophical investigation, see: Philipp Mainländer.

>Kill yourself because you are what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!

Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

For Cioran obsession with the option of suicide is a liberation like Stoics:

>When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.

Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

And suicide obsession as hell:

>The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

The New Gods

>No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

TTWBB

This >>19154489 cunt said "he didn't hate life" lmaoooo:

>“How badly nature has conceived us!” an old woman once said to me. “It is nature herself that is badly conceived,” I should have answered, if I had heeded my Manichean reflexes.

The New Gods

It really feels like that most retards ITT haven't even read his books.

>“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.

Emil Cioran, ANATHEMAS and ADMIRATIONS

>>19117763
Pessimism is Perennial Truth

Wisdom Of Silenus:
>"You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into a better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: 'you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.' It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living."

Hegesias of Cyrene, Death by Starvation:
>The book was called Death by Starvation or The Death-Persuader. According to the Roman orator Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC), the entire book was essentially an argument for why everyone should just give up on life and kill themselves.

Ecclesiastes 4:1
>Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed-- and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors-- and they have no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 4:2
>And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.
Ecclesiastes 4:3
>But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.


THE DIALOGUE OF PESSIMISM, MESOPOTAMIAN WISDOM
>What then is good? To have my neck and yours broken, Or to be thrown into the river, is that good?
>Who is so tall as to ascend to heaven? Who is so broad as to encompass the entire world?

First Two Noble Truth of Buddhism:
>dukkha (suffering, incapable of satisfying, painful) is an innate characteristic of existence in the realm of samsara;
>samudaya (origin, arising) of this dukkha, which arises or "comes together" with taṇhā ("craving, desire or attachment")

>>19111123
>start with the greeks
Philosophical Pessimists start and end with Greek. Don't you know about The Wisdom of Silenus? He is responsible for pessimism and antinatalism.

>>19111138
Ecclesiastes 4:1
>Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed-- and they have no comforter; power was on the side of their oppressors-- and they have no comforter.
Ecclesiastes 4:2
>And I declared that the dead, who had already died, are happier than the living, who are still alive.
Ecclesiastes 4:3
>But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 4:4
>And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Pessimism is Christianity without theism. Rust even had cross in room as only artwork that he owned. Living despite the amount of suffering, evil and futility is like allowing your own crucifixion everyday.

>>19111068
Philosophical Pessimism is the Truth. You're a fool for searching for copes despite know the Truth. Read The Trouble with Being Born and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and be done with your doubts.