On the heights of despair

Emil Cioran (1934)

  • On Being Lyrical
    • The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated.
    • Why is the suffering or loving man lyrical? Because such states, although different in nature and orientation, spring up from the deepest and most intimate part of our being, from the substantial center of subjectivity, as from a radiation zone. One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality.
    • There are people who become lyrical only at crucial moments in their life; some only in the throes of death, when their entire past suddenly appears before them and hits them with the force of a waterfall. Many become lyrical after some decisively critical experience, when the turmoil of their inner being reaches paroxysm. Thus people who are normally inclined toward objectivity and impersonality, strangers both to themselves and to reality, once they become prisoners of love, experience feelings which actualize all their personal resources. The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resources of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infinity; inner lyricism finds adequate objectification only through fluid, irrational material.
    • There is no authentic lyricism without a grain of interior madness.
  • How Distant Everything Is!
    • I despise people who on their deathbed master themselves and adopt a pose in order to impress. Tears do not burn except in solitude. Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they did do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone. They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don't they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits?
  • On Not Wanting to Live
  • The Passion for the Absurd
    • There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos.
    • I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing. The passion for the absurd can grow only in a man who has exhausted everything, yet is still capable of undergoing awesome transfigurations
    • An existence which does not hide a great madness has no value.
    • But there is a great advantage in the loneliness of suffering. What would happen if a man's face could adequately express his suffering, if his entire inner agony were objectified in his facial expression? Could we still communicate? Wouldn't we then cover our faces with our hands while talking? Life would really be impossible if the infinitude of feelings we harbor within ourselves were fully expressed in the lines of our faces. Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the midst of the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would we truly understand and appreciate the advantage of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering!
    • Solitary walks—extremely fertile and dangerous at the same time, for the inner life—must take place in such a way that nothing will obscure the solitary's meditation on man's isolation in the world. Solitary walks are propitious to an intense process of interiorization especially in the evening, when none of the usual seductions can steal one's interest. Then revelations about the world spring from the deepest corner of the spirit, from the place where it has detached itself from life, from the wound of life.
  • The World and I
  • Weariness and Agony
  • Despair and the Grotesque
    • Whoever has seen his face grotesquely disfigured can never forget it, because he will always be afraid of himself.
  • The Premonition of Madness
    • One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
    • I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. Although I long for luminous ecstasies, I wouldn't ask for any, because I know they are followed by great depressions. I would like instead a shower of warm light to fall from me, transfiguring the entire world, an unecstatic burst of light preserving the calm of luminous eternity. Far from the concentrations of ecstasy, it would be all graceful lightness and smiling warmth. The entire world should float in this dream of light, in this transparent and unreal state of delight. Obstacles and matter, form and limits would cease to exist. Then let me die of light in such a landscape.
  • On Death
    • There are questions which, once approached, either isolate you or kill you outright. Afterward you have nothing more to lose. From then on, your erstwhile "serious" pursuits—your spiritual quest for more varied forms of life, your limitless longing for inaccessible things, your elevated frustration with the limits of empiricism—all become simple manifestations of an excessively exuberant sensibility, lacking the profound seriousness which characterizes the man who has penetrated the realm of dangerous mysteries. I'm not talking here of the spiritual calm and empty solemnity of so-called serious people but of a mad tension that puts every moment of your life on the plane of eternity. This profound seriousness cannot be achieved by confronting purely formal problems, no matter how difficult, because they are generated exclusively by our intelligence, not by the total organic structure of our being. Only the organic and existential thinker is capable of this kind of seriousness, because truth for him is alive, born from inner agony and organic disorder rather than useless speculation. Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art. I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction. Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles? Why don't we want to acknowledge the exclusive value of live truths, of truths born in us and revealing a reality proper only to us?
    • From a grave perspective, every step in life is a step into death and memory is the only sign of nothingness.
    • Some people maintain that the fear of death does not have a deeper justification, because as long as there is an I there is no death, and once dead there is no I any longer. These people have forgotten about the very strange phenomenon of gradual agony. What comfort does this artificial distinction between the I and death offer a man who has a strong premonition of death? What meaning can logical argument or subtle thought have for someone deeply imbued with a feeling of the irrevocable? All attempts to bring existential questions onto a logical plane are null and void.
  • Melancholy
    • Regret makes man melancholy without paralyzing or cutting short his aspirations, because in regret the awareness of the irredeemable focuses on the past and the future is still left somewhat open.
    • Sweet and voluptuous melancholy, as well as black melancholy, exhibits similar traits: interior void, exterior infinity, vagueness of sensations, dreaminess, sublimation. Their differentiation is apparent only from the point of view of affective tonalities. It may be that the multipolarity of melancholy derives more from the structure of subjectivity than from its own nature. Not particularly intense, it fluctuates more than other states. Endowed with more poetic than active virtues, it possesses a certain subdued gracefulness totally absent from tragic and intense sadness.
    • The same gracefulness marks melancholy landscapes. The wide perspective of Dutch or Renaissance landscape, with its eternity of lights and shadows, its undulating vales symbolizing infinity, its transfiguring rays of light which spiritualize the material world and the hopes and regrets of men who smile wisely — the whole perspective breathes an easy melancholy grace. In such a landscape, man seems to say regretfully and resignedly: "What can we do? It's all we have!" At the end of all melancholy there is a chance of consolation or resignation. Its esthetic aspect holds possibilities for future harmony which are absent from profound organic sadness. The latter ends in the irrevocable, the former in graceful dream.
  • Nothing Is Important
    • How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history—greater than the fall of empires—I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.
    • Although life for me is torture, I cannot renounce it, because I do not believe in the absolute values in whose name I would sacrifice myself.
    • How much happier are we today because others have died for our well-being and our enlightment? Well-being? Enlightment? If anybody had died so that I could be happy, then I would be even more unhappy, because I do not want to build my life on a graveyard. There are moments when I feel responsible for all the suffering in history, since I cannot understand why some have shed blood for us. It would be a great irony if we could determine that they were happier than we are. Let history crumble into dust! Why should I bother? Let death appear in a ridiculous light; suffering, limited and unrevealing; enthusiasm, impure; life, rational; life's dialectics, logical rather than demonic; despair, minor and partial; eternity, just a word; the experience of nothingness, an illusion; fatality, a joke! I seriously ask myself, What is the meaning of all this? Why raise questions, throw lights, or see shadows? Wouldn't it be better if I buried my tears in the sand on a seashore in utter solitude? But I never cried, because my tears have always turned into thoughts. And my thoughts are as bitter as tears.
  • Ectasy
  • The World in Which Nothing Is Solved
    • One must descend all the circles of an inner hell to turn one's destiny into a subjective yet universal problem. If you are not burned to ashes, you will then be able to philosophize lyrically. Only when you do not deign even to despise this world of unsolvable problems will you finally come to achieve a superior form of personal existence. And this will be so not because you have any special value or excellence, but because nothing interests you beyond your own personal agony.
  • The Contradictory and the Inconsequential
    • Only great and dangerous contradictions betoken a rich spiritual life, because only they constitute a mode of realization for life's abundant inner flow. People who know only a few spiritual states and never live on the edge do not have contradictions, because their limited resources cannot form oppositions. But how can those who violently experience hatred, despair, chaos, nothingness, or love, who burn with each passion and gradually die with each and in each, those who can only breathe on heights, who are always alone, especially when they are with others—how can they grow in linear fashion and crystallize into a system?
    • Nobody who does not love chaos is a creator, and whoever is contemptuous of illness must not speak of the spirit. There is value only in that which bursts forth from inspiration, which springs up from the irrational depths of our being, from the secret center of our subjectivity. The fruit of labor, effort, and endeavor has no value, and the offspring of intelligence is sterile and uninteresting. I delight in the barbaric and spontaneous elan of inspiration, effervescent spiritual states, essential lyricism, and inner tension - these things make inspiration the only reality of creation.
  • On Sadness
    • I know why I am sad, but I do not know why I am melancholy. Melancholy states last a long time without reaching any great intensity. Or, rather, their long duration erases from consciousness any original motive, whereas in sadness, which is not long-lasting, the motive remains present, generating a self-contained inner tension which will never explode but slowly die in itself.
    • Neither melancholy nor sadness explodes; neither shatters lives. One speaks of a sd sigh, never a scream of sadness.
    • How could some poets find beautiful this ultimate negation which cannot even wear the mask of the grotesque? It is ironic that one fears it the more one admires it. I must confess that I admire death's negativity. It is the only thing I can admire and yet not love. Its grandeur and infinity impress me, but my despair is so vast that I don't even harbor the hope of death. How could I love death? One can only write about it in contradictory ways
    • An observation which, to my great regret, is always verifiable: only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all. True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life, to leave behind you, as symbols of your life's drama, a trail of smoke and blood—all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you. There are many things on could regret in this world in which one shouldn't regret anything. But I ask myself; Is the world worthy of my regrets?
  • Total Dissatisfaction
    • I'm weary of being a man. If I could, I would renounce my condition on the spot, but what would I become then, an animal? I cannot retrace my steps. Besides, I might become an animal who knows the history of philosophy.
  • The Bath of Fire
    • There are so many ways to achieve the sensation of immateriality that it would be difficult, if not futile, to make a classification. Nevertheless, I think that the bath of fire is one of the best. The bath of fire: your being ablaze, all flashes and sparks, consumed by flames as in Hell. The bath of fire purifies so radically that it does away with existence. Its heat waves and scorching flames burn the kernel of life, smothering its vital elan, turning its aggressiveness into aspiration. To live in a bath of fire, transfigured by its rich glow—such is the state of immaterial purity where one is nothing but a dancing flame. Freed from the laws of gravity, life becomes illusion or dream. But this is not all: at the end, a most curious and paradoxical sensation occurs, the feeling of dreamy unreality gives way to the sensation of becoming ash. The bath of fire invariable ends thus: when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience? There is both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world.
  • Disintegration
  • On the Reality of the Body
  • I Do Not Know
  • On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness
  • Apocalypse
  • The Monopoly of Suffering
  • Absolute Luricism
  • The Meaning of Grace
    • Women are safe on the spiritual plane because in them the dualism between life and the spirit is less intense than in men.
    • Grace, if it has not saved the world, has saved its women.
  • The Vanity of Compassion
    • Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was killed.
  • Eternity and Morality
  • Moment and Eternity
    • When speaking of life, you say moments; of eternity, moment.
  • History and Eternity
  • Not to Be a Man Anymore
    • Let me live the life of every species, wildly and unself-consciously, let me try out the entire spectrum of nature, let me change gracefully, discreetly, as if it were the most natural procedure. How I would search the nests and caves, wander the deserted mountains and the sea, the hills and the plains! Only a cosmic adventure of this kind, a series of metamorphoses in the plant and animal realms, would reawaken in me the desire to become Man again. If the difference between Man and animal lies in the fact that the animal can only be an animal whereas man can also be not-man—that is, something other than himself-then I am not-man.
  • Magic and Fatality
  • Unimaginable Joy
  • The Ambiguity of Suffering
    • There is no one who, after having endured pain or sickness, does not experience the slightest, vaguest twinge of regret. Although longing to recover, those who suffer intensely for a long time sense an irreparable loss in their improvement. If pain is part of your being, overcoming it is like a loss and causes a pang of regret. I owe to suffering the best parts of myself as well as all that I have lost in life. Therefore I cannot either curse or love suffering. My feeling for it is hard to describe; it is strange, elusive and has the mysterious charm of twilight. Beatitude through suffering is an illusion, since it requires a reconciliation to the fatality of pain in order to avoid total annihilation. Life's last resources smolder under this illusion. The only concession to suffering hides in our regret of potential recovery, but it is so vague and elusive a feeling that it cannot stamp itself on anyone's consciousness. All disappearing pains carry with them this vague discomfort, as if the return to equilibrium forbade the path to alluring yet tormenting realms from which one cannot part without a final backward glance. Since suffering has not revealed Beauty to us, what lights still attract our eye? Are we drawn by the gloom of suffering?
  • All Is Dust
  • Enthusiasm as a Form of Love
    • The more intense love is, the more individualized. Men who love truly and passionately cannot love several women at once: the more intense the love, the more important its object. Let us imagine a passionate love without an object, a man without the woman on whom to concentrate his love: what would it be but the plenitude of love? Are there men with a great potential for love but who have never loved in this primordial, original way? Enthusiasm is love with an unspecified object. Instead of orienting itself toward others, enthusiastic love expends itself lavishly in generous actions, with a sort of universal receptivity.
  • Light and Darkness
  • Renunciation
  • The Blessings of Insomnia
    • Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions. What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights! Their flowing tones are bewitching, but there is a note of regret in this melodic surge which keeps it short of ecstasy. What kind of regret? It is hard to say, because insomnia is so complex that one cannot tell what the loss is. Or maybe the loss is infinite. During wakeful nights, the presence of a single thought, or feeling, reigns supreme. It becomes the source of the night's mysterious music. Thus transformed, the thoughts of wakeful nights are mild enough to stir depths of universal anxiety in man's soul. Death itself, although still hideous, acquires in the night a sort of impalpable transparency, an illusory and musical character. Nevertheless, the sadness of this universal night is like the sadness of Oriental music, in which the mystery of death is more dominant than that of love.
  • On the Transubstantiation of Love
  • Man, the Insomniac Animal
    • There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.
  • Truth, What a Word!
  • The Beauty of Flames
  • The Paucity of Wisdom
  • The Return to Chaos
  • Irony and Self-Irony
  • On Poverty
  • The Flight from the Cross
  • The Cult of Infinity
  • Transfiguration of Banality
  • The Burden of Sadness
  • Degradation through Work
  • The Sense of Endings
    • I can't understand why people do not commit suicide during orgasm, why they don't think survival commonplace and vulgar. Such an intense though brief quiver should reduce us to ashes in seconds. But if it does not kill us, we should kill ourselves. . . .There are so many kinds of death. Yet no one has the courage or the originality to attempt sexual suicide, a death no less absolute than the others but in which the passage into nothingness is made from heights of pleasure. Why not take this path?
  • The Satanic Principle of Suffering
    • I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas. Ideas never caused anybody's downfall.
  • An Indirect Animal
    • All men have the same defect: they wait to live, for they have not the courage of each instant. Why not invest enough passion in each moment to make it an eternity? We all learn to live only when we no longer have anything to expect, because we do not live in the living present but in a vague and distant future. We should not wait for anything except the immediate promptings of the moment. We should wait without the consciousness of time. There's no salvation without the immediate. But man is a being who no longer knows the immediate. He is an indirect animal.
  • Impossible Truth
  • Subjectivity
  • Homo
  • Love in Brief
  • Nothing Matters
  • The Sources of Evil
  • Beauty's Magic Tricks
  • Man's Inconsistency
  • Capitulation
  • Facing Silence
  • The Double and His Art
    • One does not learn the art of psychology, one lives and experiences it, for no science will give you the key to the mysteries of the soul. One cannot become a good psychologist without turning oneself into an object of study, evincing daily interest in the complexity of one's own case. To be initiated into the mysteries of the Other, you must first be initiated into your own. In order to be a psychologist, you must be sufficiently unhappy to understand happiness, so refined that you could become a barbarian at any moment, and so intensely desperate that you do not know whether you live in a desert or in the midst of a fire. Protean, equally centripetal and centrifugal, your ecstasy will have to be esthetic, sexual, religious, and perverse. Fine psychological understanding is the product of a life of self-contemplation, a life which sees itself in other lives as if in so many mirrors; for a psychologist, all men are fragments of himself. The psychologist's contempt for others contains a grain of secret and unlimited self-irony. No one practices psychology out of love: it is rather a form of sadism, a desire to annihilate the other by taking possession of his intimate being, by stripping him of his mysterious aura. Quickly exhausting men and their limited resources, the psychologist is easily bored, for he is not naive enough to have friends and is too self-conscious to have lovers. Skepticism is not the beginning but the natural end of psychology. It is nature's punishment for this violator of mysteries, this supremely indiscreet person who, having invested too few illusions in knowledge, ends in disillusion. A little knowledge is delightful; a lot, disgusting. The more you know, the less you want to know. He who has not suffered from knowledge has never known anything.
  • Nonsense

Page last revised on: 2024-05-13