Anathemas and Admirations Read online




  ANATHEMAS

  and

  ADMIRATIONS

  BY E. M. CIORAN

  Anathemas and Admirations

  Drawn and Quartered

  History and Utopia

  On the Heights of Despair

  A Short History of Decay

  Tears and Saints

  The Temptation to Exist

  The Trouble with Being Born

  ANATHEMAS

  and

  ADMIRATIONS

  *

  BY

  E. M. CIORAN

  Translated from the French by

  RICHARD HOWARD

  Foreword by

  EUGENE THACKER

  Copyright © 1986, 1987 by Editions Gallimard

  “Valéry face à ses idoles” copyright © 1970 by Editions de l’Herne

  “Essai sur la pensée réactionnaire” copyright © 1977 by Fata Morgana

  English-language translation copyright © 1991, 2012 by Arcade

  Publishing, Inc.

  Foreword copyright © 2012 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-688-2

  Printed in China

  Contents

  *

  Foreword

  1 On the Verge of Existence

  2 Joseph de Maistre

  3 Fractures

  4 Valéry Facing His Idols

  5 The Lure of Disillusion

  6 Beckett

  7 Meeting the Moments

  8 Saint-John Perse

  9 Exasperations

  10 Mircea Eliade

  11 That Fatal Perspicacity

  12 Caillois

  13 Michaux

  14 Benjamin Fondane

  15 Borges

  16 Maria Zambrano

  17 Weininger

  18 Fitzgerald

  19 Guido Ceronetti

  20 She Was Not of Their World

  21 Foreshortened Confession

  22 Rereading . . .

  Foreword

  by Eugene Thacker

  We like to imagine that poets die poetic deaths. One thinks of Shelley, who, after having reportedly seen his doppelgänger, drowned off the coast of Tuscany while sailing out to sea in his boat, the Don Juan. Or Nietzsche, the “mad” philosopher and iconoclast who suddenly collapses in Turin while witnessing the flogging of a horse, his tear-leaden arms thrown around the animal’s neck. In the 1990s, an emaciated, elderly man with sharp eyes and wavy hair is found sitting on the side of the street somewhere in Paris’s Latin Quarter. He is lost. He can recall neither the way back home nor even his address. He is taken home. Eventually he stops eating. After an accidental fall, he is brought to a hospital. He drifts in and out of lucidity, rarely recognizing those closest to him. He stops speaking entirely. After slipping into a coma, Emil Cioran dies, on June 20, 1995.

  For Cioran, the twilight philosopher who once noted “the stillborn are the most free,” the end came not with melodramatic fair but gradually and quietly, though it was no less tragic. For several years, the Romanian-born writer had been grappling with Alzheimer’s. Writing became more and more difficult. Traveling, lectures, and interviews were impractical. Even a walk out the door took on an almost absurd risk. But Cioran’s final silence was, in a way, a long time coming. By the early 1980s, he was finding it more and more difficult to write, though the themes of his writing—pessimism, despair, melancholy, and a certain ecstatic antagonism towards the world—these continued to find their way into his increasingly sparse work. Now well into his seventies, he and Simone Boué continued to live in their Rue de l’Odéon apartment, where he divided his time between long walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg (where he and Samuel Beckett would often cross paths) and writing aphorisms in the cheap, multicolored Joseph Gibert notebooks he had been using for years, and that piled up on his desk in the hazy light of his top-floor writing alcove.

  The present volume is a hybrid of Cioran’s last two major publications. In 1986, the solitary stroller who once wrote: “Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion,” published a book about friends and colleagues entitled Exercices d’admiration. It collected short articles written between the 1950s and the 1980s; some of them are about writers with whom Cioran had long-standing friendships (Samuel Beckett, Mircea Eliade, Henri Michaux), while others were about writers with whom he shared a certain temperament (Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Valéry). There are lesser-known names, too: the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano, the Italian journalist Guido Ceronetti, and the Romanian-Jewish poet Benjamin Fondane.

  The list is highly eclectic and situational, and between each essay, Cioran’s tone varies widely. Sometimes his writing becomes a hymn that sings the praise of an author, sometimes it takes on a personal, even autobiographical form, and sometimes the writing is cagey and contentious—often Cioran’s tone will encompass all of these at once. Of Beckett, for instance, Cioran has this to say: “He lives not in time but parallel to it, which is why it has never occurred to me to ask him what he thinks of events.” Of Borges, he writes: “The misfortune of being recognized has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself.”

  Exercices d’admiration is accompanied here by another, quite different book. Struggling with the gradual loss of his memory, in 1987 Cioran publishes Aveux et anathèmes (which could be translated as “Confessions and Curses”), a short book of aphorisms on the persistence of time, memory, and mortality. Composed of short, staccato fragments, the writing has all the urgency of a last word, and yet the almost tranquil distance of a documentarian: “How age simplifies everything! At the library I ask for four books. Two are set in type that is too small; I discard them without even considering their contents. The third, too ... serious, seems unreadable to me. I carry off the fourth without conviction.” Following the publication of Aveux et anathèmes, Cioran decides to stop writing altogether. But it is a gesture already in his mind early on. In a 1980 letter to a friend he notes: “Even the idea of writing makes me queasy, and with it comes disgust, failure, and a complete lack of satisfaction that, not daring to admit this to itself, turns sour.”

  True to form, Cioran’s final writings were the result of a lived contradiction. A hermit singing the praises of others, an amnesiac obsessed with the persistence of memory and time. Circumstance or chance has deprived Cioran of the romantic death; all that remains is writing that leads to its own silence. But if there is a “poetic” image of the later Cioran, perhaps this is it.

  In any book governed by the Fragment, truths and whims keep company throughout. How to sift them, to decide which is conviction, which caprice? One proposition, a momentary impulse, precedes or follows another, a life’s companion raised to the dignity of an obsession. .
. . It is the reader who must assign the roles’, since in more than one instance, the author himself hesitates to take sides. The epigrams constitute a sequence of perplexities — in them we shall find interrogations but no answers. Moreover, what answer could there be? Had there been one, we should know it, to the great detriment of the enthusiast of stupor.

  1

  On the Verge of Existence

  WHEN CHRIST HARROWED HELL, the Just under the old law — Abel, Enoch, Noah — mistrusted his teaching and made no answer to his call. They took him for an emissary of the Tempter whose schemes they feared. Only Cain and those of his race adhered to such doctrine, or professed to, and followed him out of hell. Such was the doctrine of Mareion. “The wicked prosper,” that old objection to the notion of a merciful or at least honorable Creator — who consolidated it better than this heresiarch? Who else so acutely perceived its invincibility?

  Amateur paleontologist, I have spent several months pondering the skeleton. Result: no more than a few pages. . . . The subject, it is true, scarcely warrants prolixity.

  Applying the same treatment to a poet and a thinker strikes me as a lapse in taste. There are realms from which philosophers ought to abstain. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. Oddly enough, the poets exult when they do not understand the pronouncements made upon them. The jargon flatters them, gives them the illusion of preferment. Such weakness demeans them to the level of their glossators.

  To Buddhism (indeed, to the Orient in general), Nothingness does not have the rather grim signification we attribute to it. It is identified with a limit-experience of light or, if you like, with a state of luminous absence, an everlasting radiant void: Being that has triumphed over all its properties, or rather non-Being supremely positive in that it dispenses bliss without substance, without substratum, without support in any world at all.

  Solitude: so fulfilling that the merest rendezvous is a crucifixion.

  Hindu philosophy pursues deliverance; Greek — with the exception of Pyrrho, Epicurus, and a few unclassifiable figures — is a disappointment: it seeks only . . . truth.

  Nirvana has been compared to a mirror that no longer reflects any object. To a mirror, then, forever pure, forever unemployed.

  Christ having named Satan “Prince of this world,” Saint Paul, to go one better, struck home: “God of this world.” When such authorities designate our ruler by name, who is entitled to disinherited status?

  Man is free, save for his depths. On the surface, he does as he likes; down there, will is a meaningless syllable.

  To disarm the envious, we should take to the streets on crutches. Only the spectacle of our collapse can humanize, to some extent, our friends and our enemies.

  Rightly, in every age it is assumed we are witnessing the disappearance of the last traces of the earthly paradise.

  Christ again: according to one Gnostic source, he ascended— in abhorrence of fatum — to trouble celestial arrangements and to prevent any questioning of the heavenly bodies. In such confusion, what can have happened to my poor star?

  Kant waited until the last days of his old age to perceive the dark side of existence and to indicate “the failure of any rational theodicy.” . . . Others have been luckier: to them this occurred even before they began to philosophize.

  Apparently matter, jealous of life, seeks to discover its weak points and to punish its initiatives, its betrayals. For life is life only by infidelity to matter.

  I am distinct from all my sensations. I fail to understand how. I even fail to understand whose they are. Moreover, who is this I initiating the three propositions?

  I have just read a biography. The notion that all the figures it describes no longer exist except in this book strikes me as so intolerable that I have had to lie down to avoid a collapse.

  What entitles you to fling my truths in my face? You are taking a liberty I deny. Granted, all you allege is correct, but I have not authorized you to be frank with me. (After each outburst of rage, shame accompanied by the invariable swagger — “At least there’s some life in that” — followed in its turn by even greater shame.)

  “I am a coward, I cannot endure the pain of being happy.” To sound someone out, to know him, it is enough to see how he reacts to Keats’s avowal. If he fails to understand immediately, no use continuing.

  Affrightment: a pity the word should have vanished with the great churchmen.

  Man being an ailing animal, any of his remarks, his gestures, has symptomatic value.

  “I am amazed that so remarkable a man could have died,” I once wrote to a philosopher’s widow. I realized the stupidity of my letter only after mailing it: to send another would be to risk a second blunder. With regard to condolences, whatever is not a cliché borders on impropriety or aberration.

  In her seventies, Lady Montague admitted she had ceased looking at herself in a mirror eleven years before. Eccentricity? Perhaps, but only to those ignorant of the calvary of daily encounters with one’s own . . . countenance.

  What can I speak of save what I feel? And right now I feel nothing. Everything seems erased — suspended. Let me not be proud of this, nor embittered by it. “In the course of the many lives we have lived,” says The Treasure of the True Law, “how often have we been born in vain, how often have we died!”

  The further man advances, the less he will have to convert to.

  The best way to get rid of an enemy is to speak well of him everywhere. What you say will be repeated to him, and he will no longer have the strength to harm you: you have broken his mainspring. . . . He will still campaign against you, but without vigor or consistency, for unconsciously he will have ceased to hate you. He is conquered, though unaware of his defeat.

  Claudel’s famous edict: “I am for every Jupiter, against every Prometheus,” We may have lost our illusions about revolt, yet such an enormity wakens the terrorist slumbering in us all.

  One holds no grudges against those one has insulted; quite the contrary, one is disposed to grant them every imaginable virtue. Alas, such generosity is never to be met with in the injured party.

  I haven’t much use for anyone who can spare Original Sin. Myself, I resort to it on every occasion, and without it I don’t see how I should avoid uninterrupted consternation.

  Kandinsky maintains that yellow is the color of life. . . . Now we know why this hue so hurts the eyes.

  When we must make a crucial decision, it is extremely dangerous to consult anyone else, since no one, with the exception of a few misguided souls, sincerely wishes us well.

  To invent new words, according to Madame de Staël, is the “surest symptom of intellectual sterility,” The remark seems truer today than it was at the beginning of the last century. As early as 1649, Vaugelas decreed, “No one may create new words, not even the sovereign,” Let writers, and especially philosophers, ponder this ban even before they start thinking!

  We learn more in one white night than in a year of sleep. Practically speaking, the adoption of tobacco is much more instructive than any number of regular naps.

  The earaches Swift suffered from are partly responsible for his misanthropy. If I am so interested in others’ infirmities, it is because I want to find immediate points in common with them. I sometimes feel I have shared all the agonies of those I admire.

  This morning, after hearing an astronomer mention “billions of suns,” I renounced my morning ablutions: what is the use of washing one more time?

  Boredom is indeed a form of anxiety, but an anxiety purged of fear. When we are bored we dread nothing except boredom itself.

  Anyone who has passed through an ordeal patronizes those who have not had to undergo it. . . . The intolerable fatuity of patients who have survived an operation . . .

  At the Paris-Moscow exhibition, my amazement in front of the portrait of the young Remizov by Ilya Repin. When I knew him, Remizov was eighty-six years old; he lived in a virtually empty apartment his concierge wanted for her dau
ghter and schemed to evict him from, on the pretext that the place was a plague-spot, a rat’s nest. The man Pasternak considered the greatest Russian stylist had come to that. The contrast between the wretched, withered old man, long forgotten by the world, and the image of the brilliant youth in front of me robbed me of any desire to visit the rest of the exhibition.

  The Ancients mistrusted success because they feared not only the gods’ jealousy but, even more, the danger of an inner imbalance linked to any success as such. To have understood this jeopardy — how far beyond us they were!

  Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

  In 1849 Sainte-Beuve wrote that youth was turning away from le mal romantique in order to dream, like the Saint-Simonians, of “the limitless triumph of industry.” This dream, which has come true, discredits all our undertakings, and the very idea of hope.

  Those children I never wanted to have — if only they knew what happiness they owe me!

  While my dentist was crushing my jaw, I realized that Time is the one subject for meditation, that because of Time I was in this fatal chair and everything was breaking down, including what was left of my teeth.

  If I have always mistrusted Freud, my father is responsible: he used to tell my mother his dreams, thus spoiling all my mornings,