A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It is as though, like his lifelong pal Eugene Ionesco, he is really something of a poseur, for whom the daring language of the Absurd in the 1940s and through to the '60s and '70s provided an opportunity to spellbind his chosen audience and entertain himself at the same time. When our convictions seem the fruit of a frivolous lunacy, how tolerate other people’s passions for themselves and for their own multiplication in each day’s utopia? The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception.

But the enthusiast of separations, seeking paths unhaunted by the hordes, withdraws to the extreme margin and follows the rim of the circle, which he cannot cross so long as he is subject to the body; yet Consciousness soars farther, quite pure in an ennui without beings or objects. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. The man who managed, by an imagination overflowing with pity, to record all the sufferings, to be contemporary with all the pain and all the anguish of any given moment—such a man—supposing he could ever exist—would be a monster of love and the greatest victim in the history of the human heart.In 1937, Cioran left his native country of Romania for Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life.

But while the saints were never to collapse, these others found themselves at the mercy of their own game, masters and victims of their whims—true solitaries, since their solitude was sterile. When a nation no longer has any prejudice in its blood, its sole resource remains its will to disintegrate. Expert in disillusions, riddling the new fervors with all the arrows of a dissolute wisdom—among the courtesans, in skeptical brothels or circuses with their sumptuous cruelties, I should have swelled my reasonings with vice and with blood, dilating logic to dimensions it had never dreamed of, to the dimensions of worlds that die.Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence—that effort toward the Senseless. Carla Thomas of the Goddard College Department of Philosophy praised the book's prose, describing Cioran as a "master of cynicism, of the sardonic a perçu and the trenchant aphorism. But we could not exist one second without deceiving ourselves: the prophet in each of us is just the seed of madness which makes us flourish in our void.

In the vacant eyes of the statues, in the idols shrunken by sagging superstitions, I should have forgotten all about my ancestors, my yokes, and my regrets. There is a kind of ecstasy of the worst in Cioran’s writing that manifests itself in his many voices—sometimes philosophical, sometimes poetic, sometimes political, always polemical.When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease.