Anathemas and Admirations Read Online Free
Author: E. M. Cioran
less than a corpse.
Each desire provokes in me a counterdesire, so that whatever I do, all that matters is what I have not done.
Sarvam anityam : All is transitory (Buddha). A formula one should repeat at every hour of the day, at the — admirable — risk of dying of it.
Some diabolic thirst keeps me from exposing my pact with breathing.
To lose sleep and to change language: two ordeals, one not dependent on oneself, the other deliberate. Alone, face to face with the nights and with words.
The healthy are not real. They have everything except being — which is uniquely conferred by uncertain health.
Of all the ancients, Epicurus may have been best at disdaining the mob — one more reason for celebrating him. What a notion, to place a clown like Diogenes in so lofty a niche! It is the Garden in question I should have haunted, and not the marketplace, nor — a fortiori — the tub. . . . (Yet Epicurus himself has disappointed me more than once: does he not call Theognis of Megara a fool for proclaiming it was better not to be born or, once born, to pass as soon as possible through the gates of Hades?)
“If I were assigned to classify human miseries,” writes the young Tocqueville, “I should do so in this order: sickness, death, doubt.” Doubt as scourge: I could never have put forth such an opinion, but I understand it as well as if I had uttered it myself — in another life.
“The end of humanity will come when everyone is like me,” I declared one day in a fit I have no right to identify.
No sooner does the door close behind me than I exclaim, “What perfection in the parody of hell!”
“It is for the gods to come to me, not for me to go to them,” Plotinus answered his disciple Amelius, who had sought to take him to a religious ceremony. In whom in the Christian world could we find a like quality of pride?
You had to let him talk on, talk about everything, and try to isolate the dazzling things that escaped him. It was a meaningless verbal eruption with the histrionic and crazy gesticulations of a saint. To put yourself on his level, you had to divagate in his fashion, to utter sublime and incoherent sentences. A posthumous tête-à-tête, between impassioned ghosts.
At Saint-Séverin, listening to the organist play the Art of the Fugue , I kept saying to myself, over and over, “There is the refutation of all my anathemas.”
2
Joseph de Maistre
An Essay on Reactionary Thought
A MONG THINKERS — such as Nietzsche or Saint Paul — with the appetite and the genius for provocation, Joseph de Maistre occupies a place anything but negligible. Raising the most trivial problem to the level of paradox and the dignity of scandal, brandishing anathemas with enthusiastic cruelty, he created an oeuvre rich in enormities, a system that unfailingly seduces and exasperates. The scope and eloquence of his umbrage, the passion he devoted to indefensible causes, his tenacity in legitimizing one injustice after another, and his predilection for the deadly epithet make of him that immoderate disputant who, not deigning to persuade the adversary, crushes him with an adjective straight off. His convictions have an appearance of great firmness: he managed to overpower the solicitations of skepticism by the arrogance of his prejudices, by the dogmatic vehemence of his contempt.
Toward the end of the last century, at the height of the liberal illusion, it was possible to indulge in the luxury of calling him the “prophet of the past,” of regarding him as a relic or an aberrant phenomenon But we — in a somewhat more disabused epoch — know he is one of us precisely to the degree that he was a “monster”; it is in fact by the odious aspect of his “doctrines” that he lives for us, that he is our contemporary. Even if he were obsolete, moreover, he would still belong to that family of minds which date incorruptibly .
We must envy his luck, his privilege of disconcerting both admirers and
Each desire provokes in me a counterdesire, so that whatever I do, all that matters is what I have not done.
Sarvam anityam : All is transitory (Buddha). A formula one should repeat at every hour of the day, at the — admirable — risk of dying of it.
Some diabolic thirst keeps me from exposing my pact with breathing.
To lose sleep and to change language: two ordeals, one not dependent on oneself, the other deliberate. Alone, face to face with the nights and with words.
The healthy are not real. They have everything except being — which is uniquely conferred by uncertain health.
Of all the ancients, Epicurus may have been best at disdaining the mob — one more reason for celebrating him. What a notion, to place a clown like Diogenes in so lofty a niche! It is the Garden in question I should have haunted, and not the marketplace, nor — a fortiori — the tub. . . . (Yet Epicurus himself has disappointed me more than once: does he not call Theognis of Megara a fool for proclaiming it was better not to be born or, once born, to pass as soon as possible through the gates of Hades?)
“If I were assigned to classify human miseries,” writes the young Tocqueville, “I should do so in this order: sickness, death, doubt.” Doubt as scourge: I could never have put forth such an opinion, but I understand it as well as if I had uttered it myself — in another life.
“The end of humanity will come when everyone is like me,” I declared one day in a fit I have no right to identify.
No sooner does the door close behind me than I exclaim, “What perfection in the parody of hell!”
“It is for the gods to come to me, not for me to go to them,” Plotinus answered his disciple Amelius, who had sought to take him to a religious ceremony. In whom in the Christian world could we find a like quality of pride?
You had to let him talk on, talk about everything, and try to isolate the dazzling things that escaped him. It was a meaningless verbal eruption with the histrionic and crazy gesticulations of a saint. To put yourself on his level, you had to divagate in his fashion, to utter sublime and incoherent sentences. A posthumous tête-à-tête, between impassioned ghosts.
At Saint-Séverin, listening to the organist play the Art of the Fugue , I kept saying to myself, over and over, “There is the refutation of all my anathemas.”
2
Joseph de Maistre
An Essay on Reactionary Thought
A MONG THINKERS — such as Nietzsche or Saint Paul — with the appetite and the genius for provocation, Joseph de Maistre occupies a place anything but negligible. Raising the most trivial problem to the level of paradox and the dignity of scandal, brandishing anathemas with enthusiastic cruelty, he created an oeuvre rich in enormities, a system that unfailingly seduces and exasperates. The scope and eloquence of his umbrage, the passion he devoted to indefensible causes, his tenacity in legitimizing one injustice after another, and his predilection for the deadly epithet make of him that immoderate disputant who, not deigning to persuade the adversary, crushes him with an adjective straight off. His convictions have an appearance of great firmness: he managed to overpower the solicitations of skepticism by the arrogance of his prejudices, by the dogmatic vehemence of his contempt.
Toward the end of the last century, at the height of the liberal illusion, it was possible to indulge in the luxury of calling him the “prophet of the past,” of regarding him as a relic or an aberrant phenomenon But we — in a somewhat more disabused epoch — know he is one of us precisely to the degree that he was a “monster”; it is in fact by the odious aspect of his “doctrines” that he lives for us, that he is our contemporary. Even if he were obsolete, moreover, he would still belong to that family of minds which date incorruptibly .
We must envy his luck, his privilege of disconcerting both admirers and
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