A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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I also appreciate the biography you included since knowing one’s background can help explain their thinking. Dust Jackets are not guaranteed and when still present, they will have various degrees of tear and damage.

In 1950, A Short History of Decay was awarded the Prix Rivarol for the best work by a non-French author. 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.The difference between intelligence and stupidity resides in the manipulation of the adjective, whose use without diversity constitutes banality. We have always suffered, but our suffering has been either “sublime” or “legitimate” or “absurd,” according to the general views which the philosophic moment maintained. Not my cup of tea for several reasons, but I’ll admit you’ve shared some very interesting and thought-provoking quotes. The man who has not given himself up to the pleasures of anguish, who has not savored in his mind the dangers of his own extinction nor relished such cruel and sweet annihilations, will never be cured of the obsession with death: he will be tormented by it, for he will have resisted it; while the man who, habituated to a discipline of horror, and meditating upon his own carrion, has deliberately reduced himself to ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be merely a resurrected being who can no longer live.

The sensation of time’s immensity would make each second into an intolerable torment, a sublime firing squad.The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch-—and watch themselves watching. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain—spectators of the human convulsion—the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. Thus, frivolity is the most effective antidote to the disease of being what one is: by frivolity we abuse the world and dissimulate the impropriety of our depths. Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?

Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself but accumulated by generations and transmitted: we cannot rid ourselves of it with impunity.Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.

Like Nietzsche, Cioran is intent on exposing the hypocrisies of the human condition; but unlike Nietzsche, Cioran never once offers a way out, a new horizon, or even words of inspiration. It is neither a sudden realization nor a series of reasonings which leads us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. The victory of non-authenticity is fulfilled in philosophical activity, that complacence in “one,” and in prophetic activity [whether religious, moral, or political], that apotheosis of “we. 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. Espousing the melancholy of the ancient symbols, I should have liberated myself; I should have shared the dignity of the abandoned gods, defending them against the insidious crosses, against the invasion of servants and martyrs, and my nights would have sought their rest in the delirium and debauchery of the Caesars.I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. Time itself passes only because our desires beget that decorative universe which a jot of lucidity would lay bare. I picked A Short History of Decay by Emil Cioran from the library because I wanted to read something by Cioran.