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224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
鈥濸aradis al neurasteniei, Moldova e o provincie de un farmec trist, de-a dreptul insuportabil. La Ia艧i, capitala ei, am petrecut 卯n 1936 dou膬 s膬pt膬m卯ni: 卯n lipsa alcoolului, a艧 fi murit de ur卯t, un ur卯t ce te topea pe picioare鈥� (卯n articolul despre Benjamin Fondane / B. Fundoianu).
Doubt works deep within you like a disease or, even more effectively, like a faith.I am incapable of tiring of Cioran. His pessimism is so freaking lyrical, his aphorisms so exquisitely timbered, his arpeggiated paragraphs and chorded essays so harmonic in their opaline darkness, their existential deliquescence, their inertial braggadocio, that I'm reduced to fanboy relish every time.
Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.Et cetera, inter alia, e pluribus unum...
Like tragedy, history resolves nothing, because there is nothing to resolve. It is always by failure that we study the future. Too bad we cannot breathe as if events, in their totality, were suspended! Each time they evidence themselves a little too much, we suffer a fit of determinism, of fatalistic rage. By free will we explain only the surface of history, the appearances it assumes, its external vicissitudes, but not its depths, its real course, which preserves, in spite of everything, a baffling, even a mysterious character. We are still amazed that Hannibal, after Cannae, did not fall upon Rome. Had he done so, we should be boasting today of our Carthaginian ancestry. To maintain that whim, that accident, hence the individual, play no part, is folly. Yet each time we envisage the future as a totality, the verdict of the Mahahharata invariably comes to mind: "The knot of Destiny cannot be untied; nothing in this world is the result of our actions."
History in slow motion has inexorably been replaced by history out of breath. Institutions, societies, civilizations differ in duration and significance, yet all are subject to one and the same law, which decrees that the invincible impulse, the factor of their rise, must sag and settle after a certain time, this decadence corresponding to a slackening of that energizer which is...delirium. Compared with periods of expansion, of dementia really, those of decline seem sane and are so, are too much so鈥攚hich makes them almost as deadly as the others.
Historical time is so tense, so strained, that it is hard to see how it can keep from exploding. At each of its moments it gives the impression that it is on the point of breaking.
Nothing makes us modest, not even the sight of a corpse.
I have always been attracted by lost causes, by individuals without a hope of success, whose follies I have espoused until I suffer from them almost as much as they do.
I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.
I try to oppose the interest I take in her, I imagine her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her lips in a high state of putrefaction. No help for it: the indefinable element she releases persists. It is in such moments that one understands why life has managed to sustain itself, in spite of Knowledge.