Cioran Variations [V]
April 8th, 1962 — October 7th, 1962
This contains the fifth set of my variations-translations [translations with changes, additions, variations, subtractions, etc.] of Cioran’s Cahiers [which is as yet untranslated], covering the period April 8 1962 — October 7 1962. Sets I, II, III and IV are linked at the end.
April 8, 1962
Any possibility of sorrow becomes sorrow.
Basically, like all Central European guys, I’m a sentimentalist.
April 9, 1962
Madness is sorrow that has ceased to evolve.
April 10, 1962
“Hope without an object cannot live” (Coleridge).
God knows what paradise I long for —
If one could go mad by following the pure, ‘logical’ course of sadness, I would have lost my mind a long time ago.
(I have always looked sadness directly in the face, and it has kept up its part of the bargain. As a result, I am a sane, normal man; I go to the shop, I buy croissants, I eat them…)
My dissatisfaction with myself is almost a religion.
May 7, 1962.
Denial is always a form of complicity. He who can think no without saying it is as far from skepticism as an angel.
Welcoming God when the temperature rises one degree, abandoning him again when it drops —
The elegiac assassin —
I was made for manual work, for living outside among animals, hammering things, banging things… not for confining myself to a room, leaning over a single eternally white piece of paper.
On abstract painting. The face of man has been abolished — when does the turn of man himself come?
June 4, 1962
Yesterday I took the train back from Compiègne to Paris. In front of me, a young girl (nineteen?) and a young man. I tried to combat the interest I took in her; I imagined her dead, her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her lips, everything in a state of complete putrefaction. Nothing changed; her charm was unassaible. This is the miracle of life.
The Phenomenology of Encryption — beautiful title for a doctoral thesis...
I don’t have headaches, I have a musico-funereal gap in my brain.