Cioran XX
September 1 1968 - November 26 1968
September 1 1968
Pascal on Montaigne: salvation through nonchalance alone.
“Every time I contemplate the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” (Weil)
“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire equal gratitude.” (Weil)
And: “The Gospel was the last word of the Greek spirit, just as the Iliad was the first.” A more wilfully absurd statement can hardly be imagined.1
Christianity has arrived at a state of historical impossibility so extreme that only women — only one woman — can actually believe in it —
The most intense artists — Weil, Dickinson, Lispector, Austen, etc. — are all women; the psychic cost — in aesthetic terms, the psychic benefit — of the annihilation of subjectivity is always greater in women, simply because there’s more sloshing around in there in the first place. Male sexuality is less rhythmical, it can’t build enough heat to really wipe itself out. And so it can’t take revenge on itself, can’t ambush itself in quite the same way. This is true even of Kafka, though he spent half his life rehearsing for such an ambush (what would I do if…).
An American lady asks my opinion on the efficacy of earplugs; I say they don’t particularly interest me. She begins listing off other possible defences against noise. No, I say, there’s only one that works. What? she says. Suicide. Elle n’a pas insisté.
Attack only God. He alone is worth it.
“I am for every Jupiter and against every Prometheus.” (Claudel)
Creation: destruction at long range.
Nietzsche should have said: how to philosophise with an assault rifle.
How to philosophise when everyone except you has an assault rifle.
A Polynesian island where, if anyone insults you or your family, it’s your duty to climb the island’s highest peak and throw yourself into the sea.
Let me be saved or perish! (Whoever perishes is saved).
September 6 1968
Every sceptic would collapse in a heap if his reasons for doubt were removed.
Because he has no legitimate reason to doubt, he must run his doubt through the very centre of the earth. Now he has ballast; now he can wander placidly about.
The miraculousness of a life corresponds to its length. Unfortunately.
The beautiful young mental patient, glued to her bed by spasms of electricity. On her account, I have had visions that would make the craziest mystic white with envy.
What if we commit your suicide for you? Wouldn’t that be nice?
I saw Beckett at the Luxembourg Garden, reading a newspaper. He looked tired, a little unwell. He refuses to sacrifice even a crumb of his loneliness. Why? Because he doesn’t have very much. The secret of Irish minimalism is maternal proximity.
September 13 1968
Upon waking, I remembered Blok’s poem: “The Mongol, thin-eyed, gazes upon beautiful, dying Europe.”
I felt these words not in my mouth but in my eyes, in my nose… 2
September 16 1968
Панмонголизм! Хоть имя дико,
Но мне ласкает слух оно.
[Panmongolism! Panmongol
ASMR!]
J: “I hate Sartre because he never quotes me.” Only an honest man could have said that!
September 27 1968
“The prayer of the sorrowful man does not have the strength to rise to the altar of God.” (The Shepherd of Hermas, 140 AD.)
October 3 1968
Gabriel Marcel invites me over to watch television. France’s greatest Catholic philosopher is interested in television. It breaks my heart. The man’s eighty years old.
X has been living in a psychiatric facility for ten years now. He says that, although he’s thought about it a great deal, he’s yet to discover a single difference between his mental state after the break and his mental state prior to it. Which means he is either completely sane, or completely mad.
October 10 1968
There is no laughter in Christianity.
But for me that would be the condition of belief: a God who only mocks.
Or a God who wants only to be mocked.
Heidegger manages to be Christianly unfunny while at the same time jettisoning the whole apparatus of severity, tragedy, clarity, beauty, etc., for which the possibility of laughter was originally sacrificed. He has spent fifty years outlining the least compelling vision of the world possible. The unsaint, the world’s first world-historical embarrassment —
Whatever was left of the German spirit tried to squirrel itself away in the interstices of that stretched grammar — that was where he found it. And killed it.
Even more than Hitler, he has annihilated the possibility of Germany.
The accoutrements of the mystical wrapped ever-tighter about the corpse of a worm.
Someone said of Henry Green: a writer’s writer’s writer.
One might say of F: Oh yes! Phew! A suicide’s suicide!
There but for the mockery of God go I.
October 13 1968
A Persian historian deployed an unusual number of adjectives in his description of Genghis Khan. Genghis had the man executed; he thought he was being mocked.
October 28 1968
Nothing remains of Europe but genius for capitulation.
November 2 1968
