Fragment, Variations on Cioran IV
This contains the fourth set of my variations-translations of Cioran’s Cahiers [untranslated, most of his work is translated though]. The translations cover the period May 27 1961 — January 8 1962. Set I, II and III are in the archive.
Underneath that is a fictional/non-fictional fragment of about eight hundred words.
May 27, 1961
Mozart’s Requiem. A breath of the beyond. After this, how can I continue to believe that the universe has no meaning? Well, I do.
I don’t believe in activity, and yet the only pleasure I know is of launching into some absurd enterprise and breathlessly dragging it to its conclusion.
May 30, 1961
The angel of the Apocalypse does not say ‘there is no more time’, but ‘the cause of the delay has been resolved.’
I have always felt that time is being eaten away from within, that it’s on the verge of consuming the final crumb of its own duration. This idea fills me with satisfaction and dread.
Without anxiety, I would have less consistency than a ghost.
Anxiety: pre-emptive déjà-vu, involuntary memory of the future.
I am a walking regret, my nostalgia eats me alive and then eats itself. There is no cure for this disease, only an infinite number of ways to strengthen it.
How angry I am with civilization for having discredited tears! Having unlearned how to cry, we live glued to the dryness of our eyes.
Any path that does not proceed from our solitude is a detour (or as Beckett argues, a joke).
On submitting a text to a journal, my first thought is to immediately ask for it back and send another, refuting the former. I don’t trust anything I do or think; my self-distrust calls into question not only my abilities but my presence on earth.
After a period of the greatest perplexity, I eventually decided to undertake the smallest possible action which the circumstances allowed.
All the horror of their origins is engraved across their faces. And to think that they may be parents!
A language is dead when it is no longer compatible with mistakes [Vendryès].
I was made for insignificance and frivolity, in this regard I have extraordinary gifts. But for some reason, I began to suffer — and for this I have no talent.
I have such a direct perception of the disasters that the future will bring that I find it impossible to breathe. The disasters of the present, on the other hand, don’t trouble me — I have already forgetten them. But how to forget the future?
Every second I don’t think of death, I feel like I’m cheating…
We must interpret our life as a punishment; otherwise, we would die of shame.
The fermentation of his shames guaranteed his fertility.
July 17, 1961
Many of my ancestors must have been insane. It’s hardly reassuring that there is no record of them —
Every western country: a corpse covered in jewels.
It was Sieyès, if I’m not mistaken, who said that you have to be drunk or crazy to believe that you can express anything in any of the known languages.
The glorious indiscretion of death...
There are sleepless nights that the most gifted torturer could not have invented. We emerge shattered, annihilated. In such a state, daylight is even worse than night.
September 5, 1961
To be able to reign in my desires, I would need several centuries of ‘English education’ —
In the mountains of Santander, the cows look sad, my friend Nunez Morante tells me. Why, I ask. They have everything I dream of: silence, sky... On account of existence in general, he says.
An English journalist called me the other day to ask my opinion on ‘God’ and the ‘twentieth century.’ I’m going to the market to buy plums, I told him, adding that I was in no mood to discuss such crazy ideas, and never will be.
The sun: an electric light in an abattoir.
Delusional pity: I can imagine even the sufferings of the mineral.
If all this continues, it is because men are too weak to despair.
Plan for the evening: write a Metaphysics of Farewell.
A Greek philosopher who named his domestic servants after conjunctions: and, because, but —
January 8, 1962
No solitude is enough for me. The absence of everyone — this doesn’t even come close.