A Short History of Decay by Emil Cioran
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His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
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Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith- of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever.
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I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
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Society- an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man.
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If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions.
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Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an answer to it.
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We must be thankful to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of seriousness, which have played with values and taken their pleasure in begetting and destroying them.
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The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer.
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If life had a single argument in its favor- distinct, indisputable- it would annihilate itself; instincts and prejudices collapse at the contact of Rigor. Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence- that effort toward the Senseless. . . . Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses its attraction. The inexactitude of its ends makes life superior to death; one touch of precision would degrade it to the triviality of the tombs.
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Against the obsession with death, both the subterfuges of hope and the arguments of reason lay down their arms: their insignificance merely whets the appetite to die. In order to triumph over this appetite, there is but one "method": to live it to the end, to submit to all its pleasures, all its pangs, to do nothing to elude it.
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The man who knows nothing of ennui is still in the world's childhood, when the ages were waiting to be born; he remains closed off from that tired time which outlives itself, which laughs at its dimensions, and succumbs on the threshold of its own . . . future, dragging along matter, suddenly raised to a lyricism of negation. Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart . . . the revelation of the void, the drying up of that delirium which sustains- or invents- life. . . .
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Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our fellow men, the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? For nothing is more natural than to imagine other people's suicide. When we have glimpsed, by an overwhelming and readily renewable intuition, anyone's own uselessness, it is incomprehensible that everyone has not done the same. To do away with oneself seems such a clear and simple action! Why is it so rare, why does everyone avoid it? Because, if reason disavows the appetite for life, the nothing which extends our acts is nonetheless of a power superior to all absolutes; it explains the tacit coalition of mortals against death; it is not only the symbol of existence, but existence itself; it is everything. And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non- suicide.
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God Himself lives only by the adjectives we add to Him; whereby the raison d'etre of theology.
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Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion?
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Each suffering, except ours, seems to us legitimate or absurdly intelligible; otherwise, mourning would be the unique constant in the versatility of our sentiments. But we wear only the mourning of ourselves.
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Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.
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But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts- what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive?
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To live in expectation, in what is not yet, is to accept the stimulating disequilibrium implied by the very notion of future. Every nostalgia is a transcendence of the present. Even in the form of regret, it assumes a dynamic character: we want to force the past, we want to act retroactively, to protest against the irreversible. Life has a content only in the violation of time. The obsession of elsewhere is the impossibility of the moment; and this impossibility is nostalgia itself.
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When the solitude is intensified to the point of constituting not so much our datum as our sole faith, we cease to be integral with the whole: heretics of existence, we are banished from the community of the living, whose sole virtue is to wait, gasping, for something which is not death. But we, emancipated from the fascination of such waiting, rejected from the ecumenicity of illusion- we are the most heretical sect of all, for our soul itself is born in heresy.
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The obsession with remedies marks the end of a civilization; the search for salvation, that of a philosophy.
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We too seek "happiness," either by frenzy or by disdain: to scorn it is not yet to forget it, and to reject it is a way of retaining it; we too seek "salvation," if only by wanting nothing to do with it.
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What gift is more mysterious than being able to do what we will with ourselves and to refuse to do it? Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffocating. The notion of destroying ourselves, the multiplicity of means for doing so, their ease and their proximity delight us and fill us with dread; for there is nothing simpler and more terrible than the action by which we decide irrevocably upon ourselves.
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The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison, or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion.
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And how regain the energy of that seditious angel who, still at time's start, knew nothing of that pestilential wisdom in which our impulses asphyxiate?
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The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude.
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(To write would be an insipid and superfluous action if we could weep at will, imitating women and children in their fits of rage. . . . In the substance of which we are made, in its deepest impurity, abides a principle of bitterness which only tears can sweeten. If, each time disappointments assail us, we had the possibility to be released from them by tears, all vague maladies and poetry itself would disappear. But a native reticence, aggravated by education, or a defective functioning of the lachrymal glands, dooms us to the martyrdom of dry eyes.
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And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee- by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity- were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated from outside the spectacle of her labors, would she still persist in her pains?
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Freedom is an ethical principle of demonic essence.
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All that we build beyond raw existence, all the many powers which give the world a physiognomy, we owe to Misfortune- architect of diversity, intelligible instrument of our actions. What its sphere fails to engross transcends us: what meaning could an event have which fails to be overwhelming?
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We must persevere in breathing, feel the air burn our lips, accumulate regrets at the heart of a reality which we have not hoped for, and renounce giving an explanation for the Disease which brings about our downfall. When each moment of time rushes upon us like a dagger, when our flesh, instigated by our desires, refuses to be petrified- how confront a single moment added to our fate? With the help of what artifices might we find the strength of illusion to go in search of another life- a new life?
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Neutral ideas like dry eyes; dull looks which strip things of all dimension; self- auscultations which reduce the feelings to phenomena of attention; a vaporous life, without tears and without laughter- how to inculcate a sap, a vernal vulgarity? And how to endure this resigning heart, this time too blunted to transmit even to its own seasons the ferment of growth and dissolution?
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This stagnation of the organs, this stupor of the faculties, this petrified smile- do they not often remind you of the ennui of the cloisters, hearts abandoned by God, the dryness and idiocy of the monks loathing themselves in the ecstatic transports of masturbation? You are merely a monk without divine hypotheses and without the pride of solitary vice.
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Thousands of years of sufferings, which would have softened the hearts of stones, merely petrified this steely mayfly, monstrous example of evanescence and hardening, driven by one insipid madness, a will to exist at once imperceptible and shameless.
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I wanted to love heaven and earth, their exploits and their fevers- and I have found nothing which failed to remind me of death": flowers, stars, faces- symbols of withering, potential slabs of all possible tombs!
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To live signifies to believe and to hope- to lie and to lie to oneself.
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When we reach the limits of monologue, the confines of solitude, we invent- for lack of another interlocutor- God, supreme pretext of dialogue. So long as you name Him, your madness is well disguised, and .. . all is permitted. The true believer is scarcely to be distinguished from the madman; but his madness is legal, acknowledged; he would end up in an asylum if his aberrations were pure of all faith. But God covers them, legitimizes them. The pride of a conqueror pales beside the ostentation of a believer who addresses himself to the Creator. How can one dare so much? And how could modesty be a virtue of temples, when a decrepit old woman who imagines Infinity within reach raises herself by prayer to a level of audacity to which no tyrant has ever laid claim?
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Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe? Why still endure that solidified air which clogs your lungs and crushes your flesh?
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(The true greatness of the saints consists in that incomparable power of defeating the Fear of Ridicule. We cannot weep without shame; they invoked the "gift of tears." A preoccupation with honor in our "dryness" immobilizes us into the spectators of our bitter and repressed infinity, our streams that do not flow. Yet the eyes' function is not to see but to weep; and really to see we must close them: that is the condition of ecstasy,
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If we put in one pan the evil the "pure" have poured out upon the world, and in the other the evil that has come from men without principles and without scruples, the scale would tip toward the first.
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In the mind that proposes it, every recipe for salvation erects a guillotine. . . . The disasters of corrupt periods have less gravity than the scourges caused by the ardent ones; mud is more agreeable than blood; and there is more mildness in vice than in virtue, more humanity in depravity than in austerity. The man who rules and believes in nothing- behold the model of a paradise of forfeiture, a sovereign solution to history. Opportunists have saved nations; heroes have ruined them.
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The embellished lie of the great periods, of this century, that king, that pope. . . . The "truth" appears only at those moments when men's minds, forgetting the constructive delirium, let themselves slip back into the dissolution of morals, of ideals, and of beliefs. To know is to see; it is neither to hope nor to try.
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The aesthete has a horror of blood, sublimity, and heroes. . . . He still values only the dissipated. . .
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I no longer want to collaborate with the light or use the jargon of life. And I shall no longer say "I am" without blushing. The immodesty of the breath, the scandal of the lungs are linked to the abuse of an auxiliary verb. . . .
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The more one is a nature, the less one is an artist.
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Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone "happy," no greater flattery than to grant him a "vein of melancholy". . . . This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
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A biography is legitimate only if it focuses the elasticity of a fate, the sum of variables it contains. But the poet follows a line of fatality whose rigor nothing inflects. Life belongs to dolts; and it is in order to fill out the life they have not had that we have invented the lives of the poets. . . .
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Who would dare to wonder how he has experienced life when it is by death that he has been alive at all? When he succumbs to the temptation of happiness- he belongs to comedy. . . . But if, on the other hand, flames spring up from his wounds and he sings felicity- that voluptuous incandescence of woe- he rescues himself from the nuance of vulgarity inherent in any positive accent.
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The poet would be an odious deserter of reality if in his flight he failed to take his suffering alone. Unlike the mystic or the sage, he cannot escape himself, nor leave the stage of his own obsession: even his ecstasies are incurable, and harbingers of disasters. Unable to run away, for him everything is possible, except life. . . .
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I can imagine a thinker exclaiming in an impulse of pride: "I'd like a poet to make his fate out of my thoughts!" But for such an aspiration to be legitimate, he himself would have to have frequented the poets a long time, he would have to have borrowed from them the joys of malediction, and given back, abstract and completed, the image of their own defections or their own deliriums; above all he would have to have succumbed on the threshold of song and, a living anthem this side of inspiration, to have known the regret of not being a poet, of not being initiated into the "science of tears," the scourges of the heart, the formal orgies, the immortalities of the moment. . . . Many times I have dreamed of a melancholy and erudite monster, versed in all idioms, familiar with numbers and souls alike, who would wander the world feeding on poisons, fervors, ecstasies, crossing Persias, Chinas, defunct Indies, and dying Europes- many times I have dreamed of a friend of the poets who would have known them all out of his despair at not being one of them.
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The dreaming conqueror is the greatest calamity for men; they are no less eager to idolize him, fascinated as they are by distorted projects, ruinous ideals, unhealthy ambitions. No reasonable being was ever the object of worship, left a name, or marked a single event with his individual stamp. Imperturbable before a precise conception or a transparent idol, the mob is roused by the unverifiable, by false mysteries. Who ever died in the name of rigor? Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it.
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The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the "pleasure" of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an "I" without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us from carrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth. . . . Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . .
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A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
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Epochs of apogee cultivate values for their own sake: life is only a means of realizing them; the individual is not aware of living, he lives- happy slave of the forms he engenders, tends, and idolizes. Affectivity dominates and fills him. No creation without the resources of "feeling," which are limited; yet for the man who experiences only their wealth, they seem inexhaustible: this illusion produces history. In decadence, affective drying- up permits only two modalities of feeling and understanding: sensation and idea. Now, it is by affectivity that we participate in the world of values, that we project a vitality into categories and norms. The activity of a productive civilization consists in drawing ideas out of their abstract nothingness, in transforming concepts into myths.
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nation cannot create indefinitely. It is oiled upon to give expression and meaning to a sum of values which are exhausted with the soul which has begotten them. The citizen wakens from a productive hypnosis; the reign of lucidity begins; the masses wield no more than empty categories. Myths turn back into concepts: that is decadence. And the consequences make themselves felt: the individual wants to live, he converts life into finality, he elevates himself to the rank of a minor exception. The ledger of these exceptions, constituting the deficit of a civilization, prefigures its effacement.
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A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence. But if one of these monsters prevails, another world sets itself in motion, crude, dim, intolerant, until it exhausts its god and emancipates itself from him; for man is free- and sterile- only in the interval when the gods die; slave- and creative- only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.
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Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself but accumulated by generations and transmitted: we cannot rid ourselves of it with impunity. The nation that renounces it heedlessly will then renounce itself until it has nothing left to give up. The duration of a collectivity and its consistency coincide with the duration and consistency of its prejudices.
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The mistake of those who apprehend decadence is to try to oppose it whereas it must be encouraged: by developing it exhausts itself and permits the advent of other forms. The true harbinger is not the man who offers a system when no one wants it, but rather the man who precipitates Chaos, its agent and incense- bearer.
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The sum of phenomena- whether fruits of the mind or of time- can be embraced or denied according to our mood of the moment: arguments, proceeding from our rigor or from our whims, are of equal weight on each point. Nothing is indefensible- from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime. The history of ideas, like that of deeds, unfolds in a meaningless climate; who could in good faith find an arbiter who would settle the litigations of these anemic or bloodthirsty gorillas?
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If, by accident or miracle, words were to disappear, we should be plunged into an intolerable anguish and stupor. Such sudden dumbness would expose us to the crudest torment. It is the use of concepts which makes us masters of our fears. We say: Death- and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptizing events and things, we elude the Inexplicable: the mind's activity is a salutary deception, a conjuring trick; it allows us to circulate in a tempered reality, comfortable and inexact.
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The grand expressions- fate, misfortune, disgrace- lose their luster; and it is then that we see the creature at grips with failing organs, vanquished under a prostrate and dumbfounded substance. Take the lie of Misery away from man, give him the power to look under this word: he cannot, for one moment, endure his misery. It is abstraction, sonorities without content, swollen and dilapidated, which have kept him from foundering, and not his religions and instincts.
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By what is "profound" in us, we are victims of every evil: no salvation so long as we still conform to our being. Something must disappear from our composition, some deadly spring dry up; hence there is only one way out: to abolish the soul, its aspirations and abysses; our dreams were poisoned by it; we must extirpate it, along with its craving for "depth," its "inner" fruitfulness, and its other aberrations. The mind and sensation will suffice; their concourse will beget a discipline of sterility which will preserve us from enthusiasm, from anguish. Let no "feeling" disturb us ever again, and let the "soul" become the silliest of desuetudes. . . .
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The hatred of the "race" and of its "genius" relates you to murderers, to madmen, to divinities, and to all the great forms of the sterile. Starting from a certain degree of solitude, you must leave off loving and committing the fascinating pollution of intercourse. The man who wants to perpetuate himself at any price is scarcely to be distinguished from the dog: he is still nature; he will never understand that we can endure the empire of the instincts and rebel against them, enjoy the advantages of the species and scorn them: end of the line- with appetites. . . . That is the conflict of the man who worships and abominates woman, supremely torn between the attraction and disgust she inspires. Hence, unable to renounce the race altogether, he resolves this conflict by dreaming, on her breast, of the desert and by mingling the scent of the cloisters with the stench of over- explicit sweat. The insincerities of the flesh bring him closer to the saints. . . .
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Of all the great sufferers, the saints are best at profiting from their sickness. Willful, unbridled natures, they exploit their own disequilibrium with violence and skill. The Savior, their model, was an example of ambition and audacity, a matchless conqueror: his insinuating force, his power to identify himself with the soul's flaws and insufficiencies allowed him to establish a kingdom beyond the reach of any mere sword. Ardent with method: it is this ability which was imitated by those who took him for their ideal.
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From the sage's viewpoint, there can be no one more impure than the saint; from the saint's, no one emptier than the sage. Here we have the whole difference between the man who understands and the man who aspires.
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Life is the site of my infatuations: everything I wrest from indifference I give back almost at once. This is not the saints' method: they choose once and for all. I live in order to leave off whatever I love; they, in order to commit themselves to a single object; I savor eternity, they sink themselves into it.
Page 158
Health: decisive weapon against religion Invent the universal elixir: the heavens will vanish and never return. No use seducing man by other ideals: they will be weaker than diseases God is our rust, the gradual decay of our substance: when He penetrates us, we think we are elevated, but we descend lower and lower; having reached our end, He crowns our collapse, and so we are "saved" forever. Sinister superstition, haloed cancer which has eaten away the earth for ages. . . . I hate all gods; I am not healthy enough to scorn them. That is the Indifferent Man's great humiliation.
Page 159
In vain you search for your model among human beings; from those who have gone farther than you, you have borrowed only the compromising and harmful aspect: from the sage, sloth; from the saint, incoherence; from the aesthete, rancor; from the poet, profligacy- and from all, disagreement with yourself, ambiguity in everyday things and hatred for what lives simply to live.
Page 161
I am in a good mood: God is good; I am sullen: God is wicked; I am indifferent: He is neutral. My states confer upon Him corresponding attributes: when I love knowledge, He is omniscient, and when I worship power, omnipotent. When things seem to me to exist, He exists; when they seem illusory, He evaporates. A thousand arguments sustain Him, and a thousand destroy; if my enthusiasms animate Him, my sulks smother Him. We cannot form a more variable image: we fear Him as a monster and crush him like a worm; we idolize Him: He is Being; repel Him: He is Nothingness. Were Prayer to supplant Gravity, it would scarcely assure His universal duration: He would still remain at the mercy of our moments. His fate has decided that He be unchangeable only in the eyes of the naive or the retarded. Scrutiny reveals Him: useless cause, meaningless absolute, patron of dolts, pastime of solitaries, straw or specter according to whether he amuses our mind or haunts our fevers.
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To think of God, to seek Him, to invoke or to endure Him- movements of a disordered body and a defeated mind! The nobly superficial ages- the Renaissance, the eighteenth century- scorned religion, dismissed its rudimentary frolics. But alas! There is a plebeian melancholy in us which darkens our fervors and our concepts. Vainly we dream of a lace universe; God, product of our depths, our gangrene, profanes this dream of beauty.
Page 162
Endlessly harping on the "why" and the "how"; tracing the Cause, and all causes, on the slightest pretext- denotes a disorder of the functions and faculties which ends in a "metaphysical delirium"-senility of the abyss, downfall of anguish, ultimate ugliness of the mysteries. .. .
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Divagations in a Monastery For the unbeliever, infatuated with waste and dispersion, there is no spectacle more disturbing than these ruminants of the absolute. . . . Where do they find such pertinacity in the unverifiable, so much attention in the vague, and so much ardor to apprehend it as well? I share neither their certitudes nor their serenity. They are happy, and I blame them for being so. If at least they hated themselves! but they prize their "soul" more than the universe; this false evaluation is the source of sacrifices and renunciations of an imposing absurdity Whereas our experiences have neither sequence nor system, being at the mercy of chance and our moods, they have but one experience, always the same, of a monotony and a profundity which are profoundly disheartening. It is true that God is its object; but what interest can they still take in Him? Always equal to Himself, infinitely of the same nature, He never renews Himself; I could reflect upon Him in passing, but to fill the hours with Him! . . .
Page 165
How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your Kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets. You are the damper of our flames and our rebellions, the fire hose of our fevers, the superintendent of our senilities. Even before relegating You to a formula, I trampled Your arcana, scorned Your tricks and all those artifices which produce Your toilette of the Inexplicable. You have generously endowed me with the gall Your pity spared Your slaves. Since there is no rest but in the shadow of Your nullity, the brute finds salvation by just handing himself over to You or Your counterfeits. I don't know which is more pitiable, Your acolytes or myself: we all derive straight from Your incompetence: pitch, patch, hodgepodge- syllables of the Creation, of Your blundering. . . .
Page 167
Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves "advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge- if it is profound- never changes: only its decor varies.
Page 169
All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs- modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable- and fragile.
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We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments.
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History is irony on the move, the Mind's jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices.
Page 171
That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities.
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I no longer remember how I happened to become the recipient of this confidence: "Possessing not property, projects, or even memories, I have given over future and philosophy alike, owning merely a cot on which to unlearn the sun and sighs. I remain stretched out there, and spin out the hours; around me, utensils, objects which suggest suicide, every one. The nail whispers: stick me through your heart, the trickle of blood need not alarm you. The knife insinuates: my blade is infallible; one second's decision and you have triumphed over misery and shame. The window opens of its own accord, creaking in the silence: you share the city's heights with the poor; fling yourself out, my overture is a generous one; in the wink of an eye, you will land on the pavement with the meaning- or the meaninglessness- of life in your grasp. And a rope coils as though around some ideal neck, borrowing the tone of a suppliant power: I have been waiting for you forever, I have watched your terrors, your struggles, and your rages, I have seen your rumpled sheets, the pillow where your fury gnawed, as I have heard the swearwords with which you gratified the gods. Charitable, I sympathize and offer my services. For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair."
Page 174
Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal; so that those obsessed by frivolity prefigure authentically tormented minds. The superficial idler, haunted by the specter of age, is closer to Pascal, Bossuet, or Chateaubriand than a savant quite unconcerned with himself.
Page 175
Thus the most terrible and the most futile sufferings are begotten by that crushed pride which, in order to face up to Nothingness, transforms it, out of revenge, into Law.
Page 177
Since for you there is no ultimate criterion nor irrevocable principle, and no god, what keeps you from committing any and every crime? "I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action- mother of all the vices- 1 am the cause of no one's suffering. Harmless, without greed, and without enough energy or indecency to affront others, I leave the world as ! found it. To take revenge presupposes a constant vigilance and a systematic mind, a costly continuity, whereas the indifference of forgiveness and contempt renders the hours pleasantly empty. All ethics represent a danger for goodness; only negligence rescues it. Having chosen the phlegm of the imbecile and the apathy of the angel, I have excluded myself from actions and, since goodness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to be good."
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Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.
Page 182
There is more wisdom in letting yourself be carried by the waves than in struggling against them. Posthumous to myself, I remember Time as a kind of child's play or a lapse of taste. Without desires, without the hours in which to make them bloom, I have only the assurance of having always outlived myself, a fetus devoured by an omniscient idiocy even before his eyelids opened, and stillborn of lucidity. . . .
Page 186
Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves A touch of lucidity in the "heart" makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my "neighbor" it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer "myself" if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it.
Page 187
Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life. E. M. Cioran, Richard Howard, Eugene Thacker - A Short History of Decay-Arcade Publishing (2012) by E.M. CIORAN
Page 11
His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.
Page 11
Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith- of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever.
Page 12
I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.
Page 12
Society- an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man.
Page 14
If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions.
Page 15
Having resisted the temptation to conclude, I have overcome the mind, as I have overcome life itself by the horror of looking for an answer to it.
Page 16
We must be thankful to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of seriousness, which have played with values and taken their pleasure in begetting and destroying them.
Page 19
The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer.
Page 19
If life had a single argument in its favor- distinct, indisputable- it would annihilate itself; instincts and prejudices collapse at the contact of Rigor. Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence- that effort toward the Senseless. . . . Give life a specific goal and it immediately loses its attraction. The inexactitude of its ends makes life superior to death; one touch of precision would degrade it to the triviality of the tombs.
Page 21
Against the obsession with death, both the subterfuges of hope and the arguments of reason lay down their arms: their insignificance merely whets the appetite to die. In order to triumph over this appetite, there is but one "method": to live it to the end, to submit to all its pleasures, all its pangs, to do nothing to elude it.
Page 23
The man who knows nothing of ennui is still in the world's childhood, when the ages were waiting to be born; he remains closed off from that tired time which outlives itself, which laughs at its dimensions, and succumbs on the threshold of its own . . . future, dragging along matter, suddenly raised to a lyricism of negation. Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart . . . the revelation of the void, the drying up of that delirium which sustains- or invents- life. . . .
Page 29
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our fellow men, the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? For nothing is more natural than to imagine other people's suicide. When we have glimpsed, by an overwhelming and readily renewable intuition, anyone's own uselessness, it is incomprehensible that everyone has not done the same. To do away with oneself seems such a clear and simple action! Why is it so rare, why does everyone avoid it? Because, if reason disavows the appetite for life, the nothing which extends our acts is nonetheless of a power superior to all absolutes; it explains the tacit coalition of mortals against death; it is not only the symbol of existence, but existence itself; it is everything. And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non- suicide.
Page 30
God Himself lives only by the adjectives we add to Him; whereby the raison d'etre of theology.
Page 32
Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. But the Devil never complains and never aspires to found a religion: are we not here to safeguard him from inanition and oblivion?
Page 38
Each suffering, except ours, seems to us legitimate or absurdly intelligible; otherwise, mourning would be the unique constant in the versatility of our sentiments. But we wear only the mourning of ourselves.
Page 38
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.
Page 39
But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts- what if we prefer the nuances of the incomplete and an affective dialectic to the evenness of a sublime impasse? Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive?
Page 43
To live in expectation, in what is not yet, is to accept the stimulating disequilibrium implied by the very notion of future. Every nostalgia is a transcendence of the present. Even in the form of regret, it assumes a dynamic character: we want to force the past, we want to act retroactively, to protest against the irreversible. Life has a content only in the violation of time. The obsession of elsewhere is the impossibility of the moment; and this impossibility is nostalgia itself.
Page 46
When the solitude is intensified to the point of constituting not so much our datum as our sole faith, we cease to be integral with the whole: heretics of existence, we are banished from the community of the living, whose sole virtue is to wait, gasping, for something which is not death. But we, emancipated from the fascination of such waiting, rejected from the ecumenicity of illusion- we are the most heretical sect of all, for our soul itself is born in heresy.
Page 47
The obsession with remedies marks the end of a civilization; the search for salvation, that of a philosophy.
Page 49
We too seek "happiness," either by frenzy or by disdain: to scorn it is not yet to forget it, and to reject it is a way of retaining it; we too seek "salvation," if only by wanting nothing to do with it.
Page 49
What gift is more mysterious than being able to do what we will with ourselves and to refuse to do it? Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffocating. The notion of destroying ourselves, the multiplicity of means for doing so, their ease and their proximity delight us and fill us with dread; for there is nothing simpler and more terrible than the action by which we decide irrevocably upon ourselves.
Page 50
The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison, or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion.
Page 53
And how regain the energy of that seditious angel who, still at time's start, knew nothing of that pestilential wisdom in which our impulses asphyxiate?
Page 54
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude.
Page 57
(To write would be an insipid and superfluous action if we could weep at will, imitating women and children in their fits of rage. . . . In the substance of which we are made, in its deepest impurity, abides a principle of bitterness which only tears can sweeten. If, each time disappointments assail us, we had the possibility to be released from them by tears, all vague maladies and poetry itself would disappear. But a native reticence, aggravated by education, or a defective functioning of the lachrymal glands, dooms us to the martyrdom of dry eyes.
Page 58
And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee- by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity- were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated from outside the spectacle of her labors, would she still persist in her pains?
Page 70
Freedom is an ethical principle of demonic essence.
Page 84
All that we build beyond raw existence, all the many powers which give the world a physiognomy, we owe to Misfortune- architect of diversity, intelligible instrument of our actions. What its sphere fails to engross transcends us: what meaning could an event have which fails to be overwhelming?
Page 86
We must persevere in breathing, feel the air burn our lips, accumulate regrets at the heart of a reality which we have not hoped for, and renounce giving an explanation for the Disease which brings about our downfall. When each moment of time rushes upon us like a dagger, when our flesh, instigated by our desires, refuses to be petrified- how confront a single moment added to our fate? With the help of what artifices might we find the strength of illusion to go in search of another life- a new life?
Page 89
Neutral ideas like dry eyes; dull looks which strip things of all dimension; self- auscultations which reduce the feelings to phenomena of attention; a vaporous life, without tears and without laughter- how to inculcate a sap, a vernal vulgarity? And how to endure this resigning heart, this time too blunted to transmit even to its own seasons the ferment of growth and dissolution?
Page 90
This stagnation of the organs, this stupor of the faculties, this petrified smile- do they not often remind you of the ennui of the cloisters, hearts abandoned by God, the dryness and idiocy of the monks loathing themselves in the ecstatic transports of masturbation? You are merely a monk without divine hypotheses and without the pride of solitary vice.
Page 92
Thousands of years of sufferings, which would have softened the hearts of stones, merely petrified this steely mayfly, monstrous example of evanescence and hardening, driven by one insipid madness, a will to exist at once imperceptible and shameless.
Page 93
I wanted to love heaven and earth, their exploits and their fevers- and I have found nothing which failed to remind me of death": flowers, stars, faces- symbols of withering, potential slabs of all possible tombs!
Page 105
To live signifies to believe and to hope- to lie and to lie to oneself.
Page 107
When we reach the limits of monologue, the confines of solitude, we invent- for lack of another interlocutor- God, supreme pretext of dialogue. So long as you name Him, your madness is well disguised, and .. . all is permitted. The true believer is scarcely to be distinguished from the madman; but his madness is legal, acknowledged; he would end up in an asylum if his aberrations were pure of all faith. But God covers them, legitimizes them. The pride of a conqueror pales beside the ostentation of a believer who addresses himself to the Creator. How can one dare so much? And how could modesty be a virtue of temples, when a decrepit old woman who imagines Infinity within reach raises herself by prayer to a level of audacity to which no tyrant has ever laid claim?
Page 109
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe? Why still endure that solidified air which clogs your lungs and crushes your flesh?
Page 110
(The true greatness of the saints consists in that incomparable power of defeating the Fear of Ridicule. We cannot weep without shame; they invoked the "gift of tears." A preoccupation with honor in our "dryness" immobilizes us into the spectators of our bitter and repressed infinity, our streams that do not flow. Yet the eyes' function is not to see but to weep; and really to see we must close them: that is the condition of ecstasy,
Page 111
If we put in one pan the evil the "pure" have poured out upon the world, and in the other the evil that has come from men without principles and without scruples, the scale would tip toward the first.
Page 111
In the mind that proposes it, every recipe for salvation erects a guillotine. . . . The disasters of corrupt periods have less gravity than the scourges caused by the ardent ones; mud is more agreeable than blood; and there is more mildness in vice than in virtue, more humanity in depravity than in austerity. The man who rules and believes in nothing- behold the model of a paradise of forfeiture, a sovereign solution to history. Opportunists have saved nations; heroes have ruined them.
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The embellished lie of the great periods, of this century, that king, that pope. . . . The "truth" appears only at those moments when men's minds, forgetting the constructive delirium, let themselves slip back into the dissolution of morals, of ideals, and of beliefs. To know is to see; it is neither to hope nor to try.
Page 112
The aesthete has a horror of blood, sublimity, and heroes. . . . He still values only the dissipated. . .
Page 114
I no longer want to collaborate with the light or use the jargon of life. And I shall no longer say "I am" without blushing. The immodesty of the breath, the scandal of the lungs are linked to the abuse of an auxiliary verb. . . .
Page 118
The more one is a nature, the less one is an artist.
Page 119
Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone "happy," no greater flattery than to grant him a "vein of melancholy". . . . This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
Page 120
A biography is legitimate only if it focuses the elasticity of a fate, the sum of variables it contains. But the poet follows a line of fatality whose rigor nothing inflects. Life belongs to dolts; and it is in order to fill out the life they have not had that we have invented the lives of the poets. . . .
Page 120
Who would dare to wonder how he has experienced life when it is by death that he has been alive at all? When he succumbs to the temptation of happiness- he belongs to comedy. . . . But if, on the other hand, flames spring up from his wounds and he sings felicity- that voluptuous incandescence of woe- he rescues himself from the nuance of vulgarity inherent in any positive accent.
Page 120
The poet would be an odious deserter of reality if in his flight he failed to take his suffering alone. Unlike the mystic or the sage, he cannot escape himself, nor leave the stage of his own obsession: even his ecstasies are incurable, and harbingers of disasters. Unable to run away, for him everything is possible, except life. . . .
Page 122
I can imagine a thinker exclaiming in an impulse of pride: "I'd like a poet to make his fate out of my thoughts!" But for such an aspiration to be legitimate, he himself would have to have frequented the poets a long time, he would have to have borrowed from them the joys of malediction, and given back, abstract and completed, the image of their own defections or their own deliriums; above all he would have to have succumbed on the threshold of song and, a living anthem this side of inspiration, to have known the regret of not being a poet, of not being initiated into the "science of tears," the scourges of the heart, the formal orgies, the immortalities of the moment. . . . Many times I have dreamed of a melancholy and erudite monster, versed in all idioms, familiar with numbers and souls alike, who would wander the world feeding on poisons, fervors, ecstasies, crossing Persias, Chinas, defunct Indies, and dying Europes- many times I have dreamed of a friend of the poets who would have known them all out of his despair at not being one of them.
Page 124
The dreaming conqueror is the greatest calamity for men; they are no less eager to idolize him, fascinated as they are by distorted projects, ruinous ideals, unhealthy ambitions. No reasonable being was ever the object of worship, left a name, or marked a single event with his individual stamp. Imperturbable before a precise conception or a transparent idol, the mob is roused by the unverifiable, by false mysteries. Who ever died in the name of rigor? Each generation raises monuments to the executioners of the one which preceded it.
Page 128
The man who, liberated from all the principles of custom, lacks any gift as an actor is the archetype of wretchedness, the ideally unhappy being. No use constructing this model of ingenuousness: life is tolerable only by the degree of mystification we endow it with. Such a model would be the immediate rain of society, the "pleasure" of communal life residing in the impossibility of giving free rein to the infinity of our ulterior motives. It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false. No moral hero who is not childish, ineffectual, or inauthentic; for true authenticity is the flaw in fraud, in the proprieties of public flattery and secret defamation. If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an "I" without shame. Masquerade rules all the living, from the troglodyte to the skeptic. Since only the respect for appearances separates us from carrion, it is death to consider the basis of things, of beings; let us abide by a more agreeable nothingness: our constitution tolerates only a certain dosage of truth. . . . Let us keep deep down inside a certitude superior to all the others: life has no meaning, it cannot have any such thing. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unlooked for revelation persuaded us of the contrary. The air gone, we should still breathe; but we should immediately smother if the joy of inanity were taken from us. . . .
Page 132
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
Page 132
Epochs of apogee cultivate values for their own sake: life is only a means of realizing them; the individual is not aware of living, he lives- happy slave of the forms he engenders, tends, and idolizes. Affectivity dominates and fills him. No creation without the resources of "feeling," which are limited; yet for the man who experiences only their wealth, they seem inexhaustible: this illusion produces history. In decadence, affective drying- up permits only two modalities of feeling and understanding: sensation and idea. Now, it is by affectivity that we participate in the world of values, that we project a vitality into categories and norms. The activity of a productive civilization consists in drawing ideas out of their abstract nothingness, in transforming concepts into myths.
Page 133
nation cannot create indefinitely. It is oiled upon to give expression and meaning to a sum of values which are exhausted with the soul which has begotten them. The citizen wakens from a productive hypnosis; the reign of lucidity begins; the masses wield no more than empty categories. Myths turn back into concepts: that is decadence. And the consequences make themselves felt: the individual wants to live, he converts life into finality, he elevates himself to the rank of a minor exception. The ledger of these exceptions, constituting the deficit of a civilization, prefigures its effacement.
Page 134
A nation dies when it no longer has the strength to invent new gods, new myths, new absurdities; its idols blur and vanish; it seeks them elsewhere, and feels alone before unknown monsters. This too is decadence. But if one of these monsters prevails, another world sets itself in motion, crude, dim, intolerant, until it exhausts its god and emancipates itself from him; for man is free- and sterile- only in the interval when the gods die; slave- and creative- only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.
Page 138
Prejudice is an organic truth, false in itself but accumulated by generations and transmitted: we cannot rid ourselves of it with impunity. The nation that renounces it heedlessly will then renounce itself until it has nothing left to give up. The duration of a collectivity and its consistency coincide with the duration and consistency of its prejudices.
Page 140
The mistake of those who apprehend decadence is to try to oppose it whereas it must be encouraged: by developing it exhausts itself and permits the advent of other forms. The true harbinger is not the man who offers a system when no one wants it, but rather the man who precipitates Chaos, its agent and incense- bearer.
Page 141
The sum of phenomena- whether fruits of the mind or of time- can be embraced or denied according to our mood of the moment: arguments, proceeding from our rigor or from our whims, are of equal weight on each point. Nothing is indefensible- from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime. The history of ideas, like that of deeds, unfolds in a meaningless climate; who could in good faith find an arbiter who would settle the litigations of these anemic or bloodthirsty gorillas?
Page 144
If, by accident or miracle, words were to disappear, we should be plunged into an intolerable anguish and stupor. Such sudden dumbness would expose us to the crudest torment. It is the use of concepts which makes us masters of our fears. We say: Death- and this abstraction releases us from experiencing its infinity, its horror. By baptizing events and things, we elude the Inexplicable: the mind's activity is a salutary deception, a conjuring trick; it allows us to circulate in a tempered reality, comfortable and inexact.
Page 144
The grand expressions- fate, misfortune, disgrace- lose their luster; and it is then that we see the creature at grips with failing organs, vanquished under a prostrate and dumbfounded substance. Take the lie of Misery away from man, give him the power to look under this word: he cannot, for one moment, endure his misery. It is abstraction, sonorities without content, swollen and dilapidated, which have kept him from foundering, and not his religions and instincts.
Page 146
By what is "profound" in us, we are victims of every evil: no salvation so long as we still conform to our being. Something must disappear from our composition, some deadly spring dry up; hence there is only one way out: to abolish the soul, its aspirations and abysses; our dreams were poisoned by it; we must extirpate it, along with its craving for "depth," its "inner" fruitfulness, and its other aberrations. The mind and sensation will suffice; their concourse will beget a discipline of sterility which will preserve us from enthusiasm, from anguish. Let no "feeling" disturb us ever again, and let the "soul" become the silliest of desuetudes. . . .
Page 150
The hatred of the "race" and of its "genius" relates you to murderers, to madmen, to divinities, and to all the great forms of the sterile. Starting from a certain degree of solitude, you must leave off loving and committing the fascinating pollution of intercourse. The man who wants to perpetuate himself at any price is scarcely to be distinguished from the dog: he is still nature; he will never understand that we can endure the empire of the instincts and rebel against them, enjoy the advantages of the species and scorn them: end of the line- with appetites. . . . That is the conflict of the man who worships and abominates woman, supremely torn between the attraction and disgust she inspires. Hence, unable to renounce the race altogether, he resolves this conflict by dreaming, on her breast, of the desert and by mingling the scent of the cloisters with the stench of over- explicit sweat. The insincerities of the flesh bring him closer to the saints. . . .
Page 153
Of all the great sufferers, the saints are best at profiting from their sickness. Willful, unbridled natures, they exploit their own disequilibrium with violence and skill. The Savior, their model, was an example of ambition and audacity, a matchless conqueror: his insinuating force, his power to identify himself with the soul's flaws and insufficiencies allowed him to establish a kingdom beyond the reach of any mere sword. Ardent with method: it is this ability which was imitated by those who took him for their ideal.
Page 154
From the sage's viewpoint, there can be no one more impure than the saint; from the saint's, no one emptier than the sage. Here we have the whole difference between the man who understands and the man who aspires.
Page 156
Life is the site of my infatuations: everything I wrest from indifference I give back almost at once. This is not the saints' method: they choose once and for all. I live in order to leave off whatever I love; they, in order to commit themselves to a single object; I savor eternity, they sink themselves into it.
Page 158
Health: decisive weapon against religion Invent the universal elixir: the heavens will vanish and never return. No use seducing man by other ideals: they will be weaker than diseases God is our rust, the gradual decay of our substance: when He penetrates us, we think we are elevated, but we descend lower and lower; having reached our end, He crowns our collapse, and so we are "saved" forever. Sinister superstition, haloed cancer which has eaten away the earth for ages. . . . I hate all gods; I am not healthy enough to scorn them. That is the Indifferent Man's great humiliation.
Page 159
In vain you search for your model among human beings; from those who have gone farther than you, you have borrowed only the compromising and harmful aspect: from the sage, sloth; from the saint, incoherence; from the aesthete, rancor; from the poet, profligacy- and from all, disagreement with yourself, ambiguity in everyday things and hatred for what lives simply to live.
Page 161
I am in a good mood: God is good; I am sullen: God is wicked; I am indifferent: He is neutral. My states confer upon Him corresponding attributes: when I love knowledge, He is omniscient, and when I worship power, omnipotent. When things seem to me to exist, He exists; when they seem illusory, He evaporates. A thousand arguments sustain Him, and a thousand destroy; if my enthusiasms animate Him, my sulks smother Him. We cannot form a more variable image: we fear Him as a monster and crush him like a worm; we idolize Him: He is Being; repel Him: He is Nothingness. Were Prayer to supplant Gravity, it would scarcely assure His universal duration: He would still remain at the mercy of our moments. His fate has decided that He be unchangeable only in the eyes of the naive or the retarded. Scrutiny reveals Him: useless cause, meaningless absolute, patron of dolts, pastime of solitaries, straw or specter according to whether he amuses our mind or haunts our fevers.
Page 162
To think of God, to seek Him, to invoke or to endure Him- movements of a disordered body and a defeated mind! The nobly superficial ages- the Renaissance, the eighteenth century- scorned religion, dismissed its rudimentary frolics. But alas! There is a plebeian melancholy in us which darkens our fervors and our concepts. Vainly we dream of a lace universe; God, product of our depths, our gangrene, profanes this dream of beauty.
Page 162
Endlessly harping on the "why" and the "how"; tracing the Cause, and all causes, on the slightest pretext- denotes a disorder of the functions and faculties which ends in a "metaphysical delirium"-senility of the abyss, downfall of anguish, ultimate ugliness of the mysteries. .. .
Page 163
Divagations in a Monastery For the unbeliever, infatuated with waste and dispersion, there is no spectacle more disturbing than these ruminants of the absolute. . . . Where do they find such pertinacity in the unverifiable, so much attention in the vague, and so much ardor to apprehend it as well? I share neither their certitudes nor their serenity. They are happy, and I blame them for being so. If at least they hated themselves! but they prize their "soul" more than the universe; this false evaluation is the source of sacrifices and renunciations of an imposing absurdity Whereas our experiences have neither sequence nor system, being at the mercy of chance and our moods, they have but one experience, always the same, of a monotony and a profundity which are profoundly disheartening. It is true that God is its object; but what interest can they still take in Him? Always equal to Himself, infinitely of the same nature, He never renews Himself; I could reflect upon Him in passing, but to fill the hours with Him! . . .
Page 165
How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your Kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets. You are the damper of our flames and our rebellions, the fire hose of our fevers, the superintendent of our senilities. Even before relegating You to a formula, I trampled Your arcana, scorned Your tricks and all those artifices which produce Your toilette of the Inexplicable. You have generously endowed me with the gall Your pity spared Your slaves. Since there is no rest but in the shadow of Your nullity, the brute finds salvation by just handing himself over to You or Your counterfeits. I don't know which is more pitiable, Your acolytes or myself: we all derive straight from Your incompetence: pitch, patch, hodgepodge- syllables of the Creation, of Your blundering. . . .
Page 167
Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves "advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge- if it is profound- never changes: only its decor varies.
Page 169
All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs- modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable- and fragile.
Page 169
We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments.
Page 170
History is irony on the move, the Mind's jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices.
Page 171
That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities.
Page 173
I no longer remember how I happened to become the recipient of this confidence: "Possessing not property, projects, or even memories, I have given over future and philosophy alike, owning merely a cot on which to unlearn the sun and sighs. I remain stretched out there, and spin out the hours; around me, utensils, objects which suggest suicide, every one. The nail whispers: stick me through your heart, the trickle of blood need not alarm you. The knife insinuates: my blade is infallible; one second's decision and you have triumphed over misery and shame. The window opens of its own accord, creaking in the silence: you share the city's heights with the poor; fling yourself out, my overture is a generous one; in the wink of an eye, you will land on the pavement with the meaning- or the meaninglessness- of life in your grasp. And a rope coils as though around some ideal neck, borrowing the tone of a suppliant power: I have been waiting for you forever, I have watched your terrors, your struggles, and your rages, I have seen your rumpled sheets, the pillow where your fury gnawed, as I have heard the swearwords with which you gratified the gods. Charitable, I sympathize and offer my services. For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair."
Page 174
Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal; so that those obsessed by frivolity prefigure authentically tormented minds. The superficial idler, haunted by the specter of age, is closer to Pascal, Bossuet, or Chateaubriand than a savant quite unconcerned with himself.
Page 175
Thus the most terrible and the most futile sufferings are begotten by that crushed pride which, in order to face up to Nothingness, transforms it, out of revenge, into Law.
Page 177
Since for you there is no ultimate criterion nor irrevocable principle, and no god, what keeps you from committing any and every crime? "I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action- mother of all the vices- 1 am the cause of no one's suffering. Harmless, without greed, and without enough energy or indecency to affront others, I leave the world as ! found it. To take revenge presupposes a constant vigilance and a systematic mind, a costly continuity, whereas the indifference of forgiveness and contempt renders the hours pleasantly empty. All ethics represent a danger for goodness; only negligence rescues it. Having chosen the phlegm of the imbecile and the apathy of the angel, I have excluded myself from actions and, since goodness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to be good."
Page 179
Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.
Page 182
There is more wisdom in letting yourself be carried by the waves than in struggling against them. Posthumous to myself, I remember Time as a kind of child's play or a lapse of taste. Without desires, without the hours in which to make them bloom, I have only the assurance of having always outlived myself, a fetus devoured by an omniscient idiocy even before his eyelids opened, and stillborn of lucidity. . . .
Page 186
Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves A touch of lucidity in the "heart" makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my "neighbor" it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer "myself" if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it.
Page 187
Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life. we can endure the empire of the instincts and rebel against them, enjoy the advantages of the species and scorn them: end of the line- with appetites. . . . That is the conflict of the man who worships and abominates woman, supremely torn between the attraction and disgust she inspires. Hence, unable to renounce the race altogether, he resolves this conflict by dreaming, on her breast, of the desert and by mingling the scent of the cloisters with the stench of over- explicit sweat. The insincerities of the flesh bring him closer to the saints. . . .
Page 153
Of all the great sufferers, the saints are best at profiting from their sickness. Willful, unbridled natures, they exploit their own disequilibrium with violence and skill. The Savior, their model, was an example of ambition and audacity, a matchless conqueror: his insinuating force, his power to identify himself with the soul's flaws and insufficiencies allowed him to establish a kingdom beyond the reach of any mere sword. Ardent with method: it is this ability which was imitated by those who took him for their ideal.
Page 154
From the sage's viewpoint, there can be no one more impure than the saint; from the saint's, no one emptier than the sage. Here we have the whole difference between the man who understands and the man who aspires.
Page 156
Life is the site of my infatuations: everything I wrest from indifference I give back almost at once. This is not the saints' method: they choose once and for all. I live in order to leave off whatever I love; they, in order to commit themselves to a single object; I savor eternity, they sink themselves into it.
Page 158
Health: decisive weapon against religion Invent the universal elixir: the heavens will vanish and never return. No use seducing man by other ideals: they will be weaker than diseases God is our rust, the gradual decay of our substance: when He penetrates us, we think we are elevated, but we descend lower and lower; having reached our end, He crowns our collapse, and so we are "saved" forever. Sinister superstition, haloed cancer which has eaten away the earth for ages. . . . I hate all gods; I am not healthy enough to scorn them. That is the Indifferent Man's great humiliation.
Page 159
In vain you search for your model among human beings; from those who have gone farther than you, you have borrowed only the compromising and harmful aspect: from the sage, sloth; from the saint, incoherence; from the aesthete, rancor; from the poet, profligacy- and from all, disagreement with yourself, ambiguity in everyday things and hatred for what lives simply to live.
Page 161
I am in a good mood: God is good; I am sullen: God is wicked; I am indifferent: He is neutral. My states confer upon Him corresponding attributes: when I love knowledge, He is omniscient, and when I worship power, omnipotent. When things seem to me to exist, He exists; when they seem illusory, He evaporates. A thousand arguments sustain Him, and a thousand destroy; if my enthusiasms animate Him, my sulks smother Him. We cannot form a more variable image: we fear Him as a monster and crush him like a worm; we idolize Him: He is Being; repel Him: He is Nothingness. Were Prayer to supplant Gravity, it would scarcely assure His universal duration: He would still remain at the mercy of our moments. His fate has decided that He be unchangeable only in the eyes of the naive or the retarded. Scrutiny reveals Him: useless cause, meaningless absolute, patron of dolts, pastime of solitaries, straw or specter according to whether he amuses our mind or haunts our fevers.
Page 162
To think of God, to seek Him, to invoke or to endure Him- movements of a disordered body and a defeated mind! The nobly superficial ages- the Renaissance, the eighteenth century- scorned religion, dismissed its rudimentary frolics. But alas! There is a plebeian melancholy in us which darkens our fervors and our concepts. Vainly we dream of a lace universe; God, product of our depths, our gangrene, profanes this dream of beauty.
Page 162
Endlessly harping on the "why" and the "how"; tracing the Cause, and all causes, on the slightest pretext- denotes a disorder of the functions and faculties which ends in a "metaphysical delirium"-senility of the abyss, downfall of anguish, ultimate ugliness of the mysteries. .. .
Page 163
Divagations in a Monastery For the unbeliever, infatuated with waste and dispersion, there is no spectacle more disturbing than these ruminants of the absolute. . . . Where do they find such pertinacity in the unverifiable, so much attention in the vague, and so much ardor to apprehend it as well? I share neither their certitudes nor their serenity. They are happy, and I blame them for being so. If at least they hated themselves! but they prize their "soul" more than the universe; this false evaluation is the source of sacrifices and renunciations of an imposing absurdity Whereas our experiences have neither sequence nor system, being at the mercy of chance and our moods, they have but one experience, always the same, of a monotony and a profundity which are profoundly disheartening. It is true that God is its object; but what interest can they still take in Him? Always equal to Himself, infinitely of the same nature, He never renews Himself; I could reflect upon Him in passing, but to fill the hours with Him! . . .
Page 165
How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! Hating You, I have escaped the sugar mills of Your Kingdom, the twaddle of Your puppets. You are the damper of our flames and our rebellions, the fire hose of our fevers, the superintendent of our senilities. Even before relegating You to a formula, I trampled Your arcana, scorned Your tricks and all those artifices which produce Your toilette of the Inexplicable. You have generously endowed me with the gall Your pity spared Your slaves. Since there is no rest but in the shadow of Your nullity, the brute finds salvation by just handing himself over to You or Your counterfeits. I don't know which is more pitiable, Your acolytes or myself: we all derive straight from Your incompetence: pitch, patch, hodgepodge- syllables of the Creation, of Your blundering. . . .
Page 167
Our truths are worth no more than those of our ancestors. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves "advanced"; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. The Tree of Life, the Serpent, Eve, and Paradise signify as much as Life, Knowledge, Temptation, Unconsciousness. The concrete figurations of good and evil in mythology go as far as the Good and Evil of ethics. Knowledge- if it is profound- never changes: only its decor varies.
Page 169
All means and methods of knowing are valid: reasoning, intuition, disgust, enthusiasm, lamentation. A vision of the world propped on concepts is no more legitimate than another which proceeds from tears, arguments, or sighs- modalities equally probing and equally vain. I construct a form of universe; I believe in it, and it is the universe, which collapses nonetheless under the assault of another certitude or another doubt. The merest illiterate and Aristotle are equally irrefutable- and fragile.
Page 169
We do not find more rigor in philosophy than in poetry, nor in the mind than in the heart; rigor exists only so long as we identify ourself with the principle or thing which we confront or endure; from outside, everything is arbitrary: reasons and sentiments.
Page 170
History is irony on the move, the Mind's jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted it will follow it in its defeat Then comes another generation: the old belief is revived; its demolished monuments are reconstructed . . . until they perish yet again. No immutable principle rules the favors and severities of fate: their succession participates in the huge farce of the Mind, which identifies, in its play, impostors and enthusiasts, ardors and devices.
Page 171
That History has no meaning is what should delight our hearts. Should we be tormenting ourselves for a happy solution to process, for a final festival paid for by nothing but our sweat, our disasters? for future idiots exulting over our labors, frolicking on our ashes? The vision of a paradisiac conclusion transcends, in its absurdity, the worst divagations of hope. All we can offer in excuse for Time is that in it we find some moments more profitable than others, accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities.
Page 173
I no longer remember how I happened to become the recipient of this confidence: "Possessing not property, projects, or even memories, I have given over future and philosophy alike, owning merely a cot on which to unlearn the sun and sighs. I remain stretched out there, and spin out the hours; around me, utensils, objects which suggest suicide, every one. The nail whispers: stick me through your heart, the trickle of blood need not alarm you. The knife insinuates: my blade is infallible; one second's decision and you have triumphed over misery and shame. The window opens of its own accord, creaking in the silence: you share the city's heights with the poor; fling yourself out, my overture is a generous one; in the wink of an eye, you will land on the pavement with the meaning- or the meaninglessness- of life in your grasp. And a rope coils as though around some ideal neck, borrowing the tone of a suppliant power: I have been waiting for you forever, I have watched your terrors, your struggles, and your rages, I have seen your rumpled sheets, the pillow where your fury gnawed, as I have heard the swearwords with which you gratified the gods. Charitable, I sympathize and offer my services. For you were born to hang yourself, like all those who disdain an answer to their doubts or an escape to their despair."
Page 174
Every metaphysic begins with an anguish of the body, which then becomes universal; so that those obsessed by frivolity prefigure authentically tormented minds. The superficial idler, haunted by the specter of age, is closer to Pascal, Bossuet, or Chateaubriand than a savant quite unconcerned with himself.
Page 175
Thus the most terrible and the most futile sufferings are begotten by that crushed pride which, in order to face up to Nothingness, transforms it, out of revenge, into Law.
Page 177
Since for you there is no ultimate criterion nor irrevocable principle, and no god, what keeps you from committing any and every crime? "I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action- mother of all the vices- 1 am the cause of no one's suffering. Harmless, without greed, and without enough energy or indecency to affront others, I leave the world as ! found it. To take revenge presupposes a constant vigilance and a systematic mind, a costly continuity, whereas the indifference of forgiveness and contempt renders the hours pleasantly empty. All ethics represent a danger for goodness; only negligence rescues it. Having chosen the phlegm of the imbecile and the apathy of the angel, I have excluded myself from actions and, since goodness is incompatible with life, I have decomposed myself in order to be good."
Page 179
Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.
Page 182
There is more wisdom in letting yourself be carried by the waves than in struggling against them. Posthumous to myself, I remember Time as a kind of child's play or a lapse of taste. Without desires, without the hours in which to make them bloom, I have only the assurance of having always outlived myself, a fetus devoured by an omniscient idiocy even before his eyelids opened, and stillborn of lucidity. . . .
Page 186
Everything dissolves under the searching eye: passions, long attachments, ardors are the characteristic of simple minds, faithful to others and to themselves A touch of lucidity in the "heart" makes it the seat of feigned feelings and turns the lover into Adolphe and the discontent into René. Loving, we do not examine love; acting, we do not meditate upon action; if I study my "neighbor" it is because he has ceased to be my neighbor, and I am no longer "myself" if I analyze myself: I become an object along with all the rest. The believer who weighs his faith ends by putting God in the scales, and safeguards his fervor only out of fear of losing it.
Page 187
Everything we do not participate in seems unreasonable; but those who move cannot fail to advance, whereas the observer, whichever way he turns, registers their futile triumph only to excuse his own defeat. This is because there is life only in the inattention to life.