«Foreshortened Confession» & «Rereading…» – CIORAN

Foreshortened Confession[Confession en raccourci] I WANT TO WRITE only in an explosive state, in a fever or under great nervous tension, in an atmosphere of settling accounts, where invectives replace blows and slaps. It usually begins this way: a faint trembling that becomes stronger and stronger, as after an insult one has swallowed without responding.…

“Passeio sobre a circunferência” – CIORAN

No interior do círculo que encerra os seres em uma comunidade de interesses e de esperança, o espírito inimigo das miragens abre um caminho do centro à periferia. Não pode escutar de perto o rebuliço dos humanos; quer contemplar de tão longe quanto seja possível a simetria maldita que os une. Vê mártires por toda…

“Thinking against oneself” – CIORAN

ALMOST all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us—it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as…

“The Model Traitor” – CIORAN

Since life can be fulfilled only within individuation—that last bastion of solitude—each being is necessary alone by the fact that he is an individual. Yet all individuals are not alone in the same way nor with the same intensity: each occupies a different rank in the hierarchy of solitude; at one extreme stands the traitor:…

“The temptation to exist” (essay) – CIORAN

For centuries theologians have told us that hope is the daughter of patience. And of modesty as well, one might add; the man of pride has no time for hope … Unwilling and unable to wait for their culmination, he violates events as much as he violates his own nature; bitter, tainted, when he exhausts…

“The oldest fear: apropos of Tolstoy” – CIORAN

NATURE has been generous to none but those she has dispensed from thinking about death. The others she has condemned to the oldest fear and the most corrosive one, without offering or even suggesting a means of recovery. If it is normal to die, it is not so to dally over death nor to think…

« La peur : courant psychique qui traverse la matière autant pour la vivifier que pour la désorganiser » – CIORAN

Le malaise même qu’il [Adam] éprouvait au milieu du paradis n’était peut-être qu’une peur virtuelle, début, ébauche d’« âme ». Nul moyen de vivre à la fois dans l’innocence et la peur, surtout quand cette dernière est soif de tourments, ouverture vers le funeste, convoitise d’inconnu. Nous cultivons le frisson en soi, nous escomptons le nuisible, le…

“To commit horrors and to conceive horror are two irreducible actions” – CIORAN

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our own secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us. When we have no further illusions about ourselves, we retain none about others; the unspeakable that we discover by introspection we extend, by a legitimate generalization, to other mortals; depraved in their essence,…

“Odyssey of Rancor” – CIORAN

We spend the prime of our sleepless nights in mentally mangling our enemies, rending their entrails, wringing their veins, trampling each organ to mush and charitably leaving them the skeleton to enjoy. Whereupon we forbear, overcome by fatigue, and drop off to sleep. A well-earned rest after so much scruple, so much zeal. Moreover we…

“Os novos deuses” – CIORAN

Quem se interessa pelo desfile das ideias e crenças irredutíveis deveria deter-se no espetáculo que oferecem os primeiros séculos de nossa era: encontraria ali o modelo de todas as formas de conflito que se encontram, de forma atenuada, em qualquer momento da história. Isso é compreensível: é a época em que mais se odiou. O…