Every childbirth is suspect: the angels, luckily, are unsuited to it, the propagation of life being reserved to the fallen. The plague is impatient and greedy; it loves to spread. There is every reason to discourage generation, for the fear of seeing humanity die out has no basis: whatever happens, there will everywhere be enough fools who ask only to perpetuate themselves, and, if they themselves end by flinching from the task, there will always be found, to devote themselves to the cause, some hideous couple. . . .
It is not so much the appetite for life that is to be opposed as the lust for lineage. Parents—genitors—are provocateurs or mad. What could be more demoralizing than the fact that the worst freak should have the faculty of giving life, of “bringing into the world?” How contemplate without dread or repulsion the wonder that makes the first man in the street a demiurge on the brink? What should be a gift as exceptional as genius has been conferred indiscriminately upon all: a liberality of base coinage which forever disqualifies nature.
The criminal injunction of Genesis—“Be fruitful and multiply . . .”—could never have come out of the mouth of the Good Lord. “Be ye rare,” He would have suggested, surely, if He had had any say in the matter. Nor could He ever have added the fatal words: “. . . and replenish the earth.” They should be erased without delay, in order to cleanse the Bible of the shame of having garnered them.
The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts. Normally, the flesh should be less harmful to those who contemplate it than to those who extend its duration and assure its progress. Far from it, for they do not know what aberration it is that they are accomplices of. Pregnant women will some day be stoned to death, the maternal instinct proscribed, sterility acclaimed. It is with good reason that in the sects which held fecundity in suspicion—the Bogomils, for instance, and the Cathari—marriage was condemned; that abominable institution which all societies have always protected, to the despair despair of those who do not yield to the common delirium. To procreate is to love the scourge—to seek to maintain and to augment it. They were right, those ancient philosophers who identified fire with the principle of the universe, and with desire, for desire burns, devours, annihilates: At once agent and destroyer of beings, it is sombre, it is infernal by essence.
This world was not created in joy. Yet we procreate in pleasure. True enough—but pleasure is not joy, it is joy’s simulacrum: its function consists in deceiving, in making us forget that creation bears, down to its least detail, the mark of that initial melancholy from which it issued. Necessarily illusory, it is pleasure too which permits us to carry out certain performances which in theory we repudiate. Without its cooperation, continence, gaining ground, would seduce even the rats. But it is in what we call the transports of the flesh that we understand how fraudulent pleasure is. In the flesh, pleasure reaches its peak, its maximum intensity, and it is here, at the zenith of its success, that it suddenly opens to its unreality, that it collapses in its own void. The voluptuous flesh is the disaster of pleasure.
We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, “evolution” has not managed to perfect another formulaWhy should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment’s oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one reverts to this subject, the more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for **** or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.
Since procreation supposes a nameless distraction, it is certain that if we were to become prudent, in other words indifferent to the fate of the race, we should retain only a few samples, the way we preserve certain creatures of vanishing species. Let us block the way of all flesh, let us try to paralyze its alarming spread. We are in the presence of a veritable epidemic of life, a proliferation of faces. Where and how to remain, still, face-to-face with God?
No one is continually subject to the obsession with this horror. Sometimes we turn from it, almost forget it, especially when we contemplate some landscape from which our own kind is absent. Once they appear there, the obsession returns, settles down in the mind. If we were inclined to absolve the creator, to consider this world as acceptable and even satisfying, we should still have to make certain reservations about man, that blot on the creation.
New Gods (Cioran)
Home
Search
Members
Login
Register