Author Topic: Trouble with Being Cioran  (Read 14466 times)

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Exercise of Insubmission
« on: February 21, 2016, 08:02:54 pm »
Exercise of Insubmission

by E.M. Cioran

“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…”

“Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? Wherever something breathes there is one more infirmity: no palpitation which fails to confirm the disadvantage of being; the flesh horrifies me: these men, these women, offal that moans by the grace of certain spasms; no more relationship with the planet: each moment is merely a vote in the urn of my despair.

What does it matter, whether Your works leave off or continue! Your subalterns cannot complete what You ventured without genius. From the blindness into which You plunged them, they will emerge nonetheless, but will they have the strength to take revenge, and will You to defend yourself? This race is rusty, and You even rustier. Turning toward Your Enemy, I await the day when he will pilfer Your sun to hang it in another universe.”

-E.M. Cioran. From A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard.

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« Last Edit: February 22, 2016, 03:03:26 pm by H »
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