The Temptation to Exist

by Emil M. Cioran

“Once we have ceased linking our secret life to God, we can ascend to ecstasies as effective as those of the mystics and conquer this world without recourse to the Beyond,”

Faith itself, he argues, solves nothing.

Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. But I cannot not subscribe to it. We can never ponder enough Kirilov’s description of Stavrogin: “When he believes, he doesn’t believe he believes; and when he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe.”

Still to divine the timeless and to know nonetheless that we are time, that we produce time, to conceive the notion of eternity and to cherish our nothingness; an absurdity responsible for both our rebellions and the doubts we entertain about them.

Perhaps then we shall regain our supremacy over time; unless, the other way round, struggling to escape the calamity of consciousness, we rejoin animals, plants, things, return to that primordial stupidity of which, through the fault of history, we have lost even the memory.

Those who have found answers for nothing are better at enduring the effects of tyranny than those who have found an answer for everything.

Today as then, men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb.

Only cruel peoples have the chance to approach the very sources of life, its palpitations, its kindling arcana: life reveals its essence only to eyes inflamed with bloodlust . .

For the minor peoples, how much more tragic the national problem becomes! No sudden expansion here, no gradual decadence either. Without a prop in the future or in the past, they weigh upon themselves: a long sterile meditation is the result. Their evolution cannot be abnormal, for they do not evolve. What is left to them? Resignation to themselves, since, outside, there is all of History from which, precisely, they are excluded. Their nationalism, which we take for a farce, is actually a mask by which they try to hide their own drama and to forget, in a frenzy of claims, their incapacity to graft themselves onto events: painful lies, an exasperated reaction against the scorn they fear to deserve, a way of conjuring away their secret obsession with themselves. In simpler terms: a people which is a torment to itself is a sick people. But whereas Spain suffers for having exited from History, and Russia for seeking, in spite of all opposition, to install herself there, the minor nations struggle in order to have none of these reasons to lose patience or to despair. Cursed with an original flaw, they cannot remedy it by disappointment, or by dreams. Hence they have no other resources than to be haunted by themselves. An obsession not lacking in beauty, since it leads to nothing and interests no one.

Only the illiterate have given me that frisson of being which indicates the presence of truth. Carpathian shepherds have made a much deeper impression upon me than the professors of Germany, the wits of Paris. I have seen Spanish beggars, and I should like to have been their hagiographer. They had no need to invent a life for themselves: they existed; which does not happen in civilization.

Right or wrong, I have come to blame the whole genre for this state of affairs, fastening my fury upon it, seeing in the novel an obstacle to myself, the agent of disintegration—my own and other people’s, too—a stratagem of Time to infiltrate our substance, the final proof that eternity will never be anything more for us than a word and a regret.

What can we seek with psalms and prayers? What can we find? It is out of sloth that we personify our divinity and then appeal to Him.

In normal doses, fear, indispensable to action and thought, stimulates our senses and our mind; without it, no action at all. But when it is excessive, when it invades and overwhelms us, fear is transformed into a harmful principle, into cruelty. A man who trembles dreams of making others tremble, a man who lives in terror ends his days in ferocity. Hence the case of the Roman emperors. Anticipating their own murders, they consoled themselves by massacres . . . The discovery of a first conspiracy awakened and released in them the monster. And it was into cruelty that they withdrew in order to forget fear.

Any obsession seduces him, provided it smothers the demon of his curiosity and immobilizes his mind. Hence he envies all those who, by means of prayer or any other freak, have arrested the course of their thoughts, abdicated the responsibilities of the intellect and encountered, within a temple or a madhouse, the happiness of being through. What would he not give to be able to exult, like them, in the shadow of an error, in the shelter of a stupidity! He will try anything.

Obliged to be everywhere, a slave of His ubiquity, God Himself is a prisoner. Freer, more untrammeled than He, you delight in absence, whose extent you explore at your pleasure: impoverished substance, inaudible sigh, delight in losing the praxis of both life and death.

Entirely independent of our intellectual system, death, like every individual experience, can be confronted only by knowledge without information.

To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer . .