The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape Buddha: “If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world. . . .” And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster.

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.

As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they know they must not be impatient, that it will come sooner or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The disabused man is different: for him, disappointment occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to await it, it is present. By freeing himself from succession, he has devoured the possible and rendered the future superfluous. “I cannot meet you in your future,” he says to the others. “We do not have a single moment in common.” Because for him the whole of the future is already here.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Health is certainly a good thing; but those who possess it have been denied the opportunity of realizing it, for self-conscious health is either compromised or about to be.

X insults me. I am about to hit him. Thinking it over, I refrain. Who am I? which is my real self: the self of the retort or that of the refraining? My first reaction is always energetic; the second one, flabby. What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse. §

If attachment is an evil, we must look for its cause in the scandal of birth, for to be born is to be attached. Detachment then should apply itself to getting rid of the traces of this scandal, the most serious and intolerable of all.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

Violent men are generally sickly, “broken-down.” They live in perpetual combustion, at the expense of their bodies, exactly like ascetics, who in the discipline of quietude erode and exhaust themselves, quite as much as the furious.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.

Nature’s great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one “kingdom”: juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.

The last whose disloyalty we forgive are those we have disappointed.

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.

Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

To be “happy” you must constantly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not.

Philosophy in the Morgue. “My nephew was obviously a failure. If he had succeeded in making something of himself he would have had a different ending than . . . this.” “You know, Madame,” I replied to the monumental matron who had addressed me, “whether one succeeds or not comes down to the same thing.” “You’re right,” she said, after a few seconds’ thought. This unexpected acquiescence on the part of such a woman moved me almost as much as the death of my friend.

Filming a scene, there are countless takes of the same incident. Someone watching in the street—obviously a provincial—can’t get over it: “After this, I’ll never go to the movies again.” One might react similarly with regard to anything whose underside one has seen, whose secret one has seized. Yet, by an obnubilation which has something of the miraculous about it, there are gynecologists who are attracted to their patients, gravediggers who father children, incurables who lay plans, skeptics who write. . . .

A film about wild animals: endless cruelty in every latitude. “Nature,” a torturer of genius, steeped in herself and her work, exults with good reason: there is not a moment when what is alive fails to tremble, to make others tremble. Pity is a strange luxury only the most perfidious and the fiercest creature could invent, out of a need to punish and torture itself—out of ferocity, still.

For a writer, progress toward detachment and deliverance is an unprecedented disaster. He, more than anyone else, needs his defects: if he triumphs over them, he is lost. He must be careful, then, not to improve, for if he succeeds, he will regret it bitterly.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.

Most of our troubles come from our first impulses. The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.

What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

South American Indian who, upon conversion, lamented that he must now become the prey of worms instead of being eaten by his children, an honor he would have enjoyed had he not abjured his tribe’s beliefs.

“My curse on the man who, in future editions of my works, knowingly changes anything—a sentence, or only a word, a syllable, a letter, a punctuation mark!” Is it the philosopher or the writer in Schopenhauer who speaks this way?

At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”

To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve. . . .” I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.

I like to read the way a chorus girl does: identifying myself with the author and the book. Any other attitude makes me think of dissecting corpses.

Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for gladiators.

Gogol, in hopes of a “regeneration,” journeys to Nazareth and discovers he is as bored there as “in a Russian railroad station”—this is what happens to us all when we look outside ourselves for what can exist only inside.

A book is a postponed suicide.

Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.

When I was young, no pleasure compared with the pleasure of making enemies. Now, whenever I make one, my first thought is to be reconciled, so that I won’t have to bother about him. Having enemies is a heavy responsibility. My burden is sufficient, I no longer can carry that of others as well.