The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

Tsimtsum. This silly-sounding word designates a major concept of the Cabbala. For the world to exist, God, who was everything and everywhere, consented to shrink, to leave a vacant space not inhabited by Himself: it is in this “hole” that the world occurred.

In the “Gospel According to the Egyptians,” Jesus proclaims: “Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.” And he specifies: “I am come to destroy the works of woman.”

Once we step into a cemetery, a feeling of utter mockery does away with any metaphysical concern. Those who look for “mystery” everywhere do not necessarily get to the bottom of things.

“He who is inclined to lust is merciful and tender-hearted; those who are inclined to purity are not so” (Saint John Climacus).

Ishi, the last American Indian of his tribe, after hiding for years in terror of the White Men, reduced to starvation, surrendered of his own free will to the exterminators of his people, believing that the same treatment was in store for himself. He was made much of. He had no posterity, he was truly the last. Once humanity is destroyed or simply extinguished, we may imagine a sole survivor who would wander the earth, without even having anyone to surrender to.

Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, larger phenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease of time; life, again, a disease of matter.

Only false values prevail, because everyone can assimilate them, counterfeit them (false thereby to the second degree). An idea that succeeds is necessarily a pseudo-idea.

My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.

The further man proceeds, the less he is in a position to solve his problems, and when, at the apex of his blindness, he will be convinced he is on the point of success, then the unheard-of will occur.

With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.

The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.

What we call the creative instinct is merely a deviation, merely a perversion of our nature: we have not been brought into the world in order to innovate, to revolutionize, but to enjoy our semblance of being, in order to liquidate it quietly and to vanish afterward without a fuss.

When we have committed the folly of confiding a secret to someone, the only way of being sure he will keep it to himself is to kill him on the spot.

In periods of sterility, one should hibernate, sleep day and night to preserve one’s strength, instead of wasting it in mortification and rage.

The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.

I was alone in that cemetery overlooking the village when a pregnant woman came in. I left at once, in order not to look at this corpse-bearer at close range, nor to ruminate upon the contrast between an aggressive womb and the time-worn tombs—between a false promise and the end of all promises.

Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing.

If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains?—and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!

According to the Cabbala, God created souls at the beginning, and they were all before him in the form they would later take in their incarnation. Each soul, when its time has come, receives the order to join the body destined for it, but each to no avail implores its Creator to spare it this bondage and this corruption.

I have never known a single sensation of fulfillment, of true happiness, without thinking that it was the moment when—now or never—I should disappear for good.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our consciousness.

Each time you find yourself at a turning-point, the best thing is to lie down and let the hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.

Man certainly began praying long before he knew how to speak, for the pangs he must have suffered upon leaving animality, upon denying it, could not have been endured without grunts and groans, prefigurations, premonitory signs of prayer.

In art and in everything, the commentator is generally better informed and more lucid than the subject of commentary. This is the advantage the murderer has over his victim.

When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the “dream” he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.

When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit. It is liberation, supreme impasse.

Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his “survivor” phase, he fidgets as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.

A writer has left his mark on us not because we have read him a great deal but because we have thought of him more than is warranted.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

Walking in a forest between two hedges of ferns transfigured by autumn—that is a triumph. What are ovations and applause beside it?

“Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”

“Life seems good only to the madman,” observed Hegesias, a Cyrenaic philosopher, some twenty-three centuries ago.

To think is to undermine—to undermine oneself. Action involves fewer risks, for it fills the interval between things and ourselves, whereas reflection dangerously widens it.

From the moment defeat was in sight, Hitler spoke of nothing but victory. He believed in it—he behaved, in any case, as if he believed in it—and remained to the end walled up in his optimism, his faith. Everything was crumbling around him, every day belied his hopes but, persisting in his trust in the impossible, blinding himself as only the incurable can, he had the strength to go on to the end, to invent one horror after the next, and to continue beyond his madness, even beyond his destiny.

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything . . . Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything. . . . Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

Our first intuitions are the true ones. What I thought of so many things in my first youth seems to me increasingly right, and after so many detours and distractions, I now come back to it, aggrieved that I could have erected my existence on the ruin of those revelations.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

If I am so fond of Dostoevsky’s correspondence, it is because he speaks in it of nothing but sickness and money, the only “burning” subjects. All the rest is merely flourishes and chaff.

In five hundred thousand years, it appears that England will be entirely submerged. If I were an Englishman I should lay down my arms at once.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

A man who survives himself despises himself without acknowledging as much, sometimes without even knowing as much.

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer.

Only to the degree that our moments afford us some contact with death do we have some chance to glimpse on what insanity all existence is based.

In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.