The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.

I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts.

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it,

What are you waiting for in order to give up?’

Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles,

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

It would be far easier for me to live without a trace of belief than without a trace of doubt.

Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us:

the guillotine is merely a decor.

What use was this detour, when we might have remained forever in an unrealized plenitude?

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.