The Trouble with Being Born

by Emil M. Cioran

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.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them. § No need to elaborate works – merely say something that can be murmured in the ear of a drunkard or a dying man.

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

forget to be born.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

After all the ages of dying, the living must have learned the trick; how else explain how the insect, the rodent, and man himself have managed, after a little fuss, to do it so properly?

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.

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.