A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . But that is the point, maybe, he talks of suicide and that life itself is a waste, and yet he goes on living?

The man who has not given himself up to the pleasures of anguish, who has not savored in his mind the dangers of his own extinction nor relished such cruel and sweet annihilations, will never be cured of the obsession with death: he will be tormented by it, for he will have resisted it; while the man who, habituated to a discipline of horror, and meditating upon his own carrion, has deliberately reduced himself to ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be merely a resurrected being who can no longer live. Whether he is an angel that has lost his wings or an ape that has lost his hair, he has been able to leave the anonymity of creatures only by the eclipses of his health. In terms of essays themselves the books is split into six groups of essays or in the case of section five a single essay (part 1 accounts for about half the book). This is a really good quality print just what I'm looking for in paperbacks, in fact the quality of this paperback is better than some of my hard covers.Okay, I bought this and another of his work due to a nihilistic Romanian author who wrote about death and satanic metal fans. Whereas the animals proceed directly to their goal, man loses himself in detours; he is the indirect animal par excellence. Though his books are well-regarded today, and though he received many literary prizes for them (nearly all of which he refused), Cioran always held the worlds of literature and philosophy at arm’s length.

Because he overflows with life, the Devil has no altar: man recognizes himself too readily in him to worship him; he detests him for good reason; he repudiates himself, and maintains the indigent attributes of God. He was briefly pro-Nazi and Hitler, before recanted his views with fury and passion, and that led him to question individual involvement in history. It is no less unreasonable to grant more interest to the arguments around democracy and its forms than to those which took place, in the Middle Ages, around nominalism and realism: each period is intoxicated by an absolute, minor and tiresome but in appearance unique; we cannot avoid being contemporaries of a faith, of a system, of an ideology, cannot avoid being, in short, of our time.Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration.

If such a Being really existed, if our weaknesses vanquished our resolutions and our depths our deliberations, then why go on thinking, since our difficulties would be settled, our questions suspended, and our fears allayed?Like Nietzsche, Cioran is intent on exposing the hypocrisies of the human condition; but unlike Nietzsche, Cioran never once offers a way out, a new horizon, or even words of inspiration. And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our past pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden. Books by him: History and Utopia (1960), The Fall into Time (1964), The Trouble with being Born (1973), Exercices d’admiration (1986). In 1937, Cioran left his native country of Romania for Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life.

But we could not exist one second without deceiving ourselves: the prophet in each of us is just the seed of madness which makes us flourish in our void. How define the virus which, eroding his somnolence, has stunned him with insomnia among the universal siesta? When our convictions seem the fruit of a frivolous lunacy, how tolerate other people’s passions for themselves and for their own multiplication in each day’s utopia? Under each formula lies a corpse: being and object alike die under the pretext they have occasioned. What are his undertakings but trifles, and is the feverish symmetry of his concerns any better built than an architecture of twaddle?A Short History of Decay is a 2013 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Michael Maren. Who, with the exact vision of his nullity, would try to be effective and to turn himself into a savior? The illusion that we and our world are fine and dandy and will continue to be fine and dandy must be maintained at all costs.