Be Still, and Be Still

I. It is because it rests on nothing, because it lacks even the shadow of an argument that we persevere in life. Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown.
     By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the great Unknown.
     Where can so much Void and Incomprehensibility lead? We cling to the days because the desire to die is too logical, hence ineffective. If life had a single argument in its favor — distinct, indisputable — it would annihilate itself; instincts and prejudices collapse at the contact of Rigor. Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence....
— E. M. Cioran, from "Variations on Death, in PART I: "Directions for Decomposition," in A Short History of Decay, pp. 10-11.

....Each suffering, except ours, seems to us legitimate or absurdly intelligible; otherwise, mourning would be the unique constant in the versatility of our sentiments. But we wear only the mourning of ourselves. If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings. And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our present pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden. Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.
— E. M. Cioran, from "The Key to Our Endurance," in Ibid., p. 26.

     (The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the "will to live," in "idea," or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtile displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our inmost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moments. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.
     We define only out of despair. We must have a formula, we must even have many, if only to give justification to the mind and a façade to the void.
     Neither concept not ecstasy are functional. When music plunges us into the "inwardness" of being, we rapidly return to the surface: the effects of the illusion scatter and our knowledge admits its nullity.
     The things we touch and those we conceive are as improbable as our senses and our reason; we are sure only in our verbal universe, manageable at will — and ineffectual. Being is mute and the mind is garrulous. This is called knowing.
     The philosophers originality comes down to inventing terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world — and about as many ways of dying — the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range.
     We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.)
— E. M. Cioran, from "Farewell to Philosophy," in Ibid., pp. 48-49.

....Since the most eloquent decadences edify us no further as to unhappiness than the stammerings of a shepherd, and ultimately there is more wisdom in the mockery of an idiot than in the investigations of the laboratories, is it not madness to pursue truth on the paths of time — or in books? Lao-tse, reduced to a few texts, is not more naïve than we who have read everything. Profundity is independent of knowledge. We translate to other levels the revelations of the ages, or we exploit original intuitions by the latest acquisitions of thought. Thus Hegel is a Heraclitus who has read Kant; and our Ennui is an affective Eleaticism, the fiction of diversity unmasked and exposed to the heart....
— E. M. Cioran, from "Return to the Elements," in Ibid., p. 50.