Be Still, and Be Still, Part 2

Unknowable, what a man must lose to have the courage to confront the conventions — unknowable what Diogenes lost to become the man who permitted himself everything, who translated his innermost thoughts into actions with a supernatural insolence, like some libidinous yet pure god of knowledge. No one was so frank; a limit case of sincerity and lucidity as well as an example of what we could be if education and hypocrisy did not rein in our desires and our gestures.
     "One day a man invited him into a richly furnished house, saying 'be careful not to spit on the floor.' Diogenes, who needed to spit, spat in his face, exclaiming that it was the only dirty place he could find where spitting was permitted.' — Diogenes Laërtius.
     Who, after being received by a rich man has not longed for oceans of saliva to expectorate on all the owners of the earth? And who has not swallowed his own spittle for fear of casting it in the face of some stout and respected thief?
     We are all absurdly prudent and timid: cynicism is not something we are taught in school. Nor is pride.
     "Menippus, in his work entitled The Virtue of Diogenes, tells how he was captured and sold as a slave, and that he was asked what he knew how to do. Diogenes answered: 'Command!' and shouted to the herald: 'Ask who wants to buy a master?'"
     The man who affronted Alexander and Plato, who masterbated ("If only heaven let us rub our bellies too, and that be enough to stave off hunger!"), the man of famous cask and the famous lantern, and who in his youth was a counterfeiter (what higher dignity for a cynic?), what must his experience have been of his neighbors? Certainly our own, yet with this difference: that man was the sole substance of his reflection and his contempt. Without suffering the falsifications of any ethic and any metaphysic, he strove to strip man in order to show him to us nakeder and more abominable than any comedy, any apocalypse has done.
     "Socrates gone mad," Plato called him — Socrates turned sincere is what he should have said, Socrates renouncing the Good, abjuring formulas and the City, Socrates turning, finally, into a psychologist and nothing more. But Socrates — even sublime — remains conventional; he remains a master, an edifying model. Only Diogenes proposes nothing; the basis of his attitude — and of cynacism in its essence — is determined by a testicular horror of the absurdity of being man.
....Again, according to Diogenes Laërtius: "At the Olympic games, when the herald proclaimed: 'Dioxippus has vanquished men!' Diogenes answered: 'He has vanquished only slaves — men are my business.'"
— E. M. Cioran, from "The 'Celestial Dog'," in A Short History of Decay, "PART I: Directions for Decomposition," pp. 63-64.

     (Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun. Lonelier than You, I want my hands pure, the contrary of Yours which were forever corrupted by kneading the earth and busying themselves with the world's affairs. I ask Your stupid omnipotence for nothing bur respect of my solitude and my torments. What have I to do with Your words? And I fear the madness which would make me hear them. Grant me the miracle gathered before the first moment, the peace which You could not tolerate and which incited You to breach the nothingness in order to make way for this carnival of time, and thereby to condemn me to the universe — to humiliation and the shame of Being.)
— E. M. Cioran, from "The Arrogance of Prayer," in Ibid., pp. 86-87.

     Alexandrianism is a period of skillful negations, a style of inutility and refusal, a display of erudition and sarcasm above the confusion of values and beliefs. Its ideal space would be at the intersection of Hellas and bygone Paris, the meeting place of the agora and the salon. A civilization evolves from agriculture to paradox. Between thease two extremes unfolds the combat of barbarism and neurosis; from it results the unstable equilibrium of creative epochs. This combat is approaching its close: all horizons are opening without any being able to excite an exhausted and disabused curiosity. It is then up to the enlightened individual to flourish in the void — up to the intellectual vampire to slake his thirst on the vitiated blood of civilizations.
     Must we take history seriously, or stand on the sidelines as a spectator? Are we to see it as a struggle toward a goal or the celebration of a light which intensifies and fades with neither necessity nor reason? The answer depends on our degree of illusion about man, on our curiosity to divine the way in which will be resolved that mixture of waltz and slaughterhouse which composes and stimulates his becoming.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Faces of Decadence," in A Short History of Decay, "PART II: The Second-Hand Thinker," p. 116.

     Having passed through so many lungs, the air no longer renews itself. Every day vomits up its tomorrow, and I vainly try to imagine the image of a single desire. Everything is an ordeal: broken down like a beast of burden harnessed to Matter, I drag the planets.
     Give me another universe — or I succumb.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 122.