Negative Affirmation

     I read the other day some verse written by an eminent painter which were original not conventional. Always the soul hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost — amd our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from "Self-Reliance," in Masterworks of Prose, Parkinson (ed.), p. 213.

     We cannot grant that a god, or even a man, proceeds from a gymnastic climaxed by a moan. It is curious that at the end of such a long period of time, "evolution" has not managed to perfect another formula. Why should it take the trouble, moreover, when the one in force functions so well and suits everybody? Let there be no mistake: life in itself is not in question, life is as mysterious and enervating as could be wished. What is not so is the exercise in question, of an inadmissible facility, given the consequences. When we know what fate permits each man, we remain stunned by the disproportion between a moment's oblivion and the prodigious quantity of disgraces which result from it. The more one finds that the only men who have understood anything about it are those who have opted for orgy or for asceticism, the debauched or the castrated.
— E. M. Cioran, The New Gods, pp. 11-12.

....Now, as experience teaches, there exists no being more odious than our neighbor. The fact of knowing him to be so close in space keeps us from breathing and makes our days and our nights equally unfeasible. Try as we will to brood upon his ruin, he is there, hideously present. To suppress him is the impulse of every thought; when we finally determine to do so, a spasm of cowardice grips us, just before the act. Thus, we are the potential murderers of those who live beside us, and from incapacity to be the actual ones comes our torment, our bitterness, dilettantes and eunuchs of bloodshed that we are.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 14.

     Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coeffecient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word "depth" has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a "parasite"? In Tibet, the last country where monks still matter, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñaparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries ... for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.
— E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 38.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
— E. M. Cioran, from "Strangled Thoughts," in Ibid., p. 85.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 87.

What they ask you for is actions, proofs, works, and all you can produce are transformed tears.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 88

Chatter: any conversation with someone who has not suffered.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 101.

The mediocrity of my grief at funerals. Impossible to feel sorry for the deceased; conversely, every birth casts me into consternation. It is incomprehensible, it is insane that people can show a baby, that they can exhibit this potential disaster and rejoice over it.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 102.

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.
E. M. Cioran, Ibid., p. 113.