Onduras. Derived from “onda,” from the Latin *unda* (wave, movement of water), plus the abstract suffix “-ura,” which denotes a quality or effect. A word that suggests depth, resonance, and propagation: something that leaves a mark as it spreads. A neologism coined by the editors of Bookish & Co. to name certain literary birthdays. These Onduras by Emil Cioran celebrate a style of writing where the fragment and the idea become a diagnosis of decay and lucidity. Each line, beautifully corrosive, dissolves every illusion that naivety insists on sustaining.
When a philosopher speaks of language, I don’t read him; when he is a writer, I throw his book away. In France, one might say that every man who writes is fascinated and paralyzed by this problem. It is not what you think about language that interests me, but the use you make of it—your own language—the instrument, not the reflection on the instrument.
August 22. R. B., the fashionable critic, with his ram’s head; I have just recalled, for no reason at all, the letter he sent me in response to my preface to Maistre. “I haven’t read anything by you… I thought you were a more modest sort. There is nothing worse than pride concealed beneath a bovine face. One only affects frankness—a frankness bordering on impertinence—toward those one considers inferior. Any other frankness—in literary relations—cannot be distinguished from rudeness or provocation. No one has the right to tell an author what they really think of his work: unless they admire him. But how many authors can one admire?
Literary passion is above all else for him. X.—who is incapable of buying you a beer, let alone buying one for himself—is willing to spend a considerable sum to publish a novel with a practically unknown and fraudulent publishing house. And all just to see his name on the cover of a book! For he is not so naive as to expect success. But you never know! Without a strong dose of hope, how could he possibly agree to part with his money? (All this is pure malice. I should rather pity someone capable of such weaknesses, instead of mocking him. One should always reveal others’ weaknesses with a tone of compassion. Compassion, the one thing one can never have enough of.)
Talamanca Notebook
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At forty, I was still enrolled at the Sorbonne, eating in the student cafeteria, and hoping that situation would last until the end of my days. But they passed a law prohibiting enrollment after the age of twenty-seven, which expelled me from that paradise. Upon arriving in Paris, I had committed to the French Institute to write a thesis and had already announced its topic—something about Nietzsche’s ethics—but I had no intention whatsoever of writing it. Instead, I traveled all over France by bicycle. In the end, they didn’t revoke my scholarship, because they felt that having traveled all over France on my own two feet wasn’t without merit either. But I read a lot and, above all, I reread endlessly. I’ve read all of Dostoevsky five or six times. One shouldn’t write about anything one hasn’t reread. In France, there’s also the ritual of the annual book. You have to publish a book every year; otherwise, “they forget you.” It’s the obligatory act of presence. Just do the math. If the author is eighty years old, you know he’s published sixty books. How lucky Marcus Aurelius and the author of *The Imitation* were not to need more than one!
When I published *Précis*, the critic from *Le Monde* sent me a letter of reproach. “Don’t you realize, that book could fall into the hands of young people!” That’s absurd. What are books for?
To learn? That’s of no interest; for that, you just have to go to class. No, I believe a book must truly be a wound; it must disrupt the reader’s life in one way or another.
My idea in writing a book is to wake someone up, to shake them. Since the books I’ve written have emerged from my unease, not to say my suffering, they must in a way convey this very thing to the reader. No, I don’t like books that are read like one reads a newspaper; a book must shake everything up, call everything into question. Why? Well, I’m not overly concerned with the usefulness of what I write, because I never really think about the reader; I write for myself, to free myself from my obsessions, from my tensions—nothing more. A woman recently wrote about me in *Le Quotidien* in Paris: “Cioran writes the things that everyone repeats to themselves in a low voice.” I don’t write with the intention of producing “a book” for someone to read. No, I write to relieve myself. However, later, when I reflect on the function of my books, that’s when I think they should be something like a wound. A book that leaves its reader exactly as they were before reading it is a failed book.
When one undertakes a forty-page essay on whatever subject, one begins with certain preliminary assertions and becomes a prisoner of them. A certain sense of integrity compels one to continue respecting them until the end, to avoid contradicting oneself. However, as the text progresses, other temptations arise, which must be rejected because they lead one astray from the path laid out. One is trapped in a circle drawn by oneself. In this way, one becomes honorable and falls into falsehood and a lack of truthfulness. If this happens in a forty-page essay, what will not happen in a system! This is the drama of all structured thought: not allowing contradiction. Thus one falls into falsehood; one lies to preserve coherence. On the other hand, if one creates fragments, in the course of a single day one can say one thing and its opposite. Why? Because each fragment arises from a different experience, and those experiences are indeed true: they are what matters most. One might say this is irresponsible, but if it is, it is so in the same sense that life is irresponsible. A fragmentary thought reflects all aspects of your experience; a systematic thought reflects only one aspect—the controlled, and thus impoverished, aspect. In Nietzsche, in Dostoevsky, every possible type of humanity speaks, every experience. In the system, only the controller speaks, the boss. The system is always the voice of the boss: that is why every system is totalitarian, while fragmentary thought remains free.
In my youth I read a great deal of Leon Chestov, who was very well known in Romania at the time. But the one who interested me most, whom I loved most—that is the word—was Georg Simmel. I know that Simmel is quite well known in Spain, thanks to Ortega’s interest in him, while he is completely ignored in France. Simmel was a wonderful writer, a magnificent philosopher-essayist. He was a close friend of Lukács and Bloch, whom he influenced and who later renounced him, which strikes me as utterly dishonest. Today Simmel is completely forgotten in Germany, even silenced, but in his day he was admired by figures such as Thomas Mann and Rilke. Simmel was also a fragmentary thinker; the best of his work consists of fragments. I was also greatly influenced by the German thinkers of the so-called “philosophy of life,” such as Dilthey, and so on. Of course, I also read a lot of Kierkegaard back then, when it wasn’t yet fashionable. In general, what has always interested me most is confessional philosophy. In philosophy as in literature, what interests me are the cases—those authors of whom one can say they are “cases” in the almost clinical sense of the term. I am interested in all those who head toward catastrophe and also those who managed to place themselves beyond catastrophe. I can admire nothing more than someone who has been on the verge of collapse. That is why I loved Nietzsche or Otto Weininger. Or also Russian authors like Rozanov, religious writers who constantly border on heresy, like Dostoevsky. I was not influenced by authors who are merely an intellectual experience, like Husserl. What interested me about Heidegger was his Kierkegaardian aspect, not the Husserlian one. But, above all, I seek the case: in thought or literature, I am interested above all in the fragile, the precarious, that which collapses, and also in that which resists the temptation to collapse but bears witness to the threat…
I wrote in Romanian until 1947. That year I was in a little house near Dieppe and was translating Mallarmé into Romanian. Suddenly I said to myself: “How absurd! Why translate Mallarmé into a language that nobody knows?” And so I renounced my language. I started writing in French, and it was very difficult, because by temperament the French language doesn’t suit me; I need a wild language, a drunkard’s language. French was like a straitjacket for me. Writing in another language is an amazing experience. You reflect on the words, on the writing. When I wrote in Romanian, I didn’t realize I was writing; I simply wrote. The words were not independent of me then. As soon as I started writing in French, all the words became conscious; I had them in front of me, outside of me, in their little cells, and I was picking them up: “Now you, and now you.” It’s an experience similar to another I had when I arrived in Paris. I stayed in a small hotel in the Latin Quarter, and on the first day, when I went down to the front desk to make a phone call, I found the hotel manager, his wife, and a son preparing the lunch menu: they were preparing it as if it were a battle plan! I was astonished: in Romania I had always eaten like an animal—well, but unconsciously, without realizing what eating means. In Paris I realized that eating is a ritual, an act of civilization, almost a philosophical stance… In the same way, writing in French ceased to be an instinctive act, as it was when I wrote in Romanian, and took on a deliberate dimension, just as I also stopped eating innocently… By changing languages, I immediately put the past behind me; I completely changed my life. Even today, however, it seems to me that I write in a language that doesn’t fit in anywhere, without roots, a greenhouse language.
Conversations
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“And the people?” you might ask. Any thinker or historian who uses this word without irony discredits themselves. The “people” already know what their fate is: to suffer the events and fantasies of their rulers, submitting to designs that invalidate and overwhelm them. Any political experience, however “advanced” it may be, unfolds at their expense, is directed against them:
the people bear the stigmas of slavery by divine or diabolical decree. It is useless to pity them: their cause admits of no appeal. Nations and empires are formed by their acquiescence in the injustices to which they are subjected. There is no head of state or conqueror who does not despise them, yet they accept this contempt and live off it. If the people were to cease being weak or a victim, if they were to falter in the face of their fate, society would vanish, and with it, history. Let us not be too optimistic: nothing in the people allows us to consider such a beautiful possibility. As they are, they represent an invitation to despotism. It endures its trials, sometimes even seeks them out, and rebels against them only to move toward new ones, more atrocious than the previous ones. With revolution as its sole luxury, it rushes toward it, not so much to gain some benefits or improve its lot, but also to acquire its right to insolence—an advantage that consoles it for its habitual disappointments, yet which it loses as soon as the privileges of disorder are abolished. Since no regime assures its salvation, the people conform to all and to none. And from the Flood to the Last Judgment, the only thing to which it can aspire is to honestly fulfill its mission as the vanquished.
By deifying history to discredit God, Marxism has only succeeded in making God seem stranger and more haunting. Everything in man can be stifled, except the need for the absolute, which will survive the destruction of temples, and even the disappearance of religion from the earth. And since the Russian people are religious at heart, this essence will inevitably take its revenge. Historical reasons will contribute greatly to this.
In the long run, time favors the chained nations which, gathering strength and hope, live in the future, in hope; but in freedom, what can one hope for? Or in the regime that embodies it, made of dissipation, stagnation, and softening? Democracy, a marvel that has nothing left to offer, is at once the paradise and the tomb of a people. Life only makes sense thanks to democracy, but democracy lacks life… Immediate joy, imminent disaster; the inconsistency of a regime to which one cannot adhere without becoming entangled in a torturous dilemma.
History and Utopia
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It was 1928; I was seventeen years old and, eager for every form of excess and heresy, I liked to draw the ultimate consequences of every idea, to take rigor to the point of aberration, to the point of provocation, to confer upon fury the dignity of a system. Put another way: everything fascinated me except nuance. In Weininger, I was fascinated by the dizzying exaggeration, the infinite within negation, the rejection of common sense, the deadly intransigence, the search for an absolute position, the mania for driving a line of reasoning to the point where it destroys itself and ruins the edifice of which it was a part.
Add to that his obsession with the criminal and the epileptic (especially pronounced in Über die letzten Dinge [On the Last Things]), the cult of the brilliant formula and of arbitrary excommunication, the equating of women with Nothing and even with something less. My adherence to this devastating assertion was complete from the outset. The purpose of this letter is to inform you of the circumstance that led me to agree with those extreme theses regarding the aforementioned Nothing.
A trivial circumstance if ever there was one, yet one that would dictate my behavior for several years—in fact, throughout my entire student life. I was still in high school and was in love with philosophy and with a… young woman, a student like myself. An important detail: I did not know her personally, although she belonged to the same social circle as my family. As often happens with teenagers, I was both insolent and shy, but my shyness outweighed my insolence. For over a year I endured that torment, which culminated one day when, reading under a tree in the city’s large park, I suddenly heard laughter. When I turned around… I saw her in the company of one of my classmates, the one we all despised the most and whom we called “the Louse.” After more than fifty years, I remember perfectly what I felt in that instant. But I’ll spare the details. The fact is, I swore on the spot to put an end to “feelings.” And that’s how I became a regular at brothels. A year after this disappointment—both radical and commonplace—Weininger appeared in my life. I was in the ideal position to understand him.
It takes an immense dose of disillusionment to be able to live without utopia, and the idea of progress is the modern utopia par excellence. Even those who refuse to believe in it adhere to it unconsciously. One might say that we have done nothing more than minimize the importance of a flaw, of our own flaw. History is, at its core, nothing more than the unfolding and a sort of fruition of that primordial anomaly without which it is impossible to find the key to becoming. Perhaps we would have to go back much further, to recognize in the very principle of life an initial impurity, a propensity toward the negative, given that the originality of the vital in relation to the inorganic consists of a destructive, not to say demonic, principle. Life would then be nothing more than an error of matter; hence the curse inherent in all that moves, in all that breathes.
If the idea of progress took such a firm hold on all of us, it was because through it we neutralized the effects of that gloomy vision. One might even think that the two centuries separating us from the Revolution have desired nothing more than the eradication of the ruthless conception that man formed of his beginnings. Two centuries of forced illusion. The success is undeniable, but it is still far from complete; and it is threatened precisely by what has made it so brilliant—the results of science, which has become a dubious miracle that is gradually undermining all the hopes it had raised. Science will deliver, if it has not already done so, the coup de grâce to the hope of a final triumph. The biblical warning about the danger of the Tree of Knowledge was, therefore, justified. To realize this, all we had to do was wait. The most seemingly backward-looking view was, therefore, the correct one. In this way, beings who were almost illiterate at the beginning of our adventure discovered its risks better than entire centuries of rationalists. That paradise was destined to fall was written from the beginning.
Bossuet, Hegel, and Marx, by the very fact of giving meaning to events, belong to the same family, or at least do not differ essentially from one another, since what matters is not to define or determine that meaning, but to resort to it, to postulate it; and they resorted to it, they postulated it. Moving from a theological or metaphysical conception to historical materialism is simply a shift in providentialism. If we were to accustom ourselves to looking beyond the specific content of ideologies and doctrines, we would see that invoking one of them in place of another implies no waste of sagacity whatsoever. Those who join a party believe they are distinguishing themselves from those who join another, when all of them, from the moment they choose, coincide at a deep level, share the same nature, and differ only superficially, in the mask they assume. It is foolish to imagine that truth depends on choice, when, in reality, every stance amounts to a disregard for truth. Unfortunately, choosing, taking a position, is a fate from which no one escapes; we must all opt for an unreality, for an error, as we are forcibly convinced, sick, and agitated: our assent, our allegiances are alarming symptoms. Anyone who identifies with anything displays morbid tendencies: there is no possibility of salvation or health outside the pure being, as pure as the void.
Exercises in Admiration
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A civilization, at the end of its path, shifts from the happy anomaly it once was to withering away as a matter of course; it aligns itself with mediocre nations, wallows in failure, and makes its destiny its sole problem. Spain is the perfect model of this form of obsession. Having known, in the era of the conquistadors, a bestial superhumanity, it devoted itself to ruminating on its past, fixated on its shortcomings, and allowed its qualities and genius to grow moldy; in compensation, enamored of its own decline, it adopted it as a new supremacy. How can one fail to see that this historical masochism ceases to be a Spanish peculiarity and becomes the climate and the recipe for the decadence of an entire continent?
If Nietzsche, Proust, Baudelaire, or Rimbaud survive the fluctuations of fashion, they owe it to the gratuitousness of their cruelty, to their demonic surgery, to the generosity of their bitterness. What allows a work to endure, what prevents it from aging, is its ferocity. A gratuitous assertion? Consider the prestige of the Gospel, an aggressive book, the most poisonous of all.
Goethe, the complete artist, is our antithesis. Oblivious to the unfinished, to that modern ideal of perfection, he refused to understand the risks of his contemporaries as his own; he assimilated them so well that he did not suffer from them at all. His clear destiny demoralizes us; after having explored him in vain to discover sublime or sordid secrets within him, we are left with Rilke’s words: “I have no organs for Goethe.”
The nineteenth century can never be criticized enough for having favored that breed of commentators, those reading machines, that malformation of the spirit embodied by the Professor, symbol of the decadence of a civilization, of the degradation of taste, of the supremacy of work over whim. To view everything from the outside, to systematize the ineffable, to look at nothing head-on, to take inventory of others’ projects… Any commentary on a work is crude or useless, for anything that is not direct is null.
In the past, professors devoted themselves primarily to theology; at least they had the excuse of teaching the absolute, of limiting themselves to God, whereas now nothing escapes their murderous jurisdiction.
Syllogisms of Bitterness
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D. C., who in his village in Romania was writing his childhood memories, told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he would not forget him. The next day, very early, the peasant came to see him: “I know I’m worthless, but my goodness! I didn’t think I’d sunk so low that I’d be mentioned in a book.”
How superior the oral world was! People (and I should say peoples) remain true to themselves as long as their horror of the written word lasts. As soon as they catch the contagion of its prejudice, they enter into falsehood, losing their old superstitions to acquire a new one, worse than all the others put together.
A few kilometers from my hometown, perched high up on a hill, there was a village inhabited solely by Gypsies. In 1910, an amateur ethnologist visited it, accompanied by a photographer. He managed to gather the inhabitants, who allowed themselves to be photographed without knowing what it meant. The moment they were asked not to move, an old woman shouted: “Watch out! They’re stealing our souls.” Everyone rushed at the visitors, who barely managed to escape. Was it not India, the country of origin of those semi-wild Gypsies, that, in this circumstance, spoke through them?
The Trouble with Being Born
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The same person who says, “I don’t have the courage to kill myself,” will, a moment later, brand as cowardice a feat from which even the bravest shrink. One kills oneself, they never cease to repeat, out of weakness, to avoid having to face pain or shame. They simply fail to see that it is precisely the weak who, far from trying to escape, adapt to it instead, and that it takes strength to tear oneself away from everything in a decisive manner. In truth, it is easier to kill oneself than to overcome a prejudice as old as humanity, or at least as old as religions, which are so sadly impervious to the supreme act. While the Church wreaked havoc, only the madman enjoyed a privileged status; only he had the right to challenge its ideas: his corpse was neither desecrated nor hanged.
Between ancient Stoicism and modern “free thought,” between, say, Seneca and Hume, suicide—setting aside the Cathar interlude—suffers a long eclipse—a gloomy age, indeed, for all those who, wishing to die, did not dare to violate the prohibition against taking one’s own life.
He who has never thought of killing himself will decide to do so much more readily than he who ceaselessly thinks of it. Since every crucial act is easier to carry out through impulsiveness than through deliberation, the mind untouched by suicide, once it feels driven to it, will have no defense against this sudden impulse; it will be blinded and shaken by the revelation of a definitive escape, which it had not considered before; whereas the other will always be able to delay a gesture that he has weighed and reweighed indefinitely, that he knows thoroughly, and to which he will resign himself without passion, if indeed he ever resolves to do so.
The Fateful Demiurge (Éditions Gallimard, 1969; translation: Fernando Savater for Taurus Ediciones, Madrid, 1974)
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The most French century is the 18th. It is the salon turned into a universe; it is the century of lace-adorned intellect, of pure refinement, of pleasant and beautiful artifice. It is also the century that was most bored, that had too much time on its hands, that worked only to pass the time.
“How restorative it would have been for me to be in the shadow of Madame du Deffand’s ironic wisdom, perhaps the most clairvoyant person of that century!” “I find only nothingness within myself, and it is just as bad to find nothingness in oneself as it would be fortunate to have remained in it.” By comparison, Voltaire, her friend, who said “I was born dead,” is a wise and industrious jester. Nothingness in a salon—what a definition of prestige!
Chateaubriand, that British Frenchman like every Breton, gives the impression of a roaring horn alongside the muted effusions of the implacable Lady. France has had the privilege of intelligent women, who introduced coquetry into wit and superficial, delightful charm into abstractions.
A witty remark is worth as much as a revelation. One is profound but cannot be expressed; the other is superficial but expresses everything. Is it not more interesting to fulfill oneself on the surface than to lay oneself bare with depth? Where is there more culture? In a mystical sigh or in a “joke”? In the latter, naturally, although an alternative answer may be the only valid one.
What has France loved? Styles, the pleasures of the intellect, salons, reason, small perfections. Expression precedes nature. It is a culture of form that covers the elemental forces and spreads over every passionate outburst the well-thought-out veneer of refinement.
Life—when it is not suffering—is a game. We must be grateful to France for having cultivated it with mastery and inspiration. From it I have learned not to take myself seriously, except in the dark, and, in public, to make fun of myself. Its school is one of a lively, perfumed nonchalance. Folly sees targets everywhere; intelligence, pretexts. Its great art lies in the distinction and grace of superficiality. To devote one’s talent to insignificant things—that is, to existence and the teachings of the world—is an initiation into French doubts.
A conclusion of the 18th century, not yet tainted by the idea of progress: the Universe is a farce of the spirit.
On France
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The only argument against suicide is this: it is unnatural to end your days before having proven to yourself how far you can go, to what extent you can fulfill yourself. Although suicides believe in their precocity, they nevertheless commit an act before having reached effective maturity, before being ripe for an accepted extinction. That a man should wish to end his life is easy to understand. But why not choose the climax, the most favorable moment of his development? Suicides are horrible because they are not carried out at the right time, because they cut short a destiny rather than crowning it. An ending must be cultivated as if it were a garden. For the ancients, suicide was a form of education; the end sprouted and blossomed within them. And when they extinguished themselves of their own volition, death was an ending without twilight.
Modern people lack the inner culture of suicide, the aesthetics of the end. None die as they should, and all perish by chance: novices at suicide, embittered by death. If they knew how to end it in time, our hearts would not shrink at the news of so many “desperate acts,” and we would not call a man “unfortunate” who sanctifies his own fulfillment. Nowhere is the lack of a central axis in modern people more striking than in their inner estrangement from careful, meditated suicide—suicide as a horror of failure, of brutalization, and of old age; suicide as a tribute to strength, beauty, and heroism.
The Decline of Thought
