9 aphorisms
E.M. Cioran
The Trouble with Being Born (1973)
I read him for the shipwrecked feeling I get from anything he writes...
I have always lived with the awareness
of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is
my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the
next.
Everything is wonderfully clear if we
admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we
think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat
like everyone else.
I would give the whole universe and
all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
Each time I fail to think about death,
I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
“What do you do
from morning to night?”
“I endure
myself.”
Lucidity does not extirpate the desire
to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.
It’s not worth the bother of killing
yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
What music appeals to in us it is
difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that
madness itself cannot penetrate there.
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