A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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And I dream of an Eleusis of disabused hearts, of a lucid Mystery, without gods and without the vehemences of illusion. We change ideas like neckties; for every idea, every criterion comes from outside, from the configurations and accidents of time. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he then feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

At times the futility of a certain way of living may reveal that we need to rethink how we structure society and roles within society. Infatuated by syllables, it loathed the mystery of heavy silences and turned them light and pure; and it too has become light and pure, indeed lightened and purified of everything.In terms of essays themselves the books is split into six groups of essays or in the case of section five a single essay (part 1 accounts for about half the book). So the work is good, snappy, very clever and direct, but it will drag you down to its own personal hell, I fear. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own. How I detest, Lord, the turpitude of Your works and these syrupy ghosts who burn incense to You and resemble You! In his views, he was influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chestov, Rozanov, Dostoyevsky, and poet Mihai Eminescu.

Are we entitled to imagine a mind exclaiming: “Everything is purposeless to me now, for I have given the definitions of all things"? The man who has not given himself up to the pleasures of anguish, who has not savored in his mind the dangers of his own extinction nor relished such cruel and sweet annihilations, will never be cured of the obsession with death: he will be tormented by it, for he will have resisted it; while the man who, habituated to a discipline of horror, and meditating upon his own carrion, has deliberately reduced himself to ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be merely a resurrected being who can no longer live. He also became enthralled by the turbulent politics of the time, an enthusiasm that eventually gave way to disillusionment and bitterness. In Cioran's view it is death that holds no mystery (being a unambiguous state) whereas what makes life (it's purpose/meaning) difficult to deal with is that there is no agreed meaning or purpose and that is why mystery lays with life rather than death.As for the tough-minded, they should note that Cioran, besides being a thinker of dark and lacerating thoughts, is also a brilliant stylist with a way of expressing his disgust that can at times be hilariously funny; for example: "Sometimes I wish I was a cannibal - less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him. Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In the Dust of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Infinite Resignation (Repeater/PenguinRandomHouse, 2018). Cioran, in short, mercilessly strips away our most cherished illusions and confronts us with the stark truth of our predicament, a truth that is far from pleasant.

Having exhausted his appetites, the man who approaches a limit-form of detachment no longer wants to perpetuate himself; he loathes surviving in someone else, to whom moreover he has nothing more to transmit; the species appalls him; he is a monster—and monsters do not beget. The arguments come later; the doctrine is constructed: there still remains only the danger of ‘wisdom’. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything. But that is the point, maybe, he talks of suicide and that life itself is a waste, and yet he goes on living? He wrote A Short History of Decay in French, so me picking up an English translation made no difference to me picking up a Romanian translation.

One touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primal state: nakedness; a suspicion of irony strips us of that trumpery hope which let us dupe ourselves and devise illusion: every contrary path leads outside of life. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural. Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? Despite this Cioran gave a self-criticism, stating that the book was "not succinct, as it should have been".

It is neither a sudden realization nor a series of reasonings which leads us to this equation, but the unconscious elaboration of our every moment, the contribution of all our experiences, minute or crucial. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Any sincere philosophy renounces the claims of civilization, whose function consists in sifting our secrets and disguising them as recherché effects.Expert in disillusions, riddling the new fervors with all the arrows of a dissolute wisdom—among the courtesans, in skeptical brothels or circuses with their sumptuous cruelties, I should have swelled my reasonings with vice and with blood, dilating logic to dimensions it had never dreamed of, to the dimensions of worlds that die. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us.



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