/lit/ - Literature

Has anyone read Emil Cioran? If so, how was it?

>Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to a creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind. — E. M. Cioran

I just now realize how all the voracious reading I've been doing lately is just a way of procrastinating from the writing I know I have to complete.

>>10691989
>>10692000
>>10692605
Sigh. Isn't it depressing to realize that the glorious "canon" is really just more autism like everything else?

"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. . . .

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . . .

From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . . .

The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility. History: a factory of ideals . . . lunatic mythology, frenzy of hordes and of solitaries . . . refusal to look reality in the face, mortal thirst for fictions. . . .

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. 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. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

And if all our actions—from breathing to the founding of empires or metaphysical systems—derive from an illusion as to our importance, the same is true a fortiori of the prophetic instinct. Who, with the exact vision of his nullity, would try to be effective and to turn himself into a savior?

>>10413323
Socrates gone sincere, is what Plato should have said.

This thread is making me sad. I hope you two find happiness...I hope we all find happiness.

>>10351112
No. Pessimism is great.

>>10349559
I never made this connection before. Ha. I wonder how much of my liking of UG and Cioran is just derived from how good their photos are....

>Once I thought I could crush space with a blow of my fist, play with the stars, halt time or wield it according to my whim. The great captains seemed to me the great cowards, the poets, wretched stammerers; not knowing the resistance things, men, and words offer us, and supposing I felt more than the universe allowed, I gave myself up to a suspect infinity, to a cosmogony resulting from a puberty unfit to end itself...How easy it is to believe yourself to be a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind! And with how many illusions I must have been born in order to be able to lose one every day! Life is a miracle bitterness destroys.

>Beatitude through suffering is an illusion, since it requires a reconciliation to the fatality of pain in order to avoid total annihilation.

>>9910042
But what if I don't want to be at peace

Every birth is a tragedy.

My god, Cioran is fucking fantastic. One of the best /lit/ recommendations I've gotten. I often see him mentioned in the same breath as Ligotti, is he equally good?

Every page is just sprinkled with nuggets of pure gold, every page spurs notes and underlining.

>Once I had a "self"; now I am no more than an object

>Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration. Shelly’s “generous” aspect cripples most of his work; Shakespeare, by a stroke of luck, never “served” anything.

>Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our fellow men, the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

>Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing—each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture—pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.)

>The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee—by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity— were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated from outside the spectacle of her labors, would she still persist in her pains?

>If all those we have killed in thought were to disappear for good, the earth would be depopulated.

>Every period's ending is the mind's paradise.

>If Jesus had ended his career upon the Cross, if he had not been committed to resuscitation—-what a splendid tragic hero! His divine aspect has cost literature an admirable subject.

>The pride of a conqueror pales beside the ostentation of a believer who addresses himself to the Creator. How can one dare so much? And how could modesty be a virtue of temples, when a decrepit old woman who imagines Infinity within reach

Hey /lit/, it is really dangerous to read this guy ?
it can lead to depression ?