Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists: Isn't history the result of our fear of boredom?

Philosophic thoughts & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki Landscape, oil on canvas

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Emil Cioran (1911-1995)

Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.

After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive A Short History of Decay (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).

Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.

Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau


Emil Cioran

Aphorisms

• We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
• God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
• Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
• I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
• I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.
• I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
• If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
• If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
• Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
• In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
• In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
• In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
• Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
• Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
• It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
• It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
• Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
• Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
• Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.
• Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
• A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
• A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
• A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
• A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
• A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
• A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
• Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.
• Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
• Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.
• By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
• Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.
• Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
• Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
• Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
• Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
• Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
• Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
• Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
• For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.
• Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?