Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek artists: enjoy the moon light...

Moon and Greek artists, Greek painting, modern Greek painters

Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki in Colours, oil on canvas

Thessaloniki under moon light...

According to scientists the universe will continue to expand forever and will eventually become a dead and cold wasteland...

Anyway, we have enough time to enjoy the light of the moon - although it is shrinking...

The moon is shrinking & the universe is expanding!

The moon is shrinking
Quardian.co.uk (August 19, 2010)

Astronomers have declared that the moon is shrinking after spotting wrinkles all over the lunar surface. The tell-tale contraction marks were discovered by US scientists who examined thousands of photographs of the moon's surface taken by a Nasa orbiter.

Some of the wrinkles are several miles long and rise tens of metres above the dusty terrain. Researchers believe they arise from the moon decreasing in size by around 200 metres across its diameter. The moon's mean diameter is generally calculated to be 2,159 miles.

The prospect of a shrinking moon is not new to planetary experts. When the moon formed it had a hot core, much like that of the Earth, which caused it first to expand and then contract as it cooled down.

The latest findings suggest the moon could still be cooling, a process that causes the surface to compress and form the wrinkle-like features, known as lobate scarps.

A team led by Thomas Watters at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC studied high-resolution images of the moon taken over the past year by Nasa's latest moon probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The spacecraft cameras provide the most detailed images of the moon ever taken from orbit.

Fourteen lobate scarps were identified, at sites as far apart as the lunar equator and near the poles. The features are so pristine scientists think they could be no more than a billion years old.

"Not only could they be indicating recent contraction of the moon, they may be indicating that the moon is still contracting," said Watters. "Until now, we really had no evidence of cooling and the contraction of the moon that would go along with it. This isn't anything to worry about. The moon may be shrinking, but not by much. It's not going anywhere."

Scientists believe the moon formed after a Mars-sized object slammed into the Earth and produced an enormous cloud of debris 4.5bn years ago. The debris coalesced into the fledgling moon and warmed up as particles were crushed together and some released radiation.

A shrinking moon overturns the view that our natural satellite is a cold lump of rock and suggests it might still have a warm core and be geologically active.

"There's a general impression that the moon is geologically dead, that anything of significance that happened geologically up there happened billions of years ago. This population of young scarps indicates that really isn't the case," said Watters.

Similar markings were photographed on the moon during the Apollo missions. Scientists will now compare those pictures with the latest images to see if anything has changed in the past 40 years.

Over the next three to four years the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will build a detailed map of the moon's surface. "It will be very interesting to see the overall distribution of all lobate scarps and other telltale features, as more images of the lunar surface are returned," said Peter Grindrod, a planetary geologist at University College London. "The extent and age of these features will help reveal whether there was a global period of contraction on the moon, and ultimately tell us more about how the moon formed and evolved."

The Universe will expand forever
TrekMovie.com (August 20, 2010)

According to a new NASA study on the ever elusive dark energy, the universe will continue to expand forever. NASA researchers have been using the Hubble Space Telescope and European Space Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to observe how light from distant stars becomes distorted around nearby galaxy clusters. Dark energy, which makes up 72% of our universe, along with dark matter, another 24%, can’t be seen, but their effects on other matter in the universe can be observed. The recent determination of the distribution of dark energy in the universe have led the scientists to conclude that the universe will continue to expand forever and will eventually become a dead and cold wasteland.

Source

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: The moon goes through the sky with a child in her hand...

Moon & Greek paintings, Greek artists, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou. FIX Factory, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

Thessaloniki under the moon light...

The moon continues to shine in August...

Consolation and magic...

Following the moon paths...

Federico García Lorca

Ballad of the Moon

The moon came to the forge
wearing a bustle of nards.
The boy is looking at her.
The boy is looking hard.
In the troubled air,
the wind moves her arms,
showing lewd and pure,
her hard, tin breasts.
'Run, moon, moon, moon.
If the gypsies came,
they would make of your heart
necklaces and white rings.'
'Child, let me dance.
When the gypsies come,
they will find you on the anvil
with your little eyes shut tight.'
'Run, moon moon moon.
I can hear their horses.
Child, let me be, don't walk
on my starchy white.'

The rider was drawing closer
playing the drum of the plain.
In the forge the child
has his eyes shut tight.
Bronze and dream, the gypsies
cross the olive grove.
Their heads held high,
their eyes half open.

Ay how the nightjar sings!
How it sings in the tree!
The moon goes through the sky
with a child in her hand.

In the forge the gypsies
wept and cried aloud.
The air is watching, watching.
The air watched all night long.


Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata

Comments & Greek artists, modern Greek painters: They came dressed up as “friends,” came countless times, my enemies...

Greek poets & Greek artists, Greek painters, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Warehouses, Thermaikos, oil on canvas

They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
bearing the primeval gifts.
And their gifts were nothing else
but iron and fire only...

Odisseas Elytis

They Came

They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
trampling the primeval soil.
And the soil never blended with their heel.
They brought
The Wise One, the Founder, and the Geometer,
Bibles of letters and numbers,
every kind of Submission and Power,
to sway over the primeval light.
And the light never blended with their roof.
Not even a bee was fooled into beginning the golden game,
not even a Zephyr into swelling the white aprons.
On the peaks, in the valleys, in the ports
they raised and founded
mighty towers and villas,
floating timbers and other vessels;
and the Laws decreeing the pursuit of profit
they applied to the primeval measure.
And the measure never blended with their thinking.
Not even a footprint of a god left a man on their soul,
not even a fairy’s glance tried to rob them of their speech.
They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
bearing the primeval gifts.
And their gifts were nothing else
but iron and fire only.
To the open expecting fingers
only weapons and iron and fire.
Only weapons and iron and fire.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Heaven has different Signs to me...

Poetry & Greek painting, Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki in Colors, oil on canvas
(detail)

Emily Dickinson

"Nature" is what we see

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse—the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

"Heaven" has different Signs—to me—

"Heaven" has different Signs—to me—
Sometimes, I think that Noon
Is but a symbol of the Place—
And when again, at Dawn,

A mighty look runs round the World
And settles in the Hills—
An Awe if it should be like that
Upon the Ignorance steals—

The Orchard, when the Sun is on—
The Triumph of the Birds
When they together Victory make—
Some Carnivals of Clouds—

The Rapture of a finished Day—
Returning to the West—
All these—remind us of the place
That Men call "paradise"—

Itself be fairer—we suppose—
But how Ourself, shall be
Adorned, for a Superior Grace—
Not yet, our eyes can see—

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!

"Heaven"—is what I cannot reach!
The Apple on the Tree—
Provided it do hopeless—hang—
That—"Heaven" is—to Me!

The Color, on the Cruising Cloud—
The interdicted Land—
Behind the Hill—the House behind—
There—Paradise—is found!

Her teasing Purples—Afternoons—
The credulous—decoy—
Enamored—of the Conjuror—
That spurned us—Yesterday!

Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists: A dreamland out of space out of time...

Poetry & Greek artists, Greek painting


Yannis Stavrou, Thessaloniki 1956, oil on canvas

From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME...

Edgar Allan Poe

Dreamland

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that drip all over;
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters- lone and dead,-
Their still waters- still and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily.

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,-
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,-
By the mountains- near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,-
By the grey woods,- by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp-
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,-
By each spot the most unholy-
In each nook most melancholy-
There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth- and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion
'Tis a peaceful, soothing region-
For the spirit that walks in shadow
'Tis- oh, 'tis an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not- dare not openly view it!
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: What a moon there is tonight...

Greek poets & Greek artists, modern Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Moonlight, oil on canvas

Yannis Ritsos
Moonlight Sonata
(excerpt)

A spring evening. A large room in an old house. A woman of a certain age, dressed in
black, is speaking to a young man. They have not turned on the lights. Through both
windows the moonlight shines relentlessly. I forgot to mention that the Woman in
Black has published two or three interesting volume of poetry with a religious flavor.
So, the Woman in Black is speaking to the Young Man:


Let me come with you. What a moon there is tonight!
The moon is kind – it won’t show
that my hair turned white. The moon
will turn my hair to gold again. You wouldn’t understand.
Let me come with you.

When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger,
invisible hands draw the curtains,
a ghostly finger writes forgotten words in the dust
on the piano – I don’t want to hear them. Hush.


Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990)

Let me come with you
a little farther down, as far as the brickyard wall,
to the point where the road turns and the city appears
concrete and airy, whitewashed with moonlight,
so indifferent and insubstantial
so positive, like metaphysics,
that finally you can believe you exist and do not exist,
that you never existed, that time with its destruction never existed.
Let me come with you.

We’ll sit for a little on the low wall, up on the hill,
and as the spring breeze blows around us
perhaps we’ll even imagine that we are flying,
because, often, and now especially, I hear the sound of my own dress
like the sound of two powerful wings opening and closing,
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your ribs, your flesh,
and when you enclose yourself within the sound of that flight
you feel the tight mesh of your throat, your birds, your flesh,
and thus constricted amid the muscles of the azure air,
amid the strong nerves of the heavens,
it makes no difference whether you go or return
it makes no difference whether you go or return
and it makes no difference that my hair has turned white
(that is not my sorrow – my sorrow is
that my heart too does not turn white).
Let me come with you.

I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
alone to faith and to death.
I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
Let me come with you.

This house is haunted, it preys on me –
what I mean is, it has aged a great deal, the nails are working loose,
the portraits drop as though plunging into the void,
the plaster falls without a sound
as the dead man’s hat falls from the peg in the dark hallway
as the worn woolen glove falls from the knee of silence
or as moonbeam falls on the old, gutted armchair.

Once it too was new – not the photograph that you are starting at so dubiously –
I mean the armchair, very comfortable, you could sit in it for hours
with your eyes closed and dream whatever came into your head
– a sandy beach, smooth, wet, shining in the moonlight,
shining more than my old patent leather shoes that I send each month to the shoeshine shop on the corner,
or a fishing boat’s sail that sinks to the bottom rocked by its own breathing,
a three-cornered sail like a handkerchief folded slantwise in half only
as though it had nothing to shut up or hold fast
no reason to flutter open in farewell. I have always has a passion for handkerchiefs,
not to keep anything tied in them,
no flower seeds or camomile gathered in the fields at sunset,
nor to tie them with four knots like the caps the workers wear on the construction site across the street,
nor to dab my eyes – I’ve kept my eyesight good;
I’ve never worn glasses. A harmless idiosyncracy, handkerchiefs.

Now I fold them in quarters, in eighths, in sixteenths
to keep my fingers occupied. And now I remember
that this is how I counted the music when I went to the Odeion
with a blue pinafore and a white collar, with two blond braids
– 8,16,32,64 –
hand in hand with a small friend of mine, peachy, all light and picked flowers,
(forgive me such digressions – a bad habit) – 32, 64 – and my family rested
great hopes on my musical talent. But I was telling you about the armchair –
gutted – the rusted springs are showing, the stuffing –
I thought of sending it next door to the furniture shop,
but where’s the time and the money and the inclination – what to fix first?
I thought of throwing a sheet over it – I was afraid
of a white sheet in so much moonlight. People sat here
who dreamed great dreams, as you do and I too.
and now they rest under earth untroubled by rain or the moon.
Let me come with you.

We’ll pause for a little at the top of St. Nicholas’ marble steps,
and afterward you’ll descend and I will turn back,
having on my left side the warmth from a casual touch of your jacket
and some squares of light, too, from small neighborhood windows
and this pure white mist from the moon, like a great procession of silver swans –
and I do not fear this manifestation, for at another time
on many spring evenings I talked with God who appeared to me
clothed in the haze and glory of such a moonlight –
and many young men, more handsome even than you, I sacrificed to him –
I dissolved, so white, so unapproachable, amid my white flame, in the whiteness of moonlight,
burnt up by men’s vocarious eyes and the tentative rapture of youths,
besieged by splendid bronzed bodies,
strong limbs exercising at the pool, with oars, on the track, at soccer (I pretended not to see them),
foreheads, lips and throats, knees, fingers and eyes,
chests and arms and things (and truly I did not see them)
– you know, sometimes, when you’re entranced, you forget what entranced you, the entrancement alone is enough –
my God, what star-bright eyes, and I was lifted up to an apotheosis of disavowed stars
because, besieged thus from without and from within,
no other road was left me save only the way up or the way down. – No, it is not enough.
Let me come with you.

Comments & modern Greek artists: cold is more aesthetic than heat...

Winter & Greek artists, Greek paintings, modern Greek artists


Yannis Stavrou, Winter Evening, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

This June is too hot and the temperature will rise even more...

Fortunately, there is a real good new that comes from the scientists:

“Expect global cooling for the next two to three decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been,” Professor Easterbrook said at a climate conference that took place in Chicago...

Anyway, cold is more aesthetic than heat...

As the catastophe of our planet is inevitable, according to scientists, it is much better to result from cold than from heat. Well, this is just a point view as well as a matter of taste...

Here is the relative article from The Heartland Institute Web site:

International Climate Conference Proves “Skeptics” Champion Vibrant Discussion - by Dan Miller

Global warming is not a human-induced crisis, reported more than 70 speakers in three days of sessions at The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, May 16-18 in Chicago. Bringing together scientists, economists, and public policy experts from 23 countries, the conference proved not only that global warming is not a crisis, but also that “skeptics” can argue about the finer points of climate science without losing track of professional courtesy and civility.

Grilling Message, Not Messenger
Researcher Steve McIntyre presented the important events of the Climategate scandal for a rapt audience in the opening plenary. But at the conclusion of his 30-minute detailing of events before roughly 700 dinner guests, the Canadian scientist shunned audience pressure to proclaim a fraud or demand punishment for the scientists who in McIntyre’s estimation “offended” scientists and the public.

Citing a particularly controversial email in the Climategate emails that referred to hiding an unexpected but inconveniently inexplicable decline in global temperatures, McIntyre concluded, “To the extent that things like the ‘trick’ were common practice, the practices need to be disavowed. The scientists do not need to be drummed out, but there has to be some commitment to avoiding these sorts of practices in the future.”

But the audience as a whole was less forgiving than McIntyre, and questioner after questioner pressed him to acknowledge legal, if not moral, culpability.

“I don’t even think in those terms,” McIntyre insisted.

Global Cooling Forecast
Attendees hoping to stock up on ammunition to battle global warming alarmists got locked and loaded during the second day of the conference. But few expected the literal cold slap by climate change geologist Don Easterbrook.

“Global warming is over at least for a few decades,” Easterbrook told a breakout section. “However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for even greater concern.”

Easterbrook, an emeritus professor at Western Washington University, documented geologic evidence for sudden climate fluctuations of warming and cooling, all of which occurred before 1945 when carbon dioxide began to rise sharply.

Ten abrupt changes occurred during the past 15,000 years, and another 60 smaller climate changes occurred in the past 5,000 years, he told attendees.

“Expect global cooling for the next two to three decades that will be far more damaging than global warming would have been,” he said, noting twice as many people are killed by extreme cold as by extreme heat, and global food production will suffer because of shorter, cooler growing seasons.

Human Influence Trivial
Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., a professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, reiterated a theme echoed throughout the dozens of breakout sessions and keynote speeches. He declared manmade global warming “is trivially true and essentially meaningless.”

Lindzen accused scientists who warn of crisis-level warming of trying “to support the data [they have created] and not to test the hypothesis.” He noted computer models of climate change “cannot be tested by comparing models to models.”

Lindzen led the audience through a detailed review of current data on global warming and concluded skeptical scientists “should stop accepting the word ‘skeptic’” as a characterization. He said the alarms raised about the threat of global warming don’t “represent a plausible proposition.... Unprecedented climate catastrophes are not about to happen, though in several thousand years we may have another ice age.”

Call for New Journal
Patrick Michaels, Ph.D., a distinguished senior fellow at George Mason University, called for the creation of a new peer-reviewed journal to run online.

Michaels, who has appeared in peer-reviewed journals countless times over his long career, cited the Climategate scandal as evidence the peer-review process for climatologists “has gotten worse” in the past few years. He referred to Climategate emails from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in which influential scientists threatened to end the careers of scientific journal editors and publishers who accepted articles from Michaels and other skeptical climatologists.

Former Virginia governor and U.S. senator George Allen, head of the American Energy Freedom Center, asked the audience to rephrase a common complaint about dependence on foreign oil: “Say that Americans are addicted to freedom and prosperity.”

No Denying the Costs
Economist Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, warned against the Kerry-Lieberman carbon-tax bill, successor to the moribund Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill.

“If there is one overall theme to the economics of cap and trade or other proposed global warming abatement measures,” he said, “it is that there is absolutely no cheap way to curtail carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases.... Inflicting economic pain is not some unintended consequence. It is how any system works that is designed to reduce carbon emissions.”

Hope for Cooperation
The conference concluded with gracious words from Colorado State University climate scientist Scott Denning, who expressed far more concern about global warming than most of the speakers at the conference. Denning expressed disappointment that people expressing his point of view are called “alarmists,” but said the Heartland Institute and his fellow speakers treated him courteously and professionally during the conference.

Denning said the conference can play an important role bringing together scientists from all points of view, and he promised he would encourage scientists who believe humans are causing substantial global warming to accept invitations to speak at the Heartland Institute’s Fifth International Conference on Climate Change.

Dan Miller (dmiller@heartland.org) is executive vice president and publisher for the Heartland Institute.

Comments & Greek painting, Greek artists: Light breaks where no sun shines...

English poets & Greek artists, Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Sunset, Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain...

Dylan Thomas

Poem in October

My birthday began with the water -
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Light breaks where no sun shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Comments & Greek artists, Greek painters: Let's eat chocolate without stop...

Science & Greek artists, Greek paintings, modern Greek painters


Yannis Stavrou, Sunset in Thessaloniki, oil on canvas

Yes, there is a way to face our dramatic problems here, in Greece...

Although all of us suffer from major depression for the time being...

Chocolate! Let's eat chocolate without stop, every day, from morning to evening...

And everything will be better...



Chocolate & Depression...
ABC News/Health, April 26, 2010

The more clinically depressed people become, the more chocolate they eat, a study has found.

People who tested positive for depression consumed about 60 percent more chocolate compared with people who had lower test scores. A depression score suggesting major depression more than doubled chocolate consumption, investigators reported in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

The association held up for both men and women and appeared unaffected by other dietary factors. But whether the findings meant that depressed people may eat more chocolate -- or more chocolate may make people depressed -- is still unclear.

"Whether there is a causal connection, and if so in which direction, is a matter for future prospective study," Dr. Natalie Rose of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues wrote in conclusion.

Cultural traditions have long associated chocolate with mood benefits, as reflected in almost 6 million results the authors retrieved in a Google search of "chocolate" and "mood."

One 2007 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry showed that half of 3,000 people with depression said that chocolate actually made them feel better.

In general, however, associations between chocolate and mood have attracted little scientific interest, Rose and coauthors wrote. The scant published information on the issue has come from studies that had design flaws that limited interpretation of the results.

To improve the quantity and quality of data, the authors examined the relationship between chocolate consumption and mood in 931 men and women who participated in a clinical study of cholesterol control. The questionnaire used in the study included an item about chocolate consumption. Additionally, participants completed a food frequency questionnaire, and investigators assessed the depression level of participants.

Investigators compared chocolate consumption in study participants with lower versus higher scores for depression. The results showed that participants who tested positive for depression consumed an average of 8.4 servings of chocolate per month compared with 5.4 servings among participants with lower scores. Participants with the highest depression scores consumed an average of 11.8 servings of chocolate per month.

"In contrast to the findings for chocolate, differences in consumption of fat, energy, or carbohydrates by [depression score] group were not significant, suggesting relative specificity of the chocolate finding," the authors wrote.

Rose and coauthors suggested several mechanistic explanations for the observed association between chocolate consumption and depression score:

* Stimulation of self-treatment or self-medication with chocolate

* Stimulation of chocolate craving for reasons unrelated to depression

* Chocolate may drive depressive symptoms, rather than vice versa

* Inflammation or other physiologic factors might drive chocolate craving and depression

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?