A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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But while the saints were never to collapse, these others found themselves at the mercy of their own game, masters and victims of their whims—true solitaries, since their solitude was sterile. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. 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. 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.

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. How define the virus which, eroding his somnolence, has stunned him with insomnia among the universal siesta? He sees things very darkly indeed, and how such a man could bare to live from day to day surprises me. And I dream of an Eleusis of disabused hearts, of a lucid Mystery, without gods and without the vehemences of illusion.About the author: Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, to an Orthodox priest (main religion in Romania) and a mother who was prone to depression. To kill, on the one hand, truth, and greatness on the other, manias which nourish the mind and the city; to undermine the architecture of the facades protecting the thinker’s pride and the citizen’s; to flex to the point of fracturing the springs of their impulse to conceive and to will; to discredit, by the subtleties of sarcasm and torture, both traditional abstractions and honorable customs—what delicate and brutal effervescence! Not my cup of tea for several reasons, but I’ll admit you’ve shared some very interesting and thought-provoking quotes.

Everything that breathes feeds on the unverifiable; a dose of logic would be deadly to existence—that effort toward the Senseless. In this sense, perhaps the only way to encounter Cioran is to stumble across him, as if by accident or by fate. All Alexandrianism begins with the need to ventilate words, to make up for their blemishes by a lively refinement; but it ends in a lassitude in which mind and word are mingled and decompose. As New, unopened and unread, clean tight sound square, crisp corners and edges, in excellent paperback wrapper.

Every period's ending is the mind's paradise, for the mind regains its play and its whims only within an organism in utter dissolution.