Identify Books In Favor Of A Short History of Decay
| Original Title: | Précis de décomposition |
| ISBN: | 1559704640 (ISBN13: 9781559704649) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | PEN Translation Prize for Richard Howard (1976) |
Emil M. Cioran
Paperback | Pages: 186 pages Rating: 4.26 | 3071 Users | 217 Reviews
Itemize Epithetical Books A Short History of Decay
| Title | : | A Short History of Decay |
| Author | : | Emil M. Cioran |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 186 pages |
| Published | : | September 15th 1998 by Arcade Publishing (first published 1949) |
| Categories | : | Philosophy. Nonfiction. Writing. Essays. History |
Narration Concering Books A Short History of Decay
The Poetry of DeathA Short History of Decay is a compendium of pessimistic aphorism, a sort of cosmopolitan collection of Gnostic scripture through the ages. It is entertaining, observationally acute, and compelling - all descriptions that the author would object to strenuously. I think he would accept ‘poetry of death’ much more readily, however. There is little except for death about which Cioran has anything good to say.
Cioran begins as a sort of secular Qoholeth from the Old Testament: All is vanity. And Cioran means everything, especially those conceits of faith by religionists who have lost the capacity to doubt: “What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma?” Cioran’s hero is the doubting Hamlet, he who hesitates, who doubts, who questions what he knows incessantly. “The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth”
But it is not religion per se that is the source of evil, it is human self-assurance: “Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it... His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse... We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits.” One can almost hear Nietzsche clapping with approval in the distance.
So the fundamental problem is idealism. People who have a plan for making things better are the carriers of a deadly mental virus. These small-time peddlers of happiness scam a willing audience into believing that it is possible to reduce the net amount of misery in the world. Thus “Society is an inferno of saviors!” What human beings don’t or won’t recognise is that existence is misery. Schopenhauer has now joined Nietzsche in approbation.
The only cure for miserable existence is the termination of existence, suicide. This is the only aspect of existence we can control. Contrary to the dictum of St. Paul that our lives are not our own, Cioran makes the rather more obvious point that they are. It is the only thing we can call entirely our own: “We change ideas like neckties; for every idea, every criterion comes from outside, from the configurations and accidents of time... death is the true criterion, the only one contained within us.” Writing seven years after Camus’s Sisyphus, he managed to radicalise even that paean to control 0ver one’s existence.
Philosophy, actually thought in general, is not helpful in the situation. “The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility.” Philosophies are at best consoling fictions, and at worst reasons to persecute other human beings. “All of life’s evils come from a ‘conception of life’,” Cioran thinks. In this he is not far from Kierkegaard’s distrust of philosophy: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
In fact Cioran’s real issue is with language itself, with words pretending to be more than grunts and scratches. He thinks “Man is the chatterbox of the universe.” We throw words around as if they had substance. But as Wittgenstein has demonstrated, words refer only to other words. Consequently, Cioran concludes “We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us.” Ludwig would likely agree.
The only acceptable use of words, indeed the only ‘reasonable’ activity for a human being is poetry. At least poetry doesn’t pretend to be more than it is. In fact it doesn’t pretend to be anything at all. Poetry is a personal act of construction. “Only the poet takes responsibility for ‘I,’ he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so.” T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland seems a model for just this view.
Ultimately it is the ancient Gnostic appreciation of the world - shared certainly by the relatively optimistic(!) Thomas Ligotti - which drives Cioran: “Injustice governs the universe. Everything which is done and undone there bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness.” This seems to me outstanding poetry, as does his summary of his own life “In Time’s sentence men take their place like commas, while, in order to end it, you have immobilized yourself into a period.”
Rating Epithetical Books A Short History of Decay
Ratings: 4.26 From 3071 Users | 217 ReviewsCriticism Epithetical Books A Short History of Decay
Maybe the most quotable book I've read lately. I thought I was a few levels deep into a modern interpretation of cynicism before reading this, but apparently there's plenty of space below me on the scale. What do I mean? Where philosophers like Sartre or Camus might have found absurdity in the everyday, Cioran finds despair. His most striking sentiment is that suicide is the most logical decision a person can make, but humans are too illogical in nature to commit. I've even repeated it to peopleWhat do you get when you mix Diogenes, Heraclitus, Lao zi, the Buddha and La Rochefoucauld in a small piece of coal and crushes it under an infitiny of existential despair and cosmic horror?Cioran constantly mentions what a romantic, idealistic young man he was - though in "In the Heights of Despair" he seems as nihilistic as always - and how now he has matured, abandoning every trace of active philosophy, abandoning movement and hope. And it's true, he does reads like a mature adult and not a
A brilliant masterpiece. Says so much with such artistry. Think - Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco but flavored with full-blown nihilistic humor. Cioran has me convinced by about the first paragraph that life is absurd, God wasted was a complete failure until he created Bach and totally redeemed himself, people who live in monasteries are egotistical because they care more about their own souls than living with the rest of us... only the skeptics and the decadent roman emperors had living
As brilliant a thinker and writer as Cioran was, it became evident to me why I was not very familiar with his work, as I made my way through this collection of essays. To put it succinctly, he is dark as fuck. I honestly would not recommend reading this to anyone suffering from a serious form of depression. On the other hand, I dont think most people who are not depressed would typically enjoy delving this deep into the ruminations of such a bleak worldview. Cioran takes his nihilism all the
I love Cioran's writing but confess that he makes me laugh out loud, much in the same way that de Sade's attempts to shock raise a chuckle and the Handsome Family's modern American Gothic appeal to my Irish/English sense of the ridiculous. I simply cannot take him seriously, and for the reader, such an attitude becomes liberating: you can simply revel in the use of language and the daring with which he expresses the most life-negating ideas. They become hilarious, a joy to read. A delight.
Well, this one took a while for such a slim volume. But even aside from being an aphoristic work of philosophy (seldom the sort of thing to benefit from being read at speed), it's hard powering through a book which is one long sigh. A hymn to the futility of everything - including thinking you've gained anything by having noticed the futility of everything - it's torn between Cioran's desire to fade away, and his envy for the great monsters of history. At times, especially when he's compellingly
not seeing the appeal. overt fascist muses on decadence. how many motherfuckers died to extinguish this kind of self-obsessed bullshit?
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