It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.
— Cioran
One of my favorite writers is the cranky, old, pessimistic Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran. I read him often. For me, his sentences are pure poetry laced with uncomfortable truths. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to enjoy the wisdom of his writing.
The irony is that his pessimistic ponderings lift my spirit in strange ways. Perhaps it’s because he reminds us of what we already know on a deeper level but are conditioned to ignore or deny. He helps us remove our rose-colored glasses so as to come face to face with naked reality. He reminds us that “the more we are dispossessed, the more intense our appetites and our illusions become.”
Susan Sontag once said:
“Cioran is one of the most delicate minds of real power writing today. Nuance, irony, and refinement are the essence of his thinking…
An argument is to be ‘recognized,’ and without too much help. Good taste demands that the thinker furnish only pithy glimpses of intellectual and spiritual torment. Hence, Cioran’s tone— one of immense dignity, dogged, sometimes playful, often haughty. But for all of what may appear arrogance, there is nothing complacent in Cioran, unless it be his very sense of futility and his uncompromisingly elitist attitude toward the life of the mind…”
Below is a brief essay by Cioran from his brilliant little book, A Short History of Decay. I hope you enjoy it.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself.
Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud.
And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.