We Troglodytes

By: Emil Cioran

Photo: Charles Gatewood

Values do not accumulate: a generation contributes something new only by trampling on what was unique in the preceding generation.

This is even more the case in the succession of centuries: the Renaissance could not “save” the depth, the phantoms, the genre of savagery of the Middle Ages; the Enlightenment in its turn preserved only the sense of the universal from the Renaissance, without the pathos which marked its physiognomy.

The modern illusion has plunged man into the swoons of becoming: he has lost his footing in eternity, his “substance.”