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A Short History of Decay

1998Emil M. Cioran

2.7/5

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.”

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