A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

What nightmares have we sustained for nights on end to wake up in the mornings enemies of the sun? Must we liquidate ourselves to put an end to everything? What complicity, what bonds extend us into an intimacy with time? Life would be intolerable without the forces which deny it. Masters of a possible exit, of the idea of an escape, we might readily abolish ourselves and, at the apex of delirium, expectorate this universe. Since Adam men’s entire effort has been to modify man. The aims of reform and of pedagogy, articulated at the expense of irreducible data, denature thought and distort its movement. Knowledge has no more desperate enemy than the educative instinct, at once optimistic and virulent, which no philosopher can escape: how would their systems be unscathed by it? Outside the Irremediable, everything is false; false this civilization which seeks to combat it, false the truths with which it arms itself. A Short History of Decay is a 1949 philosophical book by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, his first work written in French. Nihilistic in tone, the book consists of a series of philosophical reflections on various subjects, such as fanaticism, music, and progress. [1] The major theme of the book is the concept of decay, which may occur in individuals as disease or mental illness, and which may occur in societies as decline into decadence. Only the rational animal has been able to learn nothing from his philosophy: he locates himself apart—and perseveres nonetheless in the same errors of effective appearance and void reality. Seen from outside, from any Archimedean point, life—with all its beliefs—is no longer possible, nor even conceivable. We can act only against the truth. Man starts over again every day, in spite of everything he knows, against everything he knows. He has extended this ambiguity to the point of vice: perspicacity is in mourning, but—strange contagion—this very mourning is active; thus we are led into a funeral procession to the Last Judgment; thus, out of the ultimate rest itself, out of history’s final silence, we have made an activity: the staging of the agony, the need for dynamism even in the death-rattles. . . .

We cannot elude existence by explanations, we can only endure it, love or hate it, adore or dread it, in that alternation of happiness and horror which expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bright or bitter vehemences. We must be thankful to the civilizations which have not taken an overdose of seriousness, which have played with values and taken their pleasure in begetting and destroying them. Who knows, outside of the Greek and French civilizations, a more lucidly facetious proof of the elegant nothingness of things? The age of Alcibiades and the eighteenth century in France are two sources of consolation. [10] All truths are against us. But we go on living, because we accept them in themselves, because we refuse to draw the consequences. Where is the man who has translated—in his behavior—a single conclusion of the lessons of astronomy, of biology, and who has decided never to leave his bed again out of rebellion or humility in the face of the sidereal distances or the natural phenomena? Has pride ever been conquered by the evidence of our unreality? And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity? The sciences prove our nothingness. But who has grasped their ultimate teaching? Who has become a hero of total sloth? No one folds his arms: we are busier than the ants and the bees. Yet if an ant, if a bee—by the miracle of an idea or by some temptation of singularity— were to isolate herself in the anthill or the hive, if she contemplated from outside the spectacle of her labors, would she still persist in her pains? It is not easy to destroy an idol: it takes as much time as is required to promote and to worship one. For it is not enough to annihilate its material symbol, which is easy; but its roots in the soul. How turn your eyes toward the twilight ages—when the past was liquidated under a scrutiny which only the void could dazzle—without being moved by that great art which is the death of a civilization? A Short History of Decay is a 2013 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Michael Maren. [1] It stars Bryan Greenberg, Linda Lavin, Harris Yulin, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Benjamin King and Kathleen Rose Perkins. Though its title is taken from the work of philosophy by Emil Cioran, it is not an adaptation of the book.The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer. The philosopher’s originality comes down to inventing terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world— and about as many ways of dying—the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range. a b Petreu, Marta (2005). An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Ivan R. Dee. pp.275, 282. ISBN 9781566636070. Athens was dying, and with it the worship of knowledge. The great systems had run their course: limited to the conceptual realm, they rejected the intervention of torments, the pursuit of deliverance and of inordinate meditation upon suffering. The declining city, having permitted the conversion of human disasters into theory, no matter what—sneeze or sudden death—was supplanting the old problems. The obsession with remedies marks the end of a civilization; the search for salvation, that of a philosophy. Plato and Aristotle had yielded to such preoccupations only for the sake of equilibrium; after them, such concerns prevailed in every domain. Everything conspires, elements and actions alike, to harm you. Arm yourself in disdain, isolate yourself in a fortress of disgust, dream of superhuman indifference? The echoes of time would persecute you in your ultimate absences. . . . When nothing can keep you from bleeding, ideas themselves turn red or encroach on each other like tumors. There is no specific in our pharmacies against existence; nothing but minor remedies for braggarts. But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . . .

By what peculiarity of fate do certain beings, having reached the point where they might coincide with a faith, retreat to follow a path which leads them only to themselves—and hence nowhere? Is it out of fear that once installed in grace they might lose there their distinct virtues? Each man develops at the expense of his depths, each man is a mystic who denies himself: the earth is inhabited by various forms of grace manqué, by trampled mysteries.) In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Cioran, Emil (1995) [Originally published in 1937]. Tears and Saints. Translated by Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. University of Chicago Press. pp.61, 81–82. ISBN 9780226106748.Having lived out—having verified all the arguments against life—I have stripped it of its savors... I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat which plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter. And I have tried to be faithful to my knowledge, to force my instincts to yield, and realized that it is no use wielding the weapons of nothingness if you cannot turn them against yourself. For the outburst of desires, amid our knowledge which contradicts them, creates a dreadful conflict between our mind opposing the Creation and the irrational substratum which binds us to it still. [5] By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of putrefaction; its odors shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition. Once, when Teresa, patron saint of Spain and of your soul, prescribed a course of temptations and intoxications, the transcendent abyss amazed you like a fall into the heavens. But those heavens have vanished—like the temptations and intoxications—and in the cold heart the fevers of Avila are extinguished forever. Though his books are well-regarded today, and though he received many literary prizes for them (nearly all of which he refused), Cioran always held the worlds of literature and philosophy at arm’s length. His willful experiment with style has largely prevented his work from being easily recognized: neither philosophy nor poetry, neither essay nor novel, neither manifesto nor confession. Perhaps he preferred it this way. Of course, in our digital age is quite easy to find Cioran’s books. The real question is why one would read them. In this sense, perhaps the only way to encounter Cioran is to stumble across him, as if by accident or by fate.

The film was shot in October and November 2012 in Wilmington, North Carolina, [2] Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, [3] and New York City. It premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival on October 12, 2013 and it opened theatrically at the Village East Cinema on May 16, 2014. This is the mind’s frivolous, funereal debauch. And this mind has squandered itself in what it has named and circumscribed. Infatuated by syllables, it loathed the mystery of heavy silences and turned them light and pure; and it too has become light and pure, indeed lightened and purified of everything. The vice of defining has made it a gracious assassin, and a discreet victim.Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again. . . . Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and a pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us. Carla Thomas of the Goddard College Department of Philosophy praised the book's prose, describing Cioran as a "master of cynicism, of the sardonic a perçu and the trenchant aphorism." [14] Nathan Knapp of the Times Literary Supplement spoke positively of the sense of dread Cioran depicted within the book, and writing in 2019, said that "he is exactly the kind of thinker our present moment most richly deserves." [1]