Author: Sineokov

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Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.
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trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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“In this our life”

“In this our life” — to be in life: suddenly I am struck by the strangeness of such an expression, as if it applied to no one.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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the paltry depths

Whenever I flag and feel sorry for my brain, I am carried away by an irresistible desire to proclaim. That is the moment I realize the paltry depths out of which rise reformers, prophets, and saviors.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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before stooping to a name

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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Demonic deliverance

Thought is never innocent, for it is pitiless, it is aggressive, it helps us burst our bonds. Were we to suppress what is evil and even demonic in thought, we should have to renounce the very concept of deliverance.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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Being crept out of somewhere [edit]

It is not my beginnings, it is the beginning that matters to me. If I bump into my birth, into a minor obsession, it is because I cannot grapple with the first moment of time. Every individual discomfort leads back, ultimately, to a cosmogonic discomfort, each of our sensation, by which Being crept out of somewhere. . . .

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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wallowing in the virtual

Endlessly to refer to a world where nothing yet stooped to occurrence, where you anticipated consciousness without desiring it, where, wallowing in the virtual, you rejoiced in the null plenitude of a self anterior to selfhood. . . .

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

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the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending

There is a kind of knowledge that strips whatever you do of weight and scope: for such knowledge, everything is without basis except itself. Pure to the point of abhorring even the notion of an object, it translates that extreme science according to which doing or not doing something comes down to the same thing and is accompanied by an equally extreme satisfaction: that of being able to rehearse, each time, the discovery that any gesture performed is not worth defending, that nothing is enhanced by the merest vestige of substance, that “reality” falls within the province of lunacy. Such knowledge deserves to be called posthumous: it functions as if the knower were alive and not alive, a being and the memory of a being. “It’s already in the past,” he says about all that he achieves, even as he achieves it, thereby forever destitute of the present.

— E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born