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the earth was falling through space and I was falling with it

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that the earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

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

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drive to distraction

A task to be done, something I have undertaken out of necessity or choice: no sooner have I started in than everything seems important, everything attracts me, except that.

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

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Particle is not the word

Why fear the nothing in store for us when it is no different from the nothing which preceded us: this argument of the Ancients against the fear of death is unacceptable as consolation. Before, we had the luck not to exist; now we exist, and it is this particle of existence, hence of misfortune, which dreads death. Particle is not the word, since each of us prefers himself to the universe, at any rate considers himself equal to it.

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

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If you are doomed to devour yourself

If you are doomed to devour yourself, nothing can keep you from it: a trifle will impel you as much as a tragedy. Resign yourself to erosion at all times: your fate wills it so.

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

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“We no longer dream”

In a remote province in India, everything was explained by dreams, and what is more important, dreams were used to cure diseases as well. It was according to dreams that business was conducted and matters of life and death decided. Until the English came. Since then, one native said, “We no longer dream.”

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

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the chain of admiration

We cannot forgive those we have praised to the skies, we are impatient to break with them, to snap the most delicate chain of all: the chain of admiration . . . , not out of insolence, but out of aspiration to find our bearings, to be free, to be . . . ourselves. Which we manage only by an act of injustice.

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

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The Beatles Butcher Cover

On June 15, 1966, Capitol Records released a Beatles album without the Beatles’ consent entitled Yesterday and Today. This featured an image that has become known as the Butcher Cover . . .

Butcher cover

(Photograph conceived and executed by Bob Whitaker)

“The original cover, created in England, was intended as a ‘pop art’ satire. However a sampling of public opinion in the United States indicates that the cover design is subject to misinterpretation. For this reason, and to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles’ image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the LP and substitute a more generally acceptable design.” – Alan W. Livingston, President of Capitol Records (USA), Tuesday, June 14, 1966.

“It was inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it. Bob was into Dali and making surreal pictures.” – John Lennon, in the interview conducted just before his death in 1980.

This now-legendary image, probably the single most famous image of the group, was originally conceived as one of a triptych of photographs, and intended as a surreal, satirical pop art observation on The Beatles’ fame. Whitaker’s inspirations for the images included the work of German surrealist Hans Bellmer, notably his 1937 book Die Puppe (La Poupée). Bellmer’s images of dismembered doll and mannequin parts were first published in the French Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1934.

“It’s an apparent switch-around of how you think. Can you imagine actually drinking out of a fur tea cup? . . . Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I’d watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people.” – Whitaker, session photographer

The albums with the butcher cover were withdrawn and returned, and a new cover was hastily prepared. . . . The offending photo was replaced by an unremarkable Whitaker shot of the Beatles gathered around a large steamer trunk, taken in Brian Epstein’s office. It was rushed to America, where Capitol staff spent the following weekend taking the discs from the returned “butcher” sleeves and putting them in the new sleeve.

Several thousand copies of the original cover were destroyed and replaced by the “cabin trunk” sleeve, but Capitol eventually decided that it would be more economical to simply paste the new cover photo over the old one. After the album was released, news of the paste-over operation leaked out, and Beatles fans across America began steaming the cabin trunk photos off of their copies of Yesterday And Today in the hope of finding the “butcher” cover underneath.

The butcher cover is now one of the most valuable and sought-after pieces of Beatles memorabilia. George Harrison himself called it “the definitive Beatles collectible” . . . .

[All text in this entry is from nine nine one]

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my taedium vitae

The energy and virulence of my taedium vitae continue to astound me. So much vigor in a disease so decrepit! To this paradox I owe my present incapacity to choose my final hour.

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

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each engenders his own enemy

Children turn, and must turn, against their parents, and the parents can do nothing about it, for they are subject to a law which decrees the relations among all the living: i.e., that each engenders his own enemy.

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

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Nothing condemns us more than our incapacity to shout our good luck

No one exclaims he is feeling well and that he is free, yet this is what all who know this double blessing should do. Nothing condemns us more than our incapacity to shout our good luck.

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

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no prayer has ever reached its destination

In a Gnostic work of the second century of our era, we read: “The prayer of a melancholy man will never have the strength to rise unto God.” . . . Since man prays only in despondency, we may deduce that no prayer has ever reached its destination.

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

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dying is immoral

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral. . . .

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