On the Heights of Despair

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All men have the same defect: they wait to live, for they have not the courage for each instant. Why not invest enough passion in each moment to make it an eternity? We all learn to live only when we no longer have anything to expect, because we do not live in the living present but in a vague and distant future. We should not wait for anything except the immediate promptings of the moment. We should wait without the consciousness of time. There’s no salvation without the immediate. But man is a being who no longer knows the immediate. He is an indirect animal. (111) A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis. But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear. A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people. On the Heights of Despair ( Romanian: Pe culmile disperării) is a Romanian philosophical work written by Emil Cioran, published in 1934 as his first book. It consists of several brief reflections on negative themes which later permeated Cioran's work, such as death, insomnia and insanity. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Bucharest and in 1932, he received a BA in philosophy with a thesis on Bergson’s thoughts. From 1933 to the end of 1935 Cioran studied philosophy in Berlin with a grant from the Humboldt Foundation. 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.I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce. Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 78. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR.Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent. There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than anything else, nor any idea better than any other. Why grow sad from one’s sadness and delight in one’s joy? What does it matter whether our tears come from pleasure or pain? Love your unhappiness and hate your happiness, mix everything up, scramble it all! Be a snowflake dancing in the air, a flower floating downstream! Have courage when you don’t need to, and be a coward when you must be brave! Who knows? You may still be a winner! And if you lose, does it really matter? Is there anything to win in this world? All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.” Regier, Willis (2004). "Cioran's Insomnia". MLN. 119 (5): 996. doi: 10.1353/mln.2005.0018. JSTOR 3251887. S2CID 170780097– via JSTOR. Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world? I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope. In 1942, Cioran met Simone Boué, another insomniac, whom he lived with for the rest of his life. Cioran kept their relationship entirely private, and never spoke of his relationship with Boué in his writings or interviews. [26]

Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time. Ornea, Z. (1995). Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească. Bucharest: Fundației Culturale Române. ISBN 973-9155-43-X. OCLC 33346781. You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one! Jakob, Michel; Cioran, Emil; Greenspan, Kate (1994). "Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E.M. Cioran". Salmagundi. 103 (103): 143. JSTOR 40548762– via JSTOR. The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned — a saint or a corpse. So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined. a b Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 76. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR.