A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history—focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science—in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe. It is not easy to destroy an idol: it takes as much time as is required to promote and to worship one. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.

When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verification of the disease. When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease.Misery’s originality is due to the verbal quality which isolates it in the sum of words and sensations. But we cannot address our prayers to him: to worship him would be to pray irrespectively, to pray to ourselves. The implicit plural of “one” and the avowed plural of “we” constitute the comfortable refuge of false existence. 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.

But that is the point, maybe, he talks of suicide and that life itself is a waste, and yet he goes on living? 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. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. His mother has Alzheimer's, his father has recently had a stroke, and his girlfriend has recently broken up with him. In terms of essays themselves the books is split into six groups of essays or in the case of section five a single essay (part 1 accounts for about half the book).A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable. Marvelous example of a foreigner (Romanian) managing to master the intricacies of the French language. Whether he is an angel that has lost his wings or an ape that has lost his hair, he has been able to leave the anonymity of creatures only by the eclipses of his health.