Emil Cioran : "Disintegration" / "I Do Not Know"

Emil Cioran

On the Heights of Despair

Disintegration

Not everybody loses his innocence: therefore not everybody is unhappy. Those who live naively, not out of stupidity - innocence is a pure state which excludes such deficiencies - but out of instinctive and organic love for nature, whose charm innocence is always quick to discover, those are the ones who achieve harmony, an integration with life, much coveted by those who struggle on the heights of despair. Disintegration implies total loss of innocence, that lovely gift destroyed by knowledge, life’s enemy. Rich ground for love and enthusiasm, innocence is delight in the natural charm of being and the unconscious experience of contradictions which no longer have a tragic character. To attain the virginal joy of innocence, one must not live contradictions consciously, or know tragedy and thoughts of death, because such knowledge is baffling, complex, and requires disjunction. Innocence resists tragedy but welcomes love, because the innocent, never troubled by inner contradictions, have generous impulses.

For the man who has cut himself off from life, tragedy is intensely painful because contradictions arise not only inside himself but also between him and the rest of the world. There are only two fundamental attitudes: the naive and the heroic. All the others partake of them. One must choose between these two in order to avoid idiocy. But for the man who has come to make such a choice, innocence is no longer an option, so there remains only heroism. The latter is both a privilege and a curse for those severed from life, incapable of fulfillment and happiness. To be a hero - in the most universal sense of the wordmeans to aspire to absolute triumph. But such triumphs come only through death. Heroism means transcending life; it is a fatal leap into nothingness, even though the hero may not be aware that his energy springs from a life deprived of its normal supports. All that is innocence, and does not lead to it, belongs to nothingness. Can one speak of the seductions of nothingness ? If we do, we must add that they are much too mysterious to penetrate.

I Do Not Know

I do not know what is right and what is wrong; what is allowed and what is not; I cannot judge and I cannot praise. There are no valid criteria and no consistent principles in the world. It surprises me that some people still concern themselves with a theory of knowledge. To tell the truth, I couldn’t care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known. At times I feel as if I had total knowledge,

exhausting the content of this world; at other times the world around me does not make any sense. Everything then has a bitter taste, there is in me a devilish, monstrous bitterness that renders even death insipid. I realize now for the first time how hard it is to define this bitterness. It may be that I’m wasting my time trying to establish a theoretical basis for it when in fact it originates in a pretheoretical zone.

At this moment I do not believe in anything and I have no hope. All forms and expressions that give life its charm seem to me meaningless. I have no feeling either for the future or for the past, while the present seems to me poison. I do not know whether I am desperate or not, since lack of hope does not automatically imply despair. I could be called anything because I stand to lose nothing. I’ve lost everything ! Flowers are blooming and birds are singing all around me ! How distant I am from everything !

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