A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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How define the virus which, eroding his somnolence, has stunned him with insomnia among the universal siesta?

According to Cioran, although both countries have a long Christian tradition, irreligious populations in both countries act as foils to the idea of God, preservering its vitality and cultural relevance—which would be diminished in a more uniformly Christian population.

There are something like material limits to our endurance; yet the expansion of each pang reaches and occasionally exceeds such limits: this is too often the source of our ruin. Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. But while the saints were never to collapse, these others found themselves at the mercy of their own game, masters and victims of their whims—true solitaries, since their solitude was sterile. 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. The illusion that we and our world are fine and dandy and will continue to be fine and dandy must be maintained at all costs.

Like Nietzsche, Cioran is intent on exposing the hypocrisies of the human condition; but unlike Nietzsche, Cioran never once offers a way out, a new horizon, or even words of inspiration. He sees things very darkly indeed, and how such a man could bare to live from day to day surprises me. Many dismissed it as overly morose and pessimistic, completely out of tune with the obligatory optimism of postwar European culture. The major theme of the book is the concept of decay, which may occur in individuals as disease or mental illness, and which may occur in societies as decline into decadence.When we have glimpsed, by an overwhelming and readily renewable intuition, anyone’s own uselessness, it is incomprehensible that everyone has not done the same.