(about whom my ?friend Karl has written an impressive tome)
I scribbled:
When you understand that your birth was a defeat, the numbing strangeness of existence can become tolerable, and death...will undo the numbing.
Cioran wrote a lot of aphoristic tosh, such as:
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
~ They might simply be bored with living, rather than reactivate their curiosity and sense of adventure.
He is a victim of a false binary (pessimist/optimist). Suicide can be a neutral act - as mine (if it happens) will be.
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
It depends on your sense of curiosity.
My old age (since the insertion of a long-overdue Pacemaker)
is (so-far) one of the best times of my life.
It is great fun observing the various forms of decline from ever-increasing deafness and dimness of vision to senile psoriasis,
a tendency to mislay things,
a certain totteriness, and lactose intolerance..
It is also enhanced by solitude, with no friends, no visitors,
just polite waves and bonjours at the market.
Like EMC, however, I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person.
which is wonderfully liberating. Until the doctors get me.
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