(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.
2 comments:
Given its price tag, I reckon you have either gotten Karl's tome from a library (the regular way or your way) or a free author's copy? Maybe I can score it from somewhere, too.
My journey ended last Friday. I really need to get going again somewhere warm, where wild camping is tolerated.
- Martin
No, he just told me about it. He is very taken by Cioran and the other Romanian, the poet Paul Celan. We had a long correspondence, and met briefly in France when he was visiting the rich parents of his then-girlfriend. He is (like most men) quite a veiled person.
It was 18° here yesterday, while Big Storms raged over the British Isles.
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