When the onslaught was over, just one word had escaped:
Solitude*. I woke up in a state of euphoria."
* translated from the French, in which language Solitude can mean loneliness, isolation or solitude.
In English loneliness and solitude are very different things.
We think only because we have language.
Language - not place, territory, tribe or kin -
is (as Cioran pointed out) each human being's only home -
and a very fragile, rickety home it is!
Some fortunate people have several such homes, but they are rarely rich.
(Languages are becoming fewer year by year,
and now the only truly 'international' language is English Bureaucratic -
a language ideal for making statements and 'marketing'
rather than suggesting the subtleties of process, mood or sensation.)
Without thought, hence without language,
we would not be leading the planet into its Sixth Extinction.
Cioran reduced the significance of language to the single solitary word.
I, more generously (or more fatuously ?),
allow two in order to make the only song, the only poem, the only novel, the only dirge:
Humanity:
Catastrophe.
But beyond our mere consciousness-through-language
(and our mere solar system)
what is 'catastrophe' ?
Only the business of being born and 'socialised'...
which (ironically and uniquely) we
can lighten with a sense of humour,
an amused acceptance of the ridiculous vanity of being
- à la Beckett.
Emile Cioran took himself, his birth and his death so seriously as to be ridiculous.
Hence his cogito, ergo glum appeal to other solipsists.
* * *