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Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.
“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded
over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply
upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary,
deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that
failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it.
It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between
literature and the real dark night of the soul.”
In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure
with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain
distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states,
while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’.
The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s
distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part
which can never act?
“When you imagine you have reached a certain degree
of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots
… But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of
its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of
action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.”
The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is
left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called
the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is
a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to
Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot
achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely
human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Perhaps
this sharp division between sickness and health is
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald
was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify
the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of
this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are
excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity
preserves reason.
“This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our
miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from
our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses
an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.”
This helps answer a perennial question: why did
Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness
can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby selfpreservation.
To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our
purpose, we must use both sickness and health, selfpity
and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny
either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by
example, how various the tension between opposites is
manifested. His examples have one thing in common
it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies
behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.
As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism,
rewarding instead skills of memory and language,
it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point
Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the
stagnant wounds of our lucidity.
“The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should
have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”. �
170
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