A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Thus “destiny,” which can will nothing, is what has willed what happens to us. . . . Infatuated with the Irrational as the sole mode of explanation, we watch it tip the scale of our fate, which weighs only negative elements. Where find the pride to provoke the forces which have so decreed, and what is more, are not to be held responsible for this decree? Against whom wage the struggle, and where lead the assault when injustice haunts the air of our lungs, the space of our thoughts, the silence and the stupor of the stars? Our revolt is as ill conceived as the world which provokes it. How take it on ourselves to right wrongs when, like Don Quixote on his deathbed, we have lost—madness at its end, exhausted—vigor and illusion to confront the highroads, combats, and defeats? And how regain the energy of that seditious angel who, still at time’s start, knew nothing of that pestilential wisdom in which our impulses asphyxiate? Where find enough verve and presumption to stigmatize the herd of the other angels, while here on earth to follow their colleague is to cast oneself still lower, while men’s injustice imitates God’s, and all rebellion sets the soul against infinity and breaks it there? The anonymous angels—huddled under their ageless wings, eternally victors and vanquished in God, numb to the deadly curiosities, dreamers parallel to the earthly griefs—who would dare to cast the first stone at them and, in defiance, divide their sleep? Revolt, the pride of downfall, takes its nobility only from its uselessness: sufferings awaken it and then abandon it; frenzy exalts it and disappointment denies it. . . . Revolt cannot have a meaning in a non-valid universe. . . . No one achieves frivolity straight off. It is a privilege and an art; it is the pursuit of the superficial by those who, having discerned the impossibility of any certitude, have conceived a disgust for such things; it is the escape far from one abyss or another which, being by nature bottomless, can lead nowhere.

To live in expectation, in what is not yet, is to accept the stimulating disequilibrium implied by the very notion of future. Every nostalgia is a transcendence of the present. Even in the form of regret, it assumes a dynamic character: we want to force the past, we want to act retroactively, to protest against the irreversible. Life has a content only in the violation of time. The obsession of elsewhere is the impossibility of the moment; and this impossibility is nostalgia itself. And yet this search is pitiable. The poverty of expression which is the mind’s poverty, is manifest in the indigence of words, in their exhaustion and their degradation: the attributes by which we determine things and sensations finally lie before us like so much verbal carrion. And we glance regretfully at the time when they gave off no more than an odor of confinement. All Alexandrianism begins with the need to ventilate words, to make up for their blemishes by a lively refinement; but it ends in a lassitude in which mind and word are mingled and decompose. [Ideally, the final stage of a literature and of a civilization: imagine a Valéry with the soul of a Nero. . . .] Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our fellow men, the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? For nothing is more natural than to imagine other people’s suicide. 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. To do away with oneself seems such a clear and simple action! Why is it so rare, why does everyone avoid it? Because, if reason disavows the appetite for life, the nothing which extends our acts is nonetheless of a power superior to all absolutes; it explains the tacit coalition of mortals against death; it is not only the symbol of existence, but existence itself; it is everything. And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.That the French should have refused to feel and above all to cultivate the imperfection of the indefinite is certainly suggestive. In a collective form, this disease does not exist in France: what the French call cafard has no metaphysical quality and ennui is managed angularly. The French repel all complacency toward the Possible; their language itself eliminates any complicity with its dangers. Is there any other nation which finds itself more at ease in the world, for which being chez soi has more meaning and more weight, for which immanence offers more attractions? It is difficult to sit in judgment on the revolt of the least philosophical of the angels without a tinge of sympathy, amazement, and . . . blame. Injustice governs the universe. Everything which is done and undone there bears the stamp of a filthy fragility, as if matter were the fruit of a scandal at the core of nothingness. Each being feeds on the agony of some other; the moments rush like vampires upon time’s anemia; the world is a receptacle of sobs. . . . In this slaughterhouse, to fold one’s arms or to draw one’s sword are equally vain gestures. No proud frenzy can shake space to its foundations or ennoble men’s souls. Triumphs and failures follow one another according to an unknown law named destiny, a name to which we resort when, philosophically unprovided for, our sojourn here on earth or anywhere seems insoluble to us, a kind of curse to endure, senseless and undeserved. Destiny—favorite word in the vocabulary of the vanquished. . . . Greedy for a nomenclature of the Irremediable, we seek relief in verbal invention, in lights suspended over our disasters. Words are charitable: their frail reality deceives and consoles us. . . . We cannot overemphasize the historical consequences of certain inner approximations. Now, nostalgia is one of these; it keeps us from resting in existence or in the absolute; it forces us to drift in the indistinct, to lose our foundations, to live uncovered in time.

Man has profaned the things which are born and die under the sun, except for the sun; the things which are born and die in hope, except for hope. Not having had the courage to go further, he has imposed limits upon his cynicism. A cynic, who claims to be consistent, is a cynic in words only; his gestures make him the most contradictory being: no one can live after having decimated his superstitions. To reach total cynicism would require an effort which is the converse of sanctity’s and at least as considerable; or else, imagine a saint who, having reached the pinnacle of his purification, discovers the vanity of the trouble he has taken—and the absurdity of God. . . . In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy . . . whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games. Such a monster of lucidity would change the data of life: he would have the strength and the authority to question the very conditions of his existence; he would no longer be in danger of contradicting himself; no human failing would then weaken his audacities; having lost the religious respect we pay despite ourselves to our last illusions, he would make a plaything of his heart, and of the sun. . . .

This is the mind’s frivolous, funereal debauch. And this mind has squandered itself in what it has named and circumscribed. Infatuated by syllables, it loathed the mystery of heavy silences and turned them light and pure; and it too has become light and pure, indeed lightened and purified of everything. The vice of defining has made it a gracious assassin, and a discreet victim. The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

By what peculiarity of fate do certain beings, having reached the point where they might coincide with a faith, retreat to follow a path which leads them only to themselves—and hence nowhere? Is it out of fear that once installed in grace they might lose there their distinct virtues? Each man develops at the expense of his depths, each man is a mystic who denies himself: the earth is inhabited by various forms of grace manqué, by trampled mysteries.) This vision is no news to the crowd; the crowd continually asks: “what’s the use?"; “what does it matter?"; “it’s not the first time"; “plus ça change . . . “—and yet nothing happens, nothing intervenes: not one saint, not one poet more. .. . If the crowd conformed to a single one of these refrains, the face of the world would be transformed. But eternity—appearing from an anti-vital thought—cannot be a human reflex without danger for the performance of actions: it becomes a commonplace, so that we can forget it by a mechanical repetition. Sanctity is a risk like poetry. Men say “everything passes"—but how many grasp the bearing of this terrifying banality? How many flee life, celebrate or bewail it? Who is not imbued with the conviction that all is vanity? But who dares confront the consequences? The man with a metaphysical vocation is rarer than a monster—and yet each man contains the potential elements of this vocation. It was enough for one Hindu prince to see a cripple, an old man, and a corpse to understand everything; we see them and understand nothing, for nothing changes in our life. We cannot renounce anything; yet the evidences of vanity are in our reach. Invalids of hope, we are still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting. We wait for everything—even Nothingness—rather than be reduced to an eternal suspension, to a condition of neutral divinity, of a corpse. Thus the heart, which has made the Irreparable into an axiom, still hopes for surprises from it. Humanity lives in love with the events which deny it. . . . Each of us takes on himself that unit of disaster which is the phenomenon man. And the only meaning time has is to multiply these units, endlessly to enlarge these vertical sufferings which depend upon a nonentity of matter, upon the pride of a given name, and upon a solitude without appeal.) We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.)

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A Short History of Decay is a 2013 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Michael Maren. [1] It stars Bryan Greenberg, Linda Lavin, Harris Yulin, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Benjamin King and Kathleen Rose Perkins. Though its title is taken from the work of philosophy by Emil Cioran, it is not an adaptation of the book. Having lived out—having verified all the arguments against life—I have stripped it of its savors... I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat which plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter. And I have tried to be faithful to my knowledge, to force my instincts to yield, and realized that it is no use wielding the weapons of nothingness if you cannot turn them against yourself. 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. [5]