A Short History Of Decay Quotes

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .

The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave’s virtue.

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. Idolaters by instinct, we convert the objects of our dreams and our interests into the Unconditional. History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable. Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create fake gods, he feverishly adopts them: his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

Once I had a “self”; now I am no more than an object.

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams. Thus sleep’s labor not only diminishes the power of our thought, but even that of our secrets.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

إذا كانت الحياة تحتل المركز الأول في سُلم الأكاذيب, فالحب يأتي بعدها مُباشرة.كذبة داخل كذبة هي التعبير عن موقفنا الهجين,الحب محاط بادوات غبطى وتعذيب تعود إلى ما نجده في أحدهم كبديل لأنفسنا . لكن يالها من خدعة تُحول عيوننا بعيداً عن العزلة!, هل هناك أي خيبة أكثر إذلالاً للعقل؟ الحب مُسكن مؤقت للمعرفة;اليقظة والمعرفة تفتل الحب. اللاواقعية لايمكنها أن تنتصر إلى أجل غير مُسمى,حتى بتقنيع المظاهر لأكبر كذبة تمجيداً. علاوة على ذلك من الذي لديه أوهام صلبة بما يكفي ليرى في الأخر ما لم يراه عبثاً في نفسه؟ أيمكن أن نجد في تنور من الأحشاء ما لم نجده في الكون؟

umiremo srazmerno broju rechi koje razbacujemo svuda oko sebe.oni koji govore nemaju tajni. a svi govorimo. izdajemo se, krchmimo dushu; svako se, kao dzhelat neizrecivog, upinje da unishti sve tajne, pochev od sopstvenih.

و كنا في لحظة الولادة مُدركين كما نحن في نهاية سن المراهقة, لكان من المرجح أن الإنتحار في عمر الخامسة ظاهرة عادية أو مسألة شرف,لكننا نستيقظ مُتأخرين

güzellik, tomurcukların içinde şişinen ölümden başka bir şey değildir

Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses?

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping

Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it?

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

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.

History is irony on the move.

Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.

Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods—and barbarism.

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

If we could understand and love the infinity of agonies which languish around us, all the lives which are hidden deaths, we should require as many hearts as there are suffering beings.

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?

bir inanç için acı çekmiş olandan daha tehlikeli bir varlık yoktur: en büyük zalimler kafası kesilmemiş mazlumlar arasından çıkar. acı, güç iştahını azaltmak şöyle dursun, onu azdırır; zihin de kendini bir soytarının meclisinde bir kurbanınkinden daha rahat hisseder; onu, bir fikir için ölünen gösteriden daha fazla tiksindiren hiçbir şey yoktur.

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

In the verbal conflagration of a Shakespeare and a Shelley we smell the ash of words, backwash and effluvium of an impossible cosmogony. The terms encroach upon each other, as though none could attain the equivalent of the inner dilation; this is the hernia of the image, the transcendent rupture of poor words, born of everyday use and miraculously raised to the heart’s altitudes. The truths of beauty are fed on exaggerations which, upon the merest analysis, turn out to be monstrous and meaningless. Poetry: demiurgical divagation of the vocabulary. . . . Has charlatanism ever been more effectively combined with ecstasy? Lying, the wellspring of all tears! such is the imposture of genius and the secret of art. Trifles swollen to the heavens; the improbable, generator of a universe! In every genius coexists a braggart and a god.

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable... Everyone trying to remedy everyone's life. Society- an inferno of saviors!

The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch-—and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain—spectators of the human convulsion—the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise.

الإنسان الذي لم يسبق أن تصور فنائه أبداً,لجوئه المتوقع إلى الحبل, الرصاصة, السُم, أو البحَر, هو عبد مُنحط لا يصلح سوى للتجديف في سفينة ,أو مجرد دودة تحبوا على جيفة الكون. يمكن للكون أن يأخذ منا كل شيء, أن يُحرم علينا كل شيء, لكن لا أحد يستطيع أن يمنعنا عن محو أنفسنا. كل الأدوات تعرض خدماتها, كل الهاويات تدعونا, لكن جميع غرائزنا تعارض الفعل. هذا التعارض يطور نزاعاً مُستعصياً على الحل في العقل. عندما نبدأ نتمعن في الحياة,لنكتشف فيها فراغاً لامتناه, تكون غرائزنا قد تحولت مُسبقاً إلى مرشد ووسيط لأفعالنا ;إنها تكبح جماح تحليق إلهامنا وليونة إنصياع إنعزالنا

Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.

Her insanın içinde bir peygamber uyuklar ve o uyandığında, dünyadaki kötülük biraz daha artar...

Toplum - bir kurtarıcılar cehennemi! Diogenes'in elinde lambasıyla aradığı, ilgisiz biriydi.

The mind’s ‘seasons’ are conditioned by an organic rhythm; it is not up to ‘me’ to be naïve or cynical: my truths are the sophisms of my enthusiasm or of my dejection.

The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equalled only by their futility.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

To be something – unconditional – is always a form of madness from which life – flower of fixed ideas – frees itself only to fade.

This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.

Apart from a few examples of exhaustive melancholy, and a few unequalled suicides, men are merely puppets stuffed with red globules in order to beget history and its grimaces.

In the gamut of creatures, only man inspires a sustained disgust.

He who is lucid, understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and masters his acts will never execute a memorable action. Psychology is the hero’s tomb.

Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation.

Man is free—and sterile—only in the interval when the gods die; slave—and creative—only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.

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.

We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe, will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. 'Imperishable monuments' and 'immortal deeds,' death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect. Arthur Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, eighth edition, pp. 30-31.

bütün kurtuluş öğretilerinin kusuru, tamamlanmamışlığın iklimi olan şiiri ortadan kaldırmalarıdır. şair, selamete ermeye özendiğinde kendine ihanet etmiş olur: selamet şarkının ölümüdür...

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successfully servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards – but from which you do not escape without dying.

Am întors spatele filozofiei cînd mi-am dat seama că e cu neputinţă să descopăr la Kant vreo slăbiciune omenească, vreo urmă adevărată de tristeţe; la Kant şi la toţi filozofii. In raport cu muzica, cu mistica şi poezia, activitatea filozofică e hrănită de o sevă sub¬ţiată şi de o profunzime suspectă, care nu-i ademe¬neşte decît pe oamenii timizi sau căldicei. De altfel, filozofia — nelinişte impersonală, refugiu în preajma unor idei anemice — e soluţia tuturor celor care fug de exuberanţa corupătoare a vieţii. Aproape toţi filo¬zofii au sfîrşit bine: iată supremul argument îm¬potriva filozofiei. Sfîrşitul lui Socrate însuşi nu are în el nimic tragic: e o neînţelegere, sfîrşitul unui pedagog — iar Nietzsche s-a prăbuşit doar ca poet şi vizionar: el şi-a ispăşit extazele, nu raţionamentele.

Outside of the surrender of the incommunicable, the suspension amid our mute and unconsoled anxieties, life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Hepimiz, düşündüğümüzden çok daha fazla şeye inanırız; hoşgörüsüzlükleri barındırır, kanlı tedbirlere ihtimam gösterir ve fikirlerimizi aşırı yöntemlerle savunarak dünyayı itiraz edilmez gezici kaleler gibi katederiz. Herkes kendi kendisi için yüce bir dogmadır; hiçbir ilahiyat, tanrısını, bizim benliğimizi koruduğumuz gibi korumaz; o benliği de şüphelerle sarıp mesele edinsek bile, gururumuzun sahte bir zarafetindendir bu: Dava peşinen kazanılmıştır.

Quand la conscience parviendra à surplomber tous nos secrets, quand de notre malheur sera évacué le dernier vestige de mystère, aurons-nous encore un reste de fièvre et d'exaltation pour contempler la ruine de l'existence et de la poésie ?

Nostalgia de um mundo sem “ideal”, de uma agonia sem doutrina, de uma eternidade sem vida... O Paraíso... Mas não poderíamos existir um instante sem enganar-nos: o profeta em cada um de nós é o grão de loucura que nos faz prosperar em nosso vazio.

According to Meister Eckhart, divinity precedes God, being His essence, his unfathomable depth. What should we find at man’s inmost core which defines his substance in opposition to the divine essence? Neurasthenia – which is to man what divinity is to God.

We cannot elude existence by explanations, we can only endure it, love it or hate it, adore it or dread it, in that alternation of happiness and horror which expresses the very rhythm of being, its oscillations, its dissonances, its bright or bitter vehemences.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.

Intre sfînta Tereza şi celelalte femei nu ar exista deci decît o deosebire ce ţine de putinţa de a delira, de intensitatea şi locul spre care sînt îndreptate capriciile. Iubirea — omenească sau divină — aduce pe aceeaşi treaptă toate făpturile: a iubi o tîrfă sau a-1 iubi pe Dumnezeu presupune aceeaşi simţire: în amîndouă cazurile, urmezi impulsul creaturii. Doar obiectul se schimbă; dar ce interes prezintă el, de vreme ce nu e decît un pretext pentru nevoia de adoraţie, iar Dumnezeu nu e decît un derivativ prin¬tre atîtea altele ?

radioactive elements decayed into other elements—that one day you had an atom of uranium, say, and the next you had an atom of lead. This was truly extraordinary. It was alchemy, pure and simple; no one had ever imagined that such a thing could happen naturally and spontaneously.

Todas as nossas humilhações provêm de que não podemos resolver-nos a morrer de fome. Pagamos caro esta covardia. Viver em função dos homens, sem vocação de mendigo! Rebaixar-se ante esses macacos engravatados, sortudos, enfatuados! Estar à mercê dessas caricaturas indignas até de desprezo!

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of petrification; its odours shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition.

The solutions offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do. But there exists a dignity which keeps us from disappearing into God and which transforms all our moments into prayers we shall never offer.

It is disturbing to think that we carry our secret – our illusion – into the grave, that we have not survived the mysterious mistake that vivified our every breath, that, except for the sceptics and whores among us, all founder in falsehood because they fail to divine the equivalence, in nullity, of triumphs and truths.

The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception. The heart’s void confronting time’s: two mirrors, reflecting each other’s absence, one and the same image of nullity…

The artist abandoning his poem, exasperated by the indigence of words, prefigures the confusion of the mind discontented within the context of the existent. Incapacity to organize the elements—as stripped of meaning and savor as the words which express them—leads to the revelation of the void. Thus the rhymer withdraws into silence or into impenetrable artifices.

So long as our untried senses and our naïve heart recognize themselves and delight in the universe of qualifications, they flourish with the aid and at the risk of the adjective, which, once dissected, proves inadequate, deficient. We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly.... Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing—each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain luster upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture—pryrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.

The philosophers’ originality comes down to inverting terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world – and about as many ways of dying – the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range. We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.

Se, no momento de nosso nascimento, fôssemos tão conscientes como o somos ao sair da adolescência, é mais do que provável que aos cinco anos o suicídio fosse um fenômeno habitual ou mesmo uma questão de honorabilidade. Mas despertamos tarde demais: temos contra nós os anos fecundados unicamente pela presença dos instintos, que devem ficar estupefatos com as conclusões a que conduzem nossas meditações e decepções.

Perseverăm în viaţă pentru că ea nu se sprijină pe nimic, pentru că este lipsită pînă şi de umbra unui temei. Moartea este prea exactă; toate argumentele sînt de partea ei. Misterioasă pentru instinctele noastre, ea se desenează, în faţa cugetului nostru, limpede, fără farmece înşelătoare, şi fără falsele atracţii ale necunoscutului. Ingrămădind mistere de nimic şi monopolizînd nonsensul, viaţa inspiră mai multă spaimă decît moartea: ea este marele Necunoscut. Unde poate duce atîta vid şi atîta neînţeles? Ne agăţăm de zile pentru că dorinţa de a muri e prea logică şi deci ineficace. Dacă viaţa ar avea un singur argument în favoarea ei — desluşit, de o evidenţă indiscutabilă —, s-ar spulbera; instinctele şi prejudecăţile se destramă în contact cu Rigoarea. Tot ce respiră se hrăneşte cu ceea ce nu poate fi verificat; un supliment de logică i-ar fi funest existenţei — efort către Nebunie... Daţi vieţii un scop precis: îşi pierde pe loc orice atracţie. Prin inexactitatea finalităţilor, e superioară morţii; un grăunte de precizie ar coborî-o la trivialitatea mormintelor. Căci o ştiinţă pozitivă a sensului vieţii ar pustii pămîntul într-o singură zi; şi nici cel mai pătimaş şi înverşunat om n-ar izbuti să mai însufleţească improbabilitatea fecundă a Dorinţei.

The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the ‘will to live,’ in ‘idea,’ or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.

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 anaemia; 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.

The philosophic exercise is not fruitful; it is merely honourable. We are always philosophers with impunity: a metier without fate which pours voluminous thoughts into our neutral and vacant hours, the hours refractory to the Old Testament, to Bach, and to Shakespeare. And have these thoughts materialized into a single page that is equivalent to one of Job’s exclamations, of Macbeth’s terrors, or the altitude of one of Bach’s cantatas? We do not argue the universe; we express it. And philosophy does not express it.

He has time for gossip, for prophecies, for marvelous dramatic interplays, for treatises on history, for analyzing the French monarchy, the corruption of the Church, the decay of Italian politics. He has time for all sorts of metaphysical treatises on such matters as the nature of the generative principle, literary criticism, meteorology—in short, for his whole unfinished encyclopedia. And he still has time to invent a death for Ulysses, to engage in a metamorphic contest with Ovid, to make side remarks to his friends.

We say of space, of time, and of suffering that they are infinite; but infinite has no more bearing than beautiful, sublime, harmonious, ugly… Suppose we force ourselves to see to the bottom of words? We see nothing – each of them, detached from the expansive and fertile soul, being null and void. The power of the intelligence functions by projecting a certain lustre upon them, by polishing them and making them glitter; this power, erected into a system, is called culture – a pyrotechnics against a night sky of nothingness.

Kendini ortadan kaldırmak öyle açık ve öyle basit bir iş gibi görünür ki! Niçin o kadar nadir bir şeydir bu? Niçin herkes bundan kaçar? Çünkü, her ne kadar akıl yaşama iştahını yok saysa da, fiiliyatın sürmesine neden olan hiçlik bütün mutlaklardan üstün bir kuvvettedir; ölümlülerin ölüme karşı sessiz ortaklıklarını izah eder; yalnızca varoluşun simgesi değil, varoluşun ta kendisidir bu hiçlik; her şeydir. Ve bu hiçlik, bu bütün, hayata bir anlam veremez, ama hiç değilse hayatı, olduğu hal içinde sürdürür: Bir intihar etmeme hali.

As with most scientific revolutions, Rutherford’s new findings were not universally accepted. John Joly of Dublin strenuously insisted well into the 1930s that the Earth was no more than eighty-nine million years old, and was stopped only then by his own death. Others began to worry that Rutherford had now given them too much time. But even with radiometric dating, as decay measurements became known, it would be decades before we got within a billion years or so of Earth’s actual age. Science was on the right track, but still way out.

When, at the dying man’s bedside, his nearest and dearest bend over his stammerings, it is not so much to decipher in them some last wish, but rather to gather up a good phrase which they can quote later on, in order to honor his memory. If the Roman historians never fail to describe the agony of their emperors, it is in order to place within them a sentence or an exclamation which the latter uttered or were supposed to have uttered. This is true for all deathbeds, even the most ordinary. That life signifies nothing, everyone knows or suspects; let it at least be saved by a turn of phrase! A sentence at the corners of their life—that is about all we ask of the great—and of the small. If they fail this requirement, this obligation, they are lost forever; for we forgive everything, down to crimes, on condition they are exquisitely glossed—and glossed over. This is the absolution man grants history as a whole, when no other criterion is seen to be operative and valid, and when he himself, recapitulating the general inanity, finds no other dignity than that of a litterateur of failure and an aesthete of bloodshed.

Não odeio ninguém; mas o ódio escurece meu sangue e queima esta pele que os anos foram incapazes de curtir. Como domar, sob juízos ternos ou rigorosos, uma horripilante tristeza e um grito de esfolado vivo? Quis amar a terra e o céu, suas façanhas e suas febres, e não encontrei nada que não me lembrasse a morte: flores, astros, rostos – símbolos de murchidão, lajes virtuais de todos os túmulos possíveis! O que se cria na vida, e a enobrece, encaminha-se para um fim macabro ou vulgar. A efervescência dos corações provocou desastres que nenhum demônio teria ousado conceber.

It was enough for one Hindu prince to see a cripple, an old 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…

The sages of antiquity, who put themselves to death as proof of their maturity, had created a discipline of suicide which the moderns have unlearned. Doomed to an uninspired agony, we are neither authors of our extremities nor arbiters of our adieux; the end is no longer our end: we lack the excellence of a unique initiative – by which we might ransom an insipid and talentless life, as we like the sublime cynicism, the ancient splendour of an art of dying. Habitués of despair, complacent corpses, we all outlive ourselves and die only to fulfil a futile formality. It is as if our life were attached to itself only to postpone the moment when we could get rid of it.

In this world nothing is in its place, beginning with the world itself. We must therefore not be surprised by the spectacle of human injustice. It is equally futile to refuse or to accept the social order: we must endure its changes for the better or the worse with a despairing conformism, as we endure birth, love, the weather, and death. Decomposition presides over the laws of life: closer to our dust than inanimate objects to theirs, we succumb before them and rush upon our destiny under the gaze of the apparently indestructible stars. But they themselves will crumble in a universe which only our heart takes seriously, later expiating its lack of irony by terrible lacerations…

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . . From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your, own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game. . .

Crossing my arms over my chest, I said, a little too heartily, “So this is the library.” There certainly couldn’t be any doubt on that score; never had a room so resembled popular preconception. The walls were paneled in rich, dark wood, although the finish had worn off the edges in spots, where books had scraped against the wood in passing one too many times. A whimsical iron staircase curved to the balcony, the steps narrowing into pie-shaped wedges that promised a broken neck to the unwary. I tilted my head back, dizzied by the sheer number of books, row upon row, more than the most devoted bibliophile could hope to consume in a lifetime of reading. In one corner, a pile of crumbling paperbacks—James Bond, I noticed, squinting sideways, in splashy seventies covers—struck a slightly incongruous note. I spotted a moldering pile of Country Life cheek by jowl with a complete set of Trevelyan’s History of England in the original Victorian bindings. The air was rich with the smell of decaying paper and old leather bindings. Downstairs, where I stood with Colin, the shelves made way for four tall windows, two to the east and two to the north, all hung with rich red draperies checked with blue, in the obverse of the red-flecked blue carpet. On the west wall, the bookshelves surrendered pride of place to a massive fireplace, topped with a carved hood to make Ivanhoe proud, and large enough to roast a serf. In short, the library was a Gothic fantasy.

To development belongs fulfilment — every evolution has a beginning, and every fulfilment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death. For the animal, tied in the nature of its thinking to the present, death is known or scented as something in the future, something that does not threaten it. It only knows the fear of death in the moment of being killed. But man, whose thought is emancipated from the fetters of here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, boldly investigates the “once” of past and future, and it depends on the depth or shallowness of his nature whether he triumphs over this fear of the end or not. An old Greek legend — without which the Iliad could not have been — tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice between a long life or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second. Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual — whether this be animal or plant or man — is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is fore-doomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the “have-been” works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about “undying achievements”?

Ninguém poderia sobreviver à compreensão instantânea da dor universal, pois cada coração só foi moldado para uma certa quantidade de sofrimentos. Existem como que limites materiais para nossa resistência; entretanto, a expansão de cada desgosto os alcança e, às vezes, os ultrapassa: é frequentemente a origem de nossa ruína. Daí deriva a impressão de que cada dor, cada desgosto, são infinitos. Eles o são, na verdade, mas somente para nós, para os limites de nosso coração; e mesmo que este tivesse as dimensões do vasto espaço, nossos males seriam ainda mais vastos, pois toda dor substitui o mundo e de cada desgosto faz outro universo. A razão esforça-se inutilmente para mostrar-nos as proporções infinitesimais de nossos acidentes; fracassa ante nossa tendência para a proliferação cosmogônica. Daí decorre que a verdadeira loucura nunca é devida aos acasos ou aos desastres do cérebro, mas à concepção falsa do espaço que o coração se forja...

One may readily concede that the historical factuality of the resurrection cannot be affirmed with the same level of confidence as the historical factuality of the crucifixion. All historical judgments can be made only with relative certainty, and the judgment that Jesus rose from the dead can be offered—from the historian’s point of view—only with great caution. The character of the event itself hardly falls within ordinary categories of experience.28 Still, something extraordinary happened shortly after Jesus’ death that rallied the dispirited disciples and sent them out proclaiming to the world that Jesus had risen and had appeared to them. Reductive psychological explanations fail to do justice to the widespread testimony to this event within the original community and to the moral seriousness of the movement that resulted from it. The best explanation is to say that God did something beyond all power of human imagining by raising Jesus from the dead. To make such a claim is to make an assertion that redefines reality.29 If such an event has happened in history, then history is not a closed system of immanent causes and effects. God is powerfully at work in the world in ways that defy common sense, redeeming the creation from its bondage to necessity and decay. That, of course, is precisely what the early Christians believed and proclaimed: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. (EPH. 1:17–21. emphasis mine)

Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’. In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history. It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.

Piekło to brak manier, to świat prostaków i nieuków w karykaturze, to ziemia pozbawiona przesądów elegancji i uprzejmości. (...) Człowiek, który wyzwolił się z wszelkich zasad obyczajowości, a przy tym pozbawiony jest choćby odrobiny talentu aktorskiego, staje się wcieleniem niedoli, istotą doskonale nieszczęśliwą. Taka wolność nie ma żadnego sensu, gdyż życie staje się do zniesienia proporcjonalnie do stopnia mistyfikacji, do jakiego się w nim uciekamy. Taka wolność doprowadziłaby do natychmiastowego upadku społeczeństwo, gdyż "urok" życia zbiorowego natychmiast by się rozwiał, gdyby puścić wolno nieskończoność naszych skrywanych myśli. Tylko obłuda pozwala ludziom znosić się nawzajem. Gdy nie zgadzasz się na kłamstwo, natychmiast czujesz, jak ziemia ucieka ci spod nóg. (...) Człowiek doskonale moralny jest albo dziecinny, albo bezskuteczny, albo nieautentyczny: bo autentyczność polega w rzeczywistości na nurzaniu się w kłamstwie, w uprzejmościach publicznych pochlebstw i skrytych oszczerstw. (...) Wszystko, co żyje, bierze udział w tej maskaradzie, od troglodytów po sceptyków. Jedynie szacunek dla pozorów różni nas od gnijącej padliny, dlatego uwierzyć w trwały fundament bytów i rzeczy to tyle co umrzeć; trzymajmy się więc o tyleż przyjemniejszej nicości - nasza konstrukcja znosi jedynie pewną niewielką dawkę prawdy...

A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

In the 50 years since, having finally arrived in Rome, having walked Via Margutta a dozen times, I’ve fallen more widely and deeply in love with it, with its warmth and disorder and mystery, with its fictions and its truths, with the romance of its chaos and decay, with its citizens and its sadness, with its monumentality and indifference to worry, its films and its comic politics and its joyful failures. A city is what it does to you, and Rome defies any attempt by the tourist to describe it—while insisting in every moment that it be described. Via Margutta is a short street with a long history, three

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, THE CRACK-UP

If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign. We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.

Salvation ends everything; and ends us. Who, once saved, dares still call himself alive? We really live only by the refusal to be delivered from suffering and by a kind of religious temptation of irreligiosity. Salvation haunts only assassins and saints, those who have killed or transcended the creature; the rest wallow—dead drunk—in imperfection. . . . The mistake of every doctrine of deliverance is to suppress poetry, climate of the incomplete. The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song, the negation of art and of the mind. How to feel integral with a conclusion? We can refine, we can farm our sufferings, but by what means can we free ourselves from them without suspending ourselves?

How easy it is to believe yourself a god by the heart, and how hard it is to be one by the mind!