The Trouble With Being Dead

Richard Howard died on March 31 at the age of 92. He was a fine poet, literary critic, and made perhaps his greatest impact on the age as a translator of dozens of French authors, among them André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, and Roland Barthes. I have in my possession a hardback copy of his translation of Pierre Drieu la Rochelle’s novel Le feu follet, an idiomatic title that he called The Fire Within. (It was made into a great film by Louis Malle in 1962.) 

But long ago, when I was settled into my position as a professional college student, I read a review of another translation by Howard of a book by a Romanian writer living in Paris named E. M. Cioran. The book’s title was The Trouble With Being Born. Howard’s translation was first published in 1976, but his translation of another Cioran book called The Temptation to Exist in 1968 prompted him to state: “I have translated some hundred and fifty books, and of them all, The Temptation to Exist has afforded me the most crucial experience.” 

Cioran wrote about himself: "I was born on the 8th April 1911 in Rasinari, a village in the Carpathians, where my teacher was a Greek Orthodox priest. From 1920 to 1928 I attended the Sibiu grammar school. From 1929 to 1931 I studied at the Faculty of Arts at Bucharest University. Post-graduate studies in philosophy until 1936. In 1937 I came to Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute in Bucharest and have been living here ever since. I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual. On the other hand, I have not disowned my Rumanian origins; had I to choose a country, I would still choose my own. Before the war I published various essays in Rumanian of a more or less philosophical nature. l only began writing in French in about 1947. It was the hardest experience I have ever undergone. This precise, highly disciplined, and exacting language seemed as restrictive to me as a straitjacket. Even now I must confess that I do not feel completely at ease with it. It is this feeling of uneasiness which has led me to ponder the problem of style and the very anomaly of writing. All my books are more or less autobiographical-a rather abstract form of autobiography, I admit." 

The Trouble With Being Born was the first of Cioran’s books to find me. It’s a book of aphorisms – one-liners, a paragraph at most, that address one subject at a time. They are divided in the book into twelve sections, but they aren’t necessarily grouped or organized around one idea. They cover a lot of ground. 

Richard Howard tried to define the aphorism: 

“A wisdom broken” is Francis Bacon’s phrase for the aphorism — the very word has horizon within it, a dividing-line between sky and earth, a separation observed … And there is a further identification to be heard in Eliot’s line: “to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/among whispers”: something subversive, something perilous, always, about the aphorism, from the pre-Socratics to Chazal. 

Since I first opened the book forty-five years ago, some of the aphorisms have stayed with me – shadowed me. They have been confirmed, but not necessarily by experience. Nothing I have since learned or have lived through has disturbed their power. They are as true as I remember them. Here is my selection. 

1 

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them. 

To have committed every crime but that of being a father. 

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what’s the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say? 

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures? 

I think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem beginning with the problem of death. 

2 

It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. 

“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.” 

3 

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. 

She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us. 

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one is we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy. 

I have killed no one, I have done better: I have killed the Possible, and like Macbeth, what I need most is to pray, buy like him too, I cannot say Amen. 

4 

According to the Bible, it is Cain who created the first city, in order to have, as Bossuet puts it, a place wherein to elude his remorse. What a judgement! And how many times have I not felt its accuracy in my night walks through Paris! 

5 

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon – this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing. 

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgement impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place. 

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure. 

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation. 

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred.” (Buddha). . . . Which is to say, to every man alive. 

6 

When I lie awake far into the night, I am visited by my evil genius, as Brutus was by his before the battle of Philippi. 

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there. 

A burial in a Norman village. I ask for details from a farmer watching the procession from a distance. "He was still young, barely sixty. They found him dead in the field. Well, that's how it is. . . . That's how it is. . . . " This refrain, which struck me as comical at the time, has haunted me ever since. The fellow had no idea that what he was saying about death was all that can be said and all we know. 

Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening . . . 

To live is to lose ground. 

A book is a postponed suicide. 

7 

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory will ever be found again. 

We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth's surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion. . . . Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does. 

Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die! 

No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things. 

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser. 

8 

The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools. 

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor. 

The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces. 

When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions. 

In the long run, tolerance breeds more ills than intolerance. If this is true, it constitutes the most serious accusation that can be made against man. 

Monkeys living in groups reject, apparently, those which in some fashion have consorted with humans. How one regrets that Swift never knew such a detail! 

The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself. 

Hitler is without a doubt the most sinister character in history. And the most pathetic. He managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what he wanted, he destroyed his ideal point by point. It is for this reason that he is a monster in a class by himself - that is, a monster twice over, for even his pathos is monstrous. 

Torn between violence and disillusionment, I seem to myself a terrorist who, going out in the street to perpetrate some outrage, stops on the way to consult Ecclesiastes or Epictetus. 

According to Hegel, man will be completely free only "by surrounding himself with a world entirely created by himself." But this is precisely what he has done, and man has never been so enchained, so much a slave as now.  

Wherever civilized men appeared for the first time, they were regarded by the natives as devils, as ghosts. specters. Never as living men! Unequaled intuition, a prophetic insight, if ever there was one. 

X maintains we are at the end of a "cosmic cycle" and that soon everything will fall apart. And he does not doubt this for one moment. 

   At the same time, he is the father of a – numerous – family. With certitudes like his, what aberration has deluded him into bringing into a doomed world one child after the next? If we foresee the End, if we are sure it will be coming soon, if we even anticipate it, better to do so alone. One does not procreate on Patmos. 

9 

Deep inside, each man feels – and believes – himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it. 

10 

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our consciousness. 

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me – and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past! 

We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the "meaning" of life. Life must have one. But is there any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous? 

Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth. 

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays. 

Nerval: "Having reached the Place de la Concorde, my thought was to kill myself" Nothing in all French literature has haunted me as much as that.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

12 

To shake people up, to wake them from their sleep, while knowing you are committing a crime and that it would be a thousand times better to leave them alone, since when they wake, too, you have nothing to offer them. 

No matter how many autumns I observe the spectacle of these leaves so eager to fall, it still surprises me each time – a surprise in which "a chill down the spine" would prevail were it not for the last-minute explosion of a gaiety whose origin I cannot account for. 

When you live past the age of rebellion, and you still rebel, you seem to yourself a kind of senile Lucifer. 

"What's wrong – what’s the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for. . . .