Status Updates From Lehre vom Zerfall

ara vericem

There rests in even the most indifferent men, a heart of skepticism in a body destined for carrion. Encompassed by rot we can't help but wish for systems that provide some divinity to our encroaching burial. To strip away the divine costume of the universe leaves us in a solitude unbearable to all; however, it is in this solitude in which mans true position is. A direct realization of the uncurable state of man.

Faces of Decadence -
How we wish for in our dying breath to personify a Creator in which to cast our last calls of defiance and scold for the conditions of our existence to wet our hospital gowns with the tears of the universe, only to be met with cold indifference.

Life continues out of inertia, built upon decrepit temples, prolonged through abstractions of being. An abolishment of soul offer the only escape.

Chapter 1-
To Cioran, existential philosophers work to build meaning in a life devoid of idols and gods only to build a new systems of belief set to serve the same purpose of distracting us from tragedy. Our decline into decay is the baseline truth, a truth that starts from birth. To live with frivolity, an amateur, keeps us from completing our identity, an identity that can't escape our inherent suffering.

Emil Cioran breaks down the contradictory nature of the intellectual who has left behind all mythos and whose unyielding pursuit to characterize our "Essential" has lead them to a crossroad. Either retreat back into the world of idols and myths and compromise with the inessential, or transcend existence to be immobilized by an acute awareness of your tragedy. To Cioran even the existential worships falls idols.

Life appears to be a contradiction between the realization that we are 'nothing' and will be reduced to 'nothingness' and the continual desire to ward off the coming night and wait for further mornings. Cioran argues that philosophy, formulaic in nature, only provides verbiage to define our despair but offers no relief from the incessant void. Only in art is despair captured in a way to offer any sense of relief.

A stranger to our creation, subject to suffering with no causality, nostalgia acts not as a comfort, but as a reminder to our descent into decay. The antipode to our eternal.

Unlike existential philosophers of the same time, Cioran offers no solution out or away from our suffering but simply a greater explanation of our misery. Yet I’m filled with a weird sense of hope while reading.