Status Updates From A Short History of Decay

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.

Has my suffering been made easier or has the modulation of my misery through intellectual pursuits only reduced the banality of my dread insomuch as to provide a new depth to my position?

This book will be such a slow read only because Cioran fits so much into each section and I am determined to break it down.

“The desire to die is too logical, hence ineffective.”

Ohhh I’m excited for this one

“…if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster. No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: ….”

Oh, I’m gonna like this book.