【齐奥朗】与齐奥朗对谈

Ben Sonnenberg An Interview with Cioran Author(s): Jason Weiss and E. M. Cioran Source: Grand Street, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Spring, 1986), pp. 105-140 Published by: Ben Sonnenberg Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006875 . Accessed: 02/03/2011 00:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bsonn. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Ben Sonnenberg is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Grand Street. http://www.jstor.org GRAND STREET AN INTERVIEW WITH CIORAN Jason Weiss Regrettably, of the six books by E. M. Cioran that have appeared in English-all translated by Richard How ard-only the most recent, Drawn and Quartered, is still in print (Seaver Books). The others are: A Short His tory of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, The Fall into Time, The New Gods and The Trouble with Being Born. Two of the untranslated titles deserve special note, Syl logismes de l'Amertume (1952)-his second book, but the first one of aphorisms-and Histoire et Utopie (1960).* Of the latter he says, "I wanted to make an apology for utopia, but when I read different utopias, I said this isn't possible." At present, occasionally, he is working on a new collection of writings, Ce Maudit Moi. Cioran is not a systematic thiinker, rather his mind advances with that "patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen,"> as he described in The New Gods. At seventy-four, he could almost be a survivor of himself, though his fatigue seems more existential than physical. Yet the ready humor of this Runmnian 4migr4 pierces even the gravest considerations with the wit of the con demned. Or as he once wrote, "In the blood an inex haustible drop of vinegar: to what fairy do I owe it?" Cioran has never given an interview to the French lit erary press nor to the American (except once with a Time correspondent). A brief interview with him was published some twenty years ago in German in the Zurich magazine DU, as well as others in the Spanish and Italian press in more recent years. The following interview took place over two mornings in mid-August, 1983, in the Latin Quarter apartment where Cioran has lived for the past twenty years. JASON WEISS: You've said that Sartre and others, in em ploying a German mode of discourse, did some harm to the philosophical language. Can you elaborate on this? * An essay from this volume, "Odyssey of Rancor," begins on page 86. [105] GRAND STREET E. M. CIORIAN: Well, first I'll tell you that when I was quite young I myself was affected by this German jargon. I thought that philosophy wasn't supposed to be acces sible to others, that the circle was closed, and that at all costs one had to employ this scholarly, laborious, compli cated terminology. It was only little by little that I under stood the impostor side of philosophical language. And I should say that the writer who helped me tremendously in this discovery is Valery. Because Val6ry, who wasn't a philosopher but had a bearing on philosophy all the same, wrote a very pure language, he had a horror of philosophical language. That jargon gives you a sense of superiority over everybody. And philosophical pride is the worst that exists, it's very contagious. At any rate, the German influence in France was disastrous on that whole level. The French can't say things simply anymore. JW: But what are the causes? EMC: I don't know. Obviously Sartre, by the enormous influence he had, contributed to generating this fashion. And then, it's the influence of Heidegger, which was very big in France. For example, when speaking about death, Heidegger employs so complicated a language to say very simple things that I well understand how one could be tempted by his style. But the danger of philosophical style is that one loses complete contact with reality. Philo sophical language leads to megalomania. One creates an artificial world where one is God. I was very proud and pleased when I was young to know this jargon. But my stay in France totally cured me of that. I'm not a phi losopher by profession, I'm not a philosopher at all, but my path was the reverse of Sartre's. That's why I turned to the French writers known as the moralists, such as La Rochefoucauld or Chamfort, who wrote for society ladies and whose style was simple, but who said very profound things. JW: Was it philosophy you were first interested in? EMC: I studied philosophy almost exclusively from the age of seventeen to twenty-one, and only the great philo sophical systems. I disregarded most poetry and other literature. But I broke happily very soon with the univer sity, which I consider to be a great intellectual misfortune, and even a danger. [1 06] JASON WEISS JW: Were you reading Nietzsche then? EMC: When I was studying philosophy I wasn't reading Nietzsche. I read serious philosophers. [Laughs.] It's when I finished studying it, at the point when I stopped be lieving in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realized that he wasn't a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him but never system atically, now and then. But really I don't read him any more. I consider his letters his most authentic work, be cause in them he's truthful, while in his other work he's prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he's just a poor fellow, that he's ill, exactly the opposite of every thing he claimed. JW: You write in The Trouble with Being Born that you stopped reading him because you found him "too naive." EMC: [Laughs.] That's a bit excessive, yes. It's because that whole grandiose vision of the will to power and all that, he imposed it on himself because he was a pitiful invalid. Its whole basis was false, nonexistent. His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the let ters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he's lament able, it's very touching, like a character out of Chekhov. I was attached to him in my youth, but not after. He's a great writer, though, a great stylist. JW: Yet critics often compare you to him, saying you fol low in his tracks. EMC: No, that's a mistake, though its obvious that his way of writing made an impression on me. He had things that other Germans didn't, because he read a lot of the French writers. That's very important. JW: You've said that you also read a lot of poetry in your youth. EMC: That was later. It was, if you like, the disappoint ment of philosophy that made me turn to literature. To tell the truth, it's from that point on that I realized that Dostoyevsky was much more important than a great phi losopher. And that great poetry was something extraordi nary. JW: Did your severe insomnia affect this attitude at the time? EMC: It was really the profound cause of my break with philosophy. I realized that in moments of great despair [107] GRAND STREEET philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own. I can say that my sleepless nights brought about the break with my idolatry of philosophy. JW: When did these sleepless nights begin? EMC: They began in my youth, when I was about nine teen. It wasn't simply a medical problem, it was deeper, in fact the fundamental and most serious experience of my life. All the rest is secondary. Those sleepless nights opened my eyes, everything changed for me because of them. JW: Do you still suffer from tlhem? EMC: A lot less. But that was a precise period, about six or seven years, when my wvhole perspective on the world changed. I think it's a very important problem, it happens like this. Normally, someone who goes to bed and sleeps all night begins the next day almost a new life. It's not simply another day, it's another life. And so he can under take things, can manifest himself, he has a present, a future, and so on. But for someone who doesn't sleep, the time from going to bed at night to rising in the moming is all continuous, with no interruption, no suppression of consciousness. So, instead of starting a new life at eight in the morning, you're still as you were at eight the eve ning before. The nightmare continues uninterrupted and, in the morning, start what, since there's no difference since the night before? That new life doesn't exist. The whole day is a trial, it's the continuation of the trial. Well, while everyone rushes towards the future, you are left outside. So, when that's stretched out for months and years, it causes the sense of things, the conception of life, to be forcibly changed. You no longer see what future to look towards, because you don't have any future. And I really consider that the most terrible, most unsettling, in short the principal experience of my life. There's also the fact that you are alone with yourself. In the middle of the night, everyone's asleep, you are the only one awake. Right away I'm no longer a part of mankind, I live in another world. And it requires an extraordinary will to not succumb. JW: Succumb to what, madness? [108] JASON WEISS EMC: Yes. To the temptation of suicide. In my opinion, almost all suicides, about ninety percent, say, are due to insomnia. I can't prove that, but I'm convinced. JW: How did it affect you physically? EMC: I was very tense, in a feverish state, and ready to explode. Everything took on another intensity, apropos of anything. I was far more violent, I quarreled with everyone. I couldn't put up with anything. And I found everyone idiotic. Nobody understood what I understood. It was the feeling of not belonging. Then too, this feeling that everything is a comedy and makes no sense. The fu ture was meaningless for me, the present as well. And so, philosophically, because one is always a philosopher, it's a sort of exasperation, an intensification, of the state of being conscious. Not self-conscious, conscious. The state of consciousness as the great misfortune, and in my case the permanent misfortune. Normally, it's the con trary, it's consciousness which is man's advantage. Me, I arrived at the conclusion that no, the fact of being con scious, of not being oblivious, is the great catastrophe. Because I was conscious twenty-four hours out of twenty four. One can be conscious several hours a day, five min utes, but not all day, all night. People are conscious by intervals, but for me it was a matter of intensity, all the time. JW: Have you met other insomniacs who suffered like that? EMC: Not to that degree, no. Perhaps in a lunatic asy lum one might. But I wasn't crazy at all, that's what's interesting. What I often liked to do was to go for walks at night. Curiously enough, I did that in Paris too, until about ten years ago. Very often, in the middle of the night, if I couldn't sleep, I'd get up and go walking through Paris for two or three hours. Now it's become too dangerous to go and walk like that at four in the moming. I liked to go all over the place. I'd wait till people were going to work, and then I'd come home and sleep a little. But I was also doing better by then. JW: That helped calm you down a little. EMC: Yes. This period of deep insomnia came to a stop in France, and you know how? By the bicycle. It's rather curious, this phenomenon, I was a bit like someone suffer [109] GRAND STREET ing hallucinations. I'd been in Paris a few months and, one day on the boulevard St. Michel, someone offered to sell me a bicycle. It was a racing bicycle, not expensive at all, and I said yes and bought it, which for me was a stroke of providence, unheard-of luck. I went all over France with that bicycle, I'd be gone for months. Because I had come here on a grant for several years from the French government to do a thesis, from 1937 until the war, till 1940, a thesis in philosophy ... Certainly not! I never went to the Sorbonne, I lied. But meanwhile I'd cover kilometers and kilometers, for months, I went all through the Pyrenees. I'd do one hundred kilometers a day. And it's this physical effort that allowed me to sleep. You know, France was very cheap before the war, I'd come into a village, I'd eat whatever I wanted, drink a bottle of wine, and then I'd go sleep in the fields. It was a very natural life, very healthy. Physical exercise from morning till night. When you do one hundred kilometers a day, there's no way you're not going to sleep, it's out of the question. So, it wasn't due to medicine. Because I had, unfortunately for me, seen a lot of doctors in Rumania and in France, and they all prescribed medications that messed up my stomach and everything, that was the big danger, and even with sleeping pills I only managed to sleep two or three hours at most. But then I'd have a headache all day, it was horrible. I was poisoned by sleeping pills. I don't take them anymore. And so this providential bicycle saved me. JW: Did other insomniacs recognize your cure? EMC: Yes. You see, there is a gang of insomniacs, with a sort of solidarity, like people who have the same illness. We understand each other right away, because we know that drama. The drama of insomnia is that time doesn't pass. You're lying down in the middle of the night and you are no longer in time. You're not in eternity either. Time passes so slowly that it becomes agonizing. All of us, being alive, are drawn along by time because we are in time. When you lie awake like that, you are outside of time. So, time passes outside of you, you can't catch up with it. JW: In The Fall into Time, you wrote, "Other people [110] JASON WEISS fall into time; I have fallen out of it." Was that from insomnia? EMC: No, but it does have a remote effect. I consider my best writing to be those few pages on time. Men fall into time and further down than time. I feel it to be one of my more original points, that you are also conscious of time. Normally people are not. A man who acts and is involved in doing something doesn't think about time. That would be absurd. But consciousness of time proves that you are outside of time, that you've been ejected. One could really call it a philosophical or metaphysical experience. I recall the first occasion when I had a revela tion of time. I was a child, I was five, and I remember exactly, it was an afternoon during the First World War. I can even say the hour, I remember it was three in the afternoon. Abruptly I felt that I was watching time pass, that I wasn't a part of it, I was outside. And I consider this sensation that I had, which didn't last even ten min utes, to be my first conscious experience of ennui, of bore dom. Ennui is also a sort of taking consciousness of time, because then time does not pass. So I was predestined a bit to that consciousness of time, and insomnia only ac celerated it. JW: Were there others around at that moment when you were five? EMC: No, I was absolutely alone. I wasn't able to formu late the experience, obviously, but I know what it was. Because I've never forgotten it. I remember it like it was yesterday, yet it was a whole life away. I consider it was there that I ceased to be an animal. I had entered hu manity and begun to have the experience of being human. So, I was predestined to lose sleep, because what is sleep? It is the return to unconsciousness, to animality, the re turn to the before-life, to oblivion. Insomnia is the worst illness. JW: What happened to you on the level of dreams dur ing your most severe insomnia? EMC: Because of the sleeping pills I did manage to sleep two or three hours at most, but I had horrifying night mares, absolutely horrifying. And so powerful that I woke up with my heart pounding. [111 ] GCRAND STREEET JW: Have there been many responses to what you've written about this experience of feeling yourself outside of time? EMC: I have met people who recognized themselves in what I said. They acknowledged these sensations and I've received a lot of letters from them. They hadn't for mulated it, perhaps, but they admitted having had the same feeling of existence. JW: In spite of your insomnia, you wrote that you had a very happy childhood. EMC: A wonderful childhood. I believe I became un happy in my life as punishment for having been so extraor dinarily happy as a child. I'm talking of early childhood, up to the age of seven or eight, not more, after which my life was a catastrophe. I was born in a mountain village, very primitive, and I was always outside in the open air. I lived as if I were in the wilds. I have wonderful memo ries of that time. JW: And you remained in that village till what age? EMC: Until I was ten. We had a garden next to the cemetery, which also played a role in my life. I was a friend of the gravedigger and was always around the cemetery, all the time seeing the disinterred, the skeletons and corpses. For me death was something so evident that it was truly a part of my daily life. I didn't start acting like Hamlet, but after that I certainly began to be ob sessed with skeletons and the phenomenon of death. All this had an effect on my insomnia. Anyone who is ob sessed with death already has a sense of the unreality of life. It's not the obsession with death that makes you dis cover that life is unreal, but it's when you discover that life is without substance, that it's nothing at all, illusion, that the obsession with death settles in. I'll tell you an anecdote that played a part in my life. We were living in Sibiu, a city in the provinces where I spent my whole youth, and where my father was the orthodox priest. I was about tventy-two and one day I was in a terrible state. Only my mother and I were at home, and-when I remember things, I remember them very precisely, I even remember the hour, it's very strange -1 think it was around two in the afternoon, everyone else had gone out. All of a sudden, I had a fantastic fit of [112] JASON WEISS despair, I threw myself on the sofa, and said, "I can't take it anymore." And my mother said this: "If I had known, I would have had an abortion." That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn't hurt me, not at all. But later, I thought, "That was very important. rm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Be cause, in effect, it's all without substance. JW: Which is interesting too, considering that your father was a priest. EMC: Yes, but it was said by my motherl At the time, abortion didn't exist. But it proved that individual life is an accident. Well, you can say, "But everyone knows that." Yes, everyone is aware of it, but only occasionally. It's another thing to know it morn