In One of the Earth’s Attics: “I have dreamed of distant springs, of a
sun shining on nothing but seafoam and the oblivion of my birth, of a
sun opposed to the earth and to this disease of finding nothing anywhere
but the desire to be somewhere else. The earthly fate – who has
inflicted it upon us, who has chained us to this morose matter, a
petrified tear against which – born of time – our tears shatter, whereas
it has fallen, immemorial, from God’s first shudder?
I have loathed the planet’s noons and midnights, I have longed for a
world without weather, without hours and the fear that swells them, I
have hated the sighs of mortals under the weight of ages. Where is the
moment without end and without desire, and that primal vacancy
insensitive to the presentiments of disaster and of life? I have sought
for the geography of Nothingness, of unknown seas and another sun – pure
of the scandal of life-bearing rays – I have sought for the rocking of a
skeptical ocean in which islands and axioms are drowned, the vast
liquid narcotic, tepid and sweet and tired of knowledge…
This
earth – sin of the Creator! But I no longer want to expiate others’
sins. I want to be cured of my begetting in an agony outside the
continents, in some fluid desert, in an impersonal shipwreck.”
— Cioran, A Short History of Decay
