A Short History of Decay

Emil Cioran

1949

November, 2025

8/10

The first part of the book was typical Cioran: endless repetition of how we are all better off dead. Unlike some of his other work, this got to be too much for me — too much repeating the same ideas of hopelessness and nothing more:

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our fellow men, the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? For nothing is more natural than to imagine other people’s suicide. When we have glimpsed, by an overwhelming and readily renewable intuition, anyone’s own uselessness, it is incomprehensible that everyone has not done the same. To do away with oneself seems such a clear and simple action! Why is it so rare, why does everyone avoid it? Because, if reason disavows the appetite for life, the nothing which extends our acts is nonetheless of a power superior to all absolutes; it explains the tacit coalition of mortals against death; it is not only the symbol of existence, but existence itself; it is everything. And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.

The man suffering from a characterized sickness is not entitled to complain: he has an occupation. The great sufferers are never bored: disease fills them, the way remorse feeds the great criminals. For any intense suffering produces a simulacrum of plenitude and proposes a terrible reality to consciousness, which it cannot elude; while suffering without substance in that temporal mourning of ennui affords consciousness nothing that forces it to fruitful action.

The book picks up significantly as it goes on — particularly after the first part. Cioran writes quite a lot about artists and poetry:

There is only the artist whose lie is not a total one.

Only the poet takes responsibility for “I,” he alone speaks in his own name, he alone is entitled to do so. Poetry is bastardized when it becomes permeable to prophecy or to doctrine: “mission” smothers music, idea shackles inspiration.

The poet would betray himself if he aspired to be saved: salvation is the death of song, the negation of art and the mind.

I saved more quotes from this book than perhaps any other. There isn't much for me to say that Cioran doesn't express himself so eloquently (or abundantly). He writes about the futility of prayer and his views on God, life and death, society, a bit too much about suicide, and so on. I would rate the book higher if not for the excess of redundancy.

I could fill many pages with quotes, but I'll leave two of my favorites to conclude:

Yet the eyes' function is not to see but to weep; and really to see we must close them.

(one of my new favorite quotes of all time for last:)

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards—but from which you do not escape without dying. Where to go, when you can live only in the city and you lack the instincts for doing so, and when you are not enterprising enough to beg your bread, nor balanced enough to give yourself up to wisdom? In the end, you stay there like everyone else, pretending to busy yourself; you convince yourself of this extremity by the resources of artifice, since it is less absurd to simulate life than to live it.