aphorisms again

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"Aphorisms usually appear in packs, as in Stevens's /Materia Poetica, 
/or the books of Emil Cioran; they invite, as Susan Sontag once noted, 
more aphorisms. Those aphorisms might contradict, rather than confirm, 
previous aphorisms. This is one paradox of the form: individually 
aphorisms assert, define, and argue definitively, but taken together 
they don't cohere into argument at all. Sontag, writing about the great 
Romanian aphorist Cioran, described "the aphoristic style" as "less a 
principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it's the destiny 
of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which 
it itself has implicitly generated.""

Here come some aphorisms by *Cioran*; when I'm really sad it's the only 
stuff to read that helps. Actually Cioran's writings are a powerful 
anti-depressant. The constant low resets the reader's cycle, so to 
speak. Two negatives make a positive. Cioran, who considered poems to be 
the modern equivalent of prayers, was a huge fan of Emily Dickinson.

/---------------------------------------------------//
//I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?/
/---------------------------------------------------//
//No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if 
there ever was one./
/---------------------------------------------------//
/
/If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the 
most irrational of all./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How 
comfortable one is among murderers.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
//A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
//Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it 
nowadays./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but 
stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the 
mystery of life.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
//Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
/
/We inhabit a language rather than a country./
/---------------------------------------------------//
/
/Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the 
butcher's the poet's equal there./
/---------------------------------------------------//
/
/What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?/
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the 
flesh./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it 
inspires.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
/
/So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that 
one can live in it./
/---------------------------------------------------//
/
/Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one 
who cannot open his mouth./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Sperm is a bandit in its pure state./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts 
upon itself./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink 
into it./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//Under each formula lies a corpse.//
//---------------------------------------------------//
//We derive our vitality from our store of madness./
/---------------------------------------------------//
//We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.//
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
On 21.03.2013 22:51, alice wellintown wrote:
> http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2013-spring/selections/hannah-brooks-motl-656342/
>
>

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