Mam aspires to eternity but loves time more

What is most essential in us struggles with time. It is impossible to not accept space; it is too great a piece of evidence. But there is a moment from which you don’t want to accept time. The dramatic moment of the individual existence culminates always in the struggle with time. This struggle, however, is without escape, because the being touched by temporality, once having conquered eternity, inevitably regrets time. The desire to flee from time is found only in people ill with time, people who are tied too strongly by the bonds of fleeting moments. Redemption is such an inconsistent aspiration because of the regret experienced by those who are after the joys, surprises, and tragedies that the world, which lives and dies in the meanwhile, has to offer. If there is a temporal pressure, there is also, none the smaller, an infinity pressure.

Man aspires to infinity, but loves time more. As this life that we live and consume is the only value that we are given, it is impossible not to conceive of eternity as a loss, which we nonetheless respect. The only thing one can love is life itself, which I detest. It is absolutely impossible to get rid of time, without getting rid of life at the same time. Wherever you position yourself, time is the biggest temptation: a greater temptation than life itself, because if death is not in time, then time will become the occasion of death. This is why the pure ecstasy of time reveals to us such bizarre mysteries and it introduces us to the secrets that bind the two worlds.

When man wouldn’t know the access to eternity through absolute living in the moment, when he wouldn’t be able to leap through eternity already living in the temporal whirlpool and would be forced to choose one of the two for eternity, would he then not hesitate to prefer time? Or when, also for ever, he would have to choose between Cleopatra and Saint Therese, would he hide his predilection for the first?



Cioran
The book of delusions
translation: Camelia Elias