Poverty: Mental Stimulant

 To keep the mind vigilant, there is only coffee, disease, insomnia, or the obsession of death; poverty contributes to this condition in equal measure, if not more effectively: terror of tomorrow as much as that of eternity, money troubles as much as metaphysical fears, exclude repose and oblivion. All our humiliations come from the fact that we cannot bring ourselves to die of hunger. We pay dearly for this cowardice. To be dependent on men, without the vocation of beggars! To abase ourselves before these dressed-up, lucky, infatuated marmosets! To be at the mercy of these caricatures unworthy of contempt! It is the shame of seeking anything which excites the desire to annihilate this planet, with its hierarchies and the degradations they involve. Society is not a disease, it is a disaster: what a stupid miracle that one can live in it! When we contemplate it, between rage and indifference, it becomes inexplicable that no one has been able to demolish its structure, that hitherto there have not been minds desperate and decent enough to raze it to the ground without a trace.

There is more than one resemblance between begging for a coin in the city and waiting for an answer from the silence of the universe. Avarice presides over men’s hearts and over matter. Away with this stingy existence! It hoards money and mysteries: purses are as inaccessible as the depths of the Unknown. But—maybe someday that Unknown will reveal itself and open its treasuries; never, so long as there is blood in his veins, will the Rich Man unearth his wealth. . . . He will confess his shames, his vices, his crimes: he will lie about his fortune; he will make you every confidence, hand you his life: you will not share his last secret, his pecuniary secret. . . .

Poverty is not a transitory state: it coincides with the certainty that, whatever happens, you will never have anything, that you are born on the wrong side of the circuit of goods, that you must struggle for even a breath, and conquer air itself, and hope, and sleep, and that even when society disappears, nature will be no less inclement, no less perverted. No paternal principle watched over the Creation; everywhere, buried treasures; behold the Miser as demiurge, the God on high a sly skinflint. It is He who implanted in you the terror of tomorrow: it is scarcely surprising that religion itself should be a form of this terror.

For the paupers of eternity, poverty is a kind of stimulant they have taken once and for all, without the possibility of an antidote, or a kind of innate awareness which, before any knowledge of life, could describe its inferno. . . .



Cioran, A Short History of Decay
translation: Richard Howard