The Void, of which it cannot be said that it is or is not, nor that it has consciousness or has none, while it denies absoluteness to any experiential value (alike to being and to consciousness) cannot be identified. And that is the doctrine of not-self (anatta) as I see it in one aspect at present. This voidness cannot be “is-ed” and so introduced into the worldly scheme, except as the denial of absoluteness of all particular values. It has no more effect on ordinary life than the theory of relativity. But just as that theory completely alters calculation of enormous speeds, so, as I see it, this void-element completely alters calculations of extraordinary situations, of death (as killing, suicide or the partner of old age). N.T

Monday, December 21, 2015

If life occupies the first place in the hierarchy of lies, love comes immediately afterward, lie within the lie

If life occupies the first place in the hierarchy of lies, love comes immediately afterward, lie within the lie. Expression of our hybrid position, love is surrounded by an apparatus of beatitudes and torments thanks to which we find in someone a substitute for ourselves. By what hoax do two eyes turn us away from our solitude? Is there any failure more humiliating for the mind? Love lulls knowledge; wakened, knowledge kills love. Unreality cannot triumph indefinitely, even disguised in the appearances of the most exalting lie. And moreover who would have an illusion solid enough to find in the other what he has vainly sought in himself? Would a furnace of guts afford what the whole universe could not give us? And yet this is the actual basis of this common, and supernatural, anomaly: to solve à deux rather, to suspend—all enigmas; by means of an imposture, to forget that fiction in which life is steeped; by a double murmur to fill the general vacuity; and—parody of ecstasy—to drown oneself at last in the sweat of some accomplice or other. . . .

Cioran, A Short History of Decay
translation: Richard Howard
p. 56
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