Dinesh's photos with the keyword: Temptation to Exist

And what Cioran says of the mystic, in his essay “Dealing with the Mystics,” applies perfectly to his own thought. “The Mystic, in most cases, invents his adversaries…. His thought asserts the existence of others by calculation, by artifice: it is a strategy of no consequence. His thought boils down, in the last instance, to a polemic with himself: he seeks to be, he becomes a crowd, even if it is only by making himself one now mask after the other, multiplying his faces: in which he resembles his Creator, whose histrionics he perpetuates.” ~ Page 21 Yet while Cioran projects a recognizable political stance (though it’s present only implicitly in most of the essays), his approach is not, in the end, grounded in a religious commitment. Whatever his political-moral sympathies have in common with right-wing Catholic sensibility, Cioran himself, as I have already said, is committed to the paradoxes of an atheist theology. Faith itself, he argues, solves nothing. ~ Page 22 ~ Excerpt: "Temptation to Exist"

The man who has glimpsed, at the start of his career, certain mortal truths, reaches the point of no longer being able to live with them. If he remains loyal to them he is lost. To unlearn them, to renounce them -- sole method of making up with life, of leaving the path of Knowledge, of the Intolerable. In pursuit of the lie, any lie which promotes action, he idolizes it and from it seeks his salvation. Any obsession seduces him, provided it smothers the demon of his curiosity and immobilizes his mind. Hence he envies all those who, by means of prayer or any other freak, have arrested the course of their thoughts, abdicated the responsibilities of the intellect and encountered, within a temple or a madhouse, the happiness of being ‘through’. What would he not give to be able to exult, like them, in the shadow of an error, in the shelter of a stupidity! He will try anything “To elude my ruin, I shall play the game, I shall persevere out of stubbornness, out of whim, out of insolence. To breathe is an aberration which fascinates me. Air avoids me, the ground trembles under my feet. I have summoned every word and ordered them to dispose themselves into a prayer; and words have remained inert and mute. That is why I cry out, and continue to cry out: “Anything, except my truths!” ~ Page 195