E M Cioran

Big Frank recently read a short story by the late David Foster Wallace entitled “Backbone”. In it there is this great quotation from E. M Cioran in reference to the human heart, which he calls: “God’s open wound.” Not knowing anything about Cioran, Big Frank went digging, and here are a few quotations from him. Emil Cioran was a Romanian writer (1911 – 1995), who wrote in French.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

We change ideas like neckties.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

The obsession with God dislodges earthly love. One cannot love both God and a woman at the same time without being torn between them: they are incompatible with each other. One woman is enough to rid us of God, and God can rid us of all women.

Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free — free in a desert.

Czesław Miłosz's "Road-side Dog"

Big Frank has been reading Milosz's "Road-side Dog", a wonderful small book of poetry, essays, aphorisms and anecdotes. Milosz starts the book with a couple of quotations taken from Lew Shestov, and this reveals much of where he is going with language and the mystery of life, or perhaps the deception of life:

"Perhaps truth by its nature makes communication between people impossible, in any case communication by the intermediary of words. Every one may know it for himself, but in order to enter into relations with his fellowmen he must renounce truth and adopt any conventional lie."
---- Lew Shestov, Penultimate Words, 1911

Here are some excerpts from the book:

The Last Judgment
"The consequences of our actions, Completely unknown, for every one of them enters into a multifaceted relation with circumstance and with the actions of others. An absolutely efficient computer could show us, with a correction for accidents, of course, for how else to calculate the direction taken by a billiard ball after it strikes another? Besides, it is permissible to maintain that nothing happens by accident. Be that as it may, standing before a perfectly computerized balanced sheet of our lives (The Last Judgment), we must be astonished: Can it be that I am responsible for so much evil done against my will? And here, on the other scale, so much good I did not intend and of which I was not aware?"

Meanwhile and Made-Believe
"To get up in the morning and go to work, to be bound to people by the ties of love, friendship, or opposition--and all the time to realize that it was only meanwhile and make-believe. . .

He did not regard kindly this affliction of his. He agreed with the opinion that he should be here--entirely present, in a given place and moment, attentive to the needs of those who were close to him and fulfilling their expectations. To think that they were just for meanwhile and that he practiced with them a make-believe was to harm them, yet he was unable to renounce the thought that, really, he had not time for life with them."

"What is not said, tends to nonexistence."

Inserting a Meaning
". . . And inserting a meaning into one's own life. Something must correspond to something, something must result from something. Perhaps, so that things just pain stupid and dishonest find an explanation."

Proust Speaks Out

1. Big Frank has turned from Connely to Proust, a much much richer source. Here are a few choice quotations:
   
   Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.
   
   All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

There is nothing like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any resemblance to what one has in one's mind.

Things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.

Cyril Connolly

Big Frank has been reading "The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle" by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly). Hemingway described the book in this way: "A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough." Big Frank concurs.

Here are a few choice quotations to mull over. There are lots more, . . . maybe later:

"Three faults, which are found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. Yet it is only the thinking which begins when habit-thinking leaves off which is ignited by the logic of the train of thought, that is worth pursuing. A comfortable person can seldom follow up an original idea any further than a London pigeon can fly."

"Further considerations on cowardice, sloth and vanity; vices which do small harm to other people but which prevent one from doing any good, and which poisen and enfeeble all the virtues. Sloth rots the intelligence, cowardice destroys all power at the source, while vanity inhibits us from facing any fact which might teach us something; it dulls all other sensation."

"And 'living from beauty': in one lovely place always pining for anyother; with the perfect woman imagining one more perfect; with a bad book unfinished beginning a second, which the almond tree is in blossom, the grasshopper fat and the winter night disquieted by the plock and gurgle of the sea, - that too would seem extinct forever."

Four Quotations to Ponder

Big Frank gives you four quotations to ponder. They are all connected in one way and they all merit consideration.

1.
There is no prayer like desire.
---- Tom Waits
2.
Your joy is your sorrow unmasked
The selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
---- Kahlil Gibran
3.
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up.
---- Sappho
4.
I might caress her, pass my hand slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial ocenas or the light of a star, I felt that i was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.
---- Marcel Proust