Curious to note the posture of those whom I might call my prose models. Nietzsche, over the years, disowned his master with unparalleled violence. Cioran, though alternating outbursts and laments, did similarly with the one who he referred to as his “model.” It seems a natural course of life to slowly shed the old precepts, the old admirations, and what once shaped and nourished an expanding spirit. Cioran said in life only breakups matter. Perhaps because breakups are usually acts of courage. Renounces, apostasies, gradual and definitive detachment: all this seems, if looked at from a distance, to contribute to a kind of liberation.
Tag: philosophy
Forced by Circumstances
It is amazing how torture it is to feel forced by circumstances to apply one’s own effort to something that delivers nothing more than money. To apply one’s own effort, and almost always the bulk of one’s own time… I see the average artist in despair before the seemingly insoluble question: how not to be useful to other human beings, or at least, how not to be outrageously useful, strictly useful, and still survive? How not sum up one’s own life in a creeping utilitarianism? How to be an artist, and not a commercial manager, a designer, a salesman? How to be an artist and, at the very least, abstain from any financial necessity in the production of one’s own work? It seems that the supreme merit boils down to being lucky…
The Substance of Life Is Time
The substance of life is time: to live is but to define the application to it, on a smaller scale, during the space of twenty-four hours, and on a larger scale, during the indefinite interval of a lifetime—and I am but a spreadsheet-man! In any case, the immediate decision is always the most important, and planning, the later it comes, the less fruitful it is. The truth is that the distribution of time involves, in the first instance, the ability to visualize the desired result which, as if it were not uncertain enough, has to fit the primary needs and the longing for the consummation of something that justifies one’s existence. Generally, these are conflicting spheres, and generally the former ends up sucking up the bulk of the vital substance. If we knew, at least, the circumstance of the last breath and if there was not such vagueness about the horizon, everything would be easier: distributing time would be an almost pleasant task and the fruits of life would be much more meritocratic. However, the plot would lose in emotion and suspense. It seems very difficult to live and not sin, on the one hand, by precipitation and, on the other, by cowardice.
Maturity Eequires the Experience of Deviation
I said yesterday and I continue with the idea: if someone gave me, at the age of fourteen, a nuclear bomb, I guarantee that I would blow it up. No doubt about it! I would blow it up, at the very least, to see what would happen, out of curiosity about the explosion. But there it is: nobody, at the age of fourteen, receives a nuclear bomb as a gift. The other bombs—all the ones that passed in my hands!—I exploded, and the ones I did not have, but I saw, worked to get them, and took care that they exploded too. Today, I have no interest in bombs. The bad elements of whom I learned and taught, also not—mostly. To me all of this is quite natural. Maturity demands the experience of deviation, of libertinism, of transgression. More than that: malice is a discipline of practical classes. But what am I getting at? I said maturity: one does not mature at sixty. After an age, a man limits himself to being what he is.