624
E. M.
CIORAN
vulsed the world, then allowed herself to decline and fall: and one day,
I had a revelation of that fall.
It
was in Valladolid, in the Casa Cervan–
tes. An ordinary-looking old woman was standing next to me, looking at
the portrait of Philip III: "A madman," I said. She turned toward me:
"It was with
him
that our decadence began." I was at the heart of the
problem. "Our decadence!" There we have it, I thought, in Spain
decadence is a popular concept, a national cliche, an official slogan. The
nation which in the sixteenth century offered the world a spectacle of
magnificence and madness-is now reduced to codifying her inertia.
If
they had had time for it, doubtless the last Romans would not have
proceeded otherwise; but they were unable to ponder their fall, for the
Barbarians already surrounded them. Better provided for, the Spanish
have had the leisure (three centuries!) to meditate on their miseries, to
saturate themselves in them. Gossips of despair, improvisers of illusions,
they live in a kind of melodious asperity, a
tragic nonseriousness,
which
saves them from vulgarity, from happiness and from success. Should they
someday exchange their ancient baubles for other, more modern ones,
they would nonetheless remain marked by so long an absence. Incapable
of falling into step with "civilization," bigots or anarchists, they could
never renounce their
inactuality.
How could they overtake the other
nations, how could they be up-to-date, when they have exhausted the
best of themselves ruminating on death, befouling themselves with it,
turning it into a visceral experience? Constantly retrogressing toward the
essential, they have capsized out of their depths-i.e., in them. The notion
of decadence would not preoccupy them so much if it did not translate
in terms of history their weakness for the void, their obsession with the
skeleton. Nothing surprising in the fact that for each of them;his country
should be
his
problem. Reading Ganivet, Unamuno or Ortega, we realize
that for them Spain is a paradox which touches them intimately and
which they cannot reduce to a rational formula. They return to it
constantly, fascinated by the attraction of the insoluble which it repre–
sents. Unable to solve it by analysis, they contemplate Don Quixote, in
whom the paradox is even more insoluble, being a symbol. ... We do not
imagine
a
Valery or a Proust meditating on France in order to discover
himself: a country intact, without the deep rifts that breed anxiety,
a nontragic nation, France is not a case: having succeeded, having con–
cluded her fate, how could she be "interesting"?
It is the merit of Spain to propose a type of unwonted development,
a destiny both inspired and incomplete. (One might say, a Rimbaud
incarnated in a collectivity.) Think of Spain's frenzied pursuit of gold,
her collapse into anonymity, then think of the conquistadors, their ban-
