628
E. M. CIORAN
woes. To belong to it-what a lesson in humiliation and sarcasm, what
a calamity, what a leprosy!
As for the great idea that prevailed there, I was too impertinent,
too conceited to perceive its origin, its depth, or its experiences, the system
of disasters which it supposed. I was not to understand it until much
later. How it has insinuated itself to me, I do not know. When I was
led to experience it lucidly, I became reconciled to my country which,
thereupon,
at last ceased to.haunt me.
To exempt themselves from action, oppressed peoples entrust them–
selves to "fate," a negative salvation as well as a means of interpreting
events: a philosophy of history
for daily use,
a determinist vision on an
affective basis, a metaphysic of circumstance....
If
the Germans, too, are sensitive to destiny, they see it, nonethe–
less, not as a principle intervening from outside, but as a power which,
emanating from their will, ends by escaping them and turning against
them in order to crush them. Linked to their appetite for the demiurge,
their
Schicksal
supposes a play of fatalities not so much within the world
as within the self. Which comes down to saying that up to a certain
point it depends on them.
To conceive destiny as exterior to ourselves, omnipotent and sov–
ereign, a vast cycle of failures is requisite. A condition which my country
fulfills to perfection. It would be indecent for Rumania to believe in
effort, in the utility of action. Hence it does not believe in them and,
out of propriety, resigns itself to the inevitable. I am grateful to it for
having bequeathed me, with the code of despair, that
savoir-vivre,
that
relaxation in the face of Necessity, as well as several impasses and the
art of adjusting to them. Prompt to sustain my disappointments and to
initiate my indolence into the secret of preserving them,
my
country
has further offered me, in its eagerness to make me into a wastrel who
keeps up appearances, the means of degrading myself without compromis–
ing myself too much. lowe it not only my finest, my surest failures, but
also this talent for masking my cowardice and hoarding my compunc–
tions. For how many other advantages am I not in its debt! Its titles to
my gratitude are so numerous, in fact, that it would be boring to list
them here.
Whatever good will I might have mustered, would I have been
able, without my country, to waste my days in so exemplary a manner?
It
has helped me to do so, led me on, encouraged me. To spoil one's
life, one forgets all too quickly, is not so easy: it takes a tradition, long
training, the labor of several generations. This labor performed, every–
thing goes to perfection. The certainty of Futility then forms part of
