VARIETY
629
your inheritance: it is a possession your ancestors have acquired for you
by the sweat of their brow and at the cost of countless humiliations.
And you profit by them, glory in them. As for your own humiliations,
it will always be praiseworthy to embellish or evade them, to affect the
manner of an elegant no-good, to be, honorably, the last among men.
Politeness, the
custom
of misfortune, privilege of those who, born failures,
have begun by their end. To know oneself of a breed which has never
been is a bitterness alloyed with a certain sweetness, even a certain
voluptuousness.
The exasperation I used to feel when I heard anyone say, apropos
of one thing or another, "It's fate," now seems childish to me. I didn't
realize then that I would come to do as much; that, taking shelter
behind this syllable myself, I would ascribe to it good luck and bad, all
the details of happiness and disaster; that, further, I would cling to
Destiny with the ecstasy of a shipwrecked mariner, would address my
first thoughts to it before flinging myself into the horror of each day.
"You will vanish into space, 0 my Russia," Tyuchev exclaimed in the
last century. I applied his exclamation with more suitability to my own
country, differently constituted in order to be engulfed, provided with all
the qualities of an ideal and anonymous victim. The habit of endless and
pointless suffering, the plenitude of disaster- what an apprenticeship in
the school of vanquished tribes! This is how the oldest Rumanian his–
torian begins his chronicles: "It is not man who commands the times, but
the times which command man." A crude formula, program and epitaph
of one corner of Europe. To catch the tone of Balkan popular sensibility,
one need only recall the lamentations of the chorus in Greek tragedy. By
an unconscious tradition, a whole ethnic space was marked by it. Routine
of the sigh and of calamity, jeremiads of minor peoples before the bestial–
ity of the great! Yet let us be careful not to complain too much: is it not
comforting to oppose to the world's disorders the coherence of our mise–
ries and our defeats? And have we not, in the face of universal dilet–
tantism, the consolation of possessing, with regard to pain, a profes–
sional competence?
E. M.
Cioran
(Translated from the French
by
Richard Howard)
