I get your drift. In my rich interior life, and since you are philosophically inclined, I sometimes fantasize about a meeting between Cioran and others of his inclination, such as Ortega, and the granite poet from California, Robinson Jeffers. I suspect that within the space of an hour they would have whimpered, whined, and called out for their mothers. My favorite Jeffers story involves how he was once called for jury duty for a murder trial and immediately dismissed by the defense because of the “assumed cruelty of his countenance”. Edward Weston said he wasn’t human. He was an element. Which is my other antidote when it comes to nihilists and such who, in my view, expend way too much energy on what it means and doesn’t mean to be human. Thanks.

Terreson
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Granada (Pomegranate)

Little seeds,
like stars of continuous luxurious taste,
you brighten my day with your sweet luxury.
Now I know why Persephone could not resist you.
I know I would not be able to.
I could not starve with your seeds in my face.
Because of you we lost summer.
But you cast a spell on me so
I crunch, crunch away.

The assignment, starting from their work translating Neruda’s Oda al tomate, was to write about a food they loved or hated. I guess the class had been studying Greek mythology.
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I am 100% with you and Stendahl as a matter of principle, just as I am all for clean living and a healthy diet. Yet I find myself at times repairing with gleeful perversity to Cioran (and Schopenhauer) now and then, in much the same way that I sometimes go out and buy a pack of cigarettes. So bad. So good.

Thanks for that Stendahl quote. Terrific.
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I found this comment in a Wiki article on Cioran: “According to Cioran, as long as man has kept in touch with his origins and hasn’t cut himself off from himself, he has resisted decadence. Today, he is on his way to his own destruction through self-objectification, impeccable production and reproduction, excess of self-analysis and transparency, and artificial triumph.” The sweet irony, of course, is that all nihilists since Turgenev coined the word have been subject to self-objectification and an excess of self-analysis. My personal antidote to the Ciorans of the philosophical world has been something Stendhal said in his memoirs:

“The genius of poetry is dead, but the demon of suspicion has come into the world. I am firmly convinced that the only antidote for this, the only thing that might make the reader forget the eternal I of the author, is complete sincerity.”

Anyway, funny what autumn without fail does to the body’s soma.

Terreson
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