On Not Wanting to Live

Emil Cioran — On the Heights of Despair

There are experiences which one cannot survive, after which one feels that there is no meaning left in anything. Once you have reached the limits of life, having lived to extremity all that is offered at those dangerous borders, the everyday gesture and the usual aspiration lose their seductive charm. If you go on living, you do so only through your capacity for objectification, your ability to free yourself, in writing, from the infinite strain. Creativity is a temporary salvation from the claws of death.

I feel I must burst because of all that life offers me and because of the prospect of death. I feel that I am dying of solitude, of love, of despair, of hatred, of all that this world offers me. With every experience I expand like a balloon blown up beyond its capacity. The most terrifying intensification bursts into nothingness. You grow inside, you dilate madly until there are no boundaries left, you reach the edge of light, where light is stolen by night, and from that plenitude as in a savage whirlwind you are thrown straight into nothingness. Life breeds both plenitude and void, exuberance and depression. What are we when confronted with the interior vortex which swallows us into absurdity? I feel my life cracking within me from too much intensity, too much disequilibrium.

It is like an explosion which cannot be contained, which throws you up in the air along with everything else. At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm. At the edge of life everything is an occasion for death. You die because of all there is and all there is not. Every experience is in this case a leap into nothingness.

When you have lived everything life has offered you to a paroxysm of supreme intensity, you have reached the stage at which you can no longer experience anything, because there is nothing left. Even if you have not exhausted all the possibilities of these experiences, it is enough to have lived the principal ones to their limit. And when you feel that you are dying of loneliness, despair, or love, all that you have not experienced joins in this endlessly sorrowful procession.

The feeling that you cannot survive such whirlwinds also arises from a consummation on a purely inner plane. The flames of life burn in a closed oven from which the heat cannot escape. Those who live on an external plane are saved from the outset: but do they have anything to save when they are not aware of any danger? The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself. Life is too limited and too fragmentary to endure great tensions. Did not all the mystics feel that they could not live after their great ecstasies? What could they expect from this world, those who sense, beyond the normal limits, life, loneliness, despair, and death?

Emil Cioran — On the Heights of Despair