Searching for Cioran

1. Răşinari, Transylvania, 1911–1921

Răşinari, Transylvania, 1911–1921 I haven’t written with my blood, I have written with all the tears I have never shed. Even if I had been a logician, I would still have been an elegiacal man. Every day I relive the expulsion from Paradise with the same passion and the same regret as the one who was first banished. —Cioran, Cahiers, 683 I am not from here; condition of inner exile; I’m nowhere at home— absolute rootlessness. Paradise lost,—my constant obsession. —Cioran, Cahiers, 19 I have lived all my life with the feeling that I was chased away from my true place. If the phrase “metaphysical exile” had been deprived of meaning, my existence alone would have sufficed to give it one. —Cioran, “De l’inconvénient d’être né,” Œuvres, 1320 The Past’s Omnipresence: 21, rue de l’Odéon, Paris, July 1960 He lay fully clothed on his narrow cot in the unfamiliar attic room, staring at the gray light filtered through a small skylight in the ceiling. He preferred overcast skies; blue skies were troubling, stirring up one’s wanderlust. And now he had stopped wandering : for ten years, while living in furnished hotel rooms, Cioran had been dreaming 1 Răşinari, Transylvania, 1911–1921 21 of an apartment of his own. The dream had finally come true, but now it gave him little satisfaction. Having a home: if only God would forgive him such decadence! He was nowhere at home, he was the exile par excellence. He thought himself a passant, “en instance de depart, realité provisoire” [on the point of departure, provisional reality].1 He had been almost homeless all his life, moving from one city to another, farther and farther away from his birthplace: Răşinari, Sibiu, Bucharest, Berlin, Paris. Răşinari and Paris: the beginning and the end of his life’s journey. Farthest apart in time and space, they shared one advantage for him: they were both places “out of time.” The former was his childhood paradise, the latter was the “home” of his exile, which fed his vocation for marginality. Between them, they spanned history, and he abhorred history.2 He had felt homeless ever since the day he left his village in the Carpathian mountains to go to secondary school in the nearby old German town of Sibiu (Hermannstadt ) in Transylvania.3 Now forty years had passed, and he could not forget the feeling of estrangement he experienced then. He saw himself, a sturdy, fair-haired child of ten, dressed in the stiff new school uniform, sitting on a load of hay in the back of a horse-drawn cart. His parents sat on the box in front. Though a priest, his father had enough of the peasant left in him to drive the horses himself. His robust back, draped in priestly black robes, rose straight and massive in front of his son’s eyes like an insurmountable obstacle or a terrible menace. The cart advanced slowly in the blue haze of an early September morning. The villagers on their way to their fields stopped and respectfully lifted their hats to greet them. They stared after the cart. The village priest’s son was going away to school. Like a wedding or a funeral, it was an event worthy of their attention. As the towers of Sibiu’s churches gradually came into view, his heart sank with despair. He burst into tears, sobbing with uncontrollable and unmitigated grief. His father was “tearing him away from the village he adored to the point of idolatry.” He had been used to running barefoot in the fields and hills of his native village from May to November, totally free. Suddenly he felt trapped. The outskirts of the approaching city were the new limits of his freedom, and his father’s bulky black shape, their guardian . His new clothes itched, his new shoes pinched. He felt as if his feet had sunk into an anthill and were being slowly eaten by the tireless insects. He shook with helpless rage. He wished the new school would disappear, wiped away by some disaster. One of his childhood friends had thought up an ingenious method to do away with school: he had rubbed their old country school with lard, hoping the dogs would eat it. It was an action of protest worthy of Rabelais’s Panurge. How well he understood the feeling that had prompted it! [3.144.113.30] Project MUSE...