JMA-PSOS

A few weeks ago, I read Cioran's History and Utopia in roughly two sittings. I like his first two essays best in their maniacal dissection of humanity reminiscent of Nietzsche's Übermensch, the Gnostics or simply foreshadowing our current times. Semi-random excerpts:

I pity those who have never conceived a dream of excessive domination, nor felt the times seething within themselves. In the days when Ahriman was my principle and my god, when I thirsted for barbarism, I brooded over the cavalcades within myself, hordes provoking one sweet catastrophe after the next! Foundered as I have, nowadays, in modesty, I nonetheless harbor a weakness for tyrants, whom I always prefer to redeemers and prophets; I prefer them because they do not take refuge in formulas; because their prestige is an equivocal one, their cravings self-destructive; whereas the others, possessed of a limitless ambition, dis guise its aims under deceptive precepts, retreat from the citizen in order to rule over conscience, to occupy it, and, once implanted there, to create permanent ravages without incurring the reproach, however merited, of indiscretion or sadism. Compared to the power of a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Mohammed, what does that of the conquerors signify?
Abandon the notion of glory unless you are tempted to found a religion!

The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the major intuition of ancient mythology.

Every undermining labor exalts, confers energy; whence the urgency, whence the practical infallibility of vile sentiments. Envy, which makes a fool into a daredevil, a worm into a tiger, whips up our nerves, ignites our blood, communicates to the body a shudder that keeps it from going soft, lends the most anodyne countenance an expression of concentrated ardor; without envy, there would be no events, nor even a world; indeed it is envy that has made man possible, permitted him to gain a name for himself, to accede to greatness by the fall, by that rebellion against the anonymous glory of paradise, to which-any more than the Fallen Angel, his inspiration and his model-he could not adapt himself. Everything that breathes and moves testifies to the initial taint. Forever associated with the effervescences of Satan (patron of Time, scarcely distinct from God, being merely
His visible countenance), we are victims of this genius of sedition who persuades us to perform our task as living men by rousing us against one another in a deplorable combat, no doubt, but a fortifying one: we emerge from torpor, enlivened whenever-triumphing over our Higher Impulses-we become aware of our role as destroyers.

He who has suffered humiliation will never forget its effects and will know no rest until he has put them into a work capable of perpetuating its pangs. To create is to bequeath one's sufferings, wanting others to enter into them, to assume them, to be impregnated by them, and to live them over again. This is true of a poem, this can be true of the cosmos. Without the hypothesis of a feverish deity subject to convulsions, giddy with epilepsy, we could not explain a universe that . everywhere shows signs of an original sputum . . . . And we divine the essence of such a God only when we ourselves suffer fits such as He must have known at the moments He came to grips with Chaos. We are reminded of Him by everything in ourselves that resists form or good sense, by our confusions and our delirium: we join Him by supplications in which we dislocate ourselves in Him and Him in us, for He is close to us whenever something in ourselves breaks down and when, in our fashion, we too measure ourselves against Chaos. A summary theology? Contemplating this botched Creation, how can we help incriminating its Author, how-above all-suppose Him able and adroit? Any other God would have given evidence of more competence or more equilibrium than this one: errors and confusion wherever you look! Impossible to absolve Him, but impossible, too, not to understand Him. And we understand Him by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune. His enterprise bears the stigmata of the provisional, yet it is not time He lacked in order to finish things off. He was, to our misfortune, inexplicably rushed. By a legitimate ingratitude, and to make Him feel the brunt of our ill humor, we set about-experts in counter-Creation-deteriorating His structure, rendering even messier a work already compromised from the start. Doubtless it would be wiser and more elegant to have nothing to do with it, to leave it as it is, not to exact reprisal for His own incapacities; but since He has transmitted His defects to us, we cannot show Him much solicitude. If, all things considered, we prefer Him to humanity, this does not exempt Him from our resentment. Perhaps we have conceived Him only to justify and regenerate our rebellions, to afford them a worthy object, to keep them from spoiling and dwindling, reinforcing them by the inspiriting abuse of sacrilege, an answer to the arguments and seductions of discouragement. We are never quite finished with God. Treating Him on equal footing as an enemy is an impertinence that fortifies, stimulates, and how much we must pity those He has ceased to annoy.