conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Temptation to Exist about strong>the, Romania, Paris with the genre: Literature & Fiction, History & Criticism.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: <strong>the author</strong> left his native land of Romania for Paris in the late 1930s, where he lived and wrote until his death in 1995. His many books include <em>Anathemas and Admirations</em>, <em>A Short History of Decay</em>, and <em>The Trouble with Being Born</em>.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. End with the sentence '
  When Cioran describes Nietzsche's philosophy as "a sum of attitudes"—mistakenly scrutinized by scholars for the constants that the philosopher has rejected—it's clear that he accepts the Nietzschean standard, with its critique of "truth" as system and consistency, as his own.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Temptation to Exist
  Yet while Cioran projects a recognizable political stance (though it's present only implicitly in most of the essays), his approach is not, in the end, grounded in a religious commitment. Whatever his political-moral sympathies have in common with the right-wing Catholic sensibility, Cioran himself, as I have already said, is committed to the paradoxes of an atheist theology. Faith itself, he argues, solves nothing.
  Perhaps what prevents Cioran from making the commitment, even in a secular form, to something like the Catholic theology of order is the fact that he understands too well and shares too many of the spiritual presuppositions of the Romantic movement. Critic of left-wing revolution that he may be, and a slightly snobbish analyst of the fact "that rebellion enjoys an undue privilege among us," Cioran cannot disavow the lesson that "almost all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbations of our instability." Thus, alongside the conservative implications of some of the essays, with their scornful treatment of the phenomenology of uprootedness, one must set the ironic-positive attitude toward rebellion in "Thinking Against Oneself," an essay which concludes with the admonition that, "since the Absolute corresponds to a meaning we have not been able to cultivate, let us surrender to all rebellions: they will end by turning against themselves, against us..."
  What makes Cioran's position not truly a conservative one in the modern sense is that his is, above all, an aristocratic stance. See, for only one illustration of the resources of this stance, his brilliant essay, "Beyond the Novel/' in which the novel is eloquently and persuasively condemned, in the end, for its spiritual vulgarity—for its devotion to what Cioran calls "destiny in lower case."
  Whether the vocation of the philosopher is any less compromised can hardly be proved. (Reason is dying, Cioran says in "Style as Risk," in both philosophy and art.) But at least philosophy, I imagine Cioran feels, maintains somewhat higher standards of decorum. Untempted by the same kind of fame or emotional rewards that can descend on the poet, perhaps the philosopher, a little better than the poet, can comprehend and respect the modesty of the inexpressible.
  When Cioran describes Nietzsche's philosophy as "a sum of attitudes"—mistakenly scrutinized by scholars for the constants that the philosopher has rejected—it's clear that he accepts the Nietzschean standard, with its critique of "truth" as system and consistency, as his own.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Taste is formed by the pressure the idle exert upon Letters, especially in epochs when society is refined enough to set the tone for literature. When we realize that once upon a time a mangled metaphor discredited a writer, that an academician lost face for an impropriety, or that a witticism uttered in a courtesan's hearing could procure a situation, even an abbey (such was Talleyrand's case), we measure the distance that has been covered since. The terrorism of taste has ceased, and with it the superstition of style. To bemoan the fact would be as ridiculous as it is ineffectual. Behind us lies a sufficiently solid tradition of vulgarity; art must adapt, must resign itself to it or be isolated in an absolutely subjective expression. To write for everyone or for no one— each man decides the matter for himself, according to his nature. Whatever choice we make, we are sure of no longer meeting on our way that old scarecrow, a failure of taste.
  A nation going downhill diminishes in every domain. "Every individual or national degradation," Joseph de Maistre observes, "is immediately heralded by a strictly proportional degradation in the language itself." Our deficiencies stain our style; as for a nation, its increasingly shaky instinct drags it into an equivalent uncertainty in all realms. France, for over a century, has abandoned her old idea of perfection. The same was true for Rome: the eclipse of her power was contemporary with the decline of Latin which, docile in the service of doctrines and chimeras opposed to its genius, became a tool monopolized by the Councils. The language of Tacitus, distorted, trivialized, forced to endure divagations on the Trinity! Words have the same destiny as empires.
  In the age of the salons, French acquired a dryness and a transparency which allowed it to become universal. When it began to grow complicated, to take liberties, its solidity suffered. The language freed itself at last to the detriment of its universality and, like France, is evolving toward the antipodes of its past, of its genius. A double and inevitable disintegration. In the age of Voltaire, each man tried to write like everyone; but everyone wrote perfectly. Today, the writer wants his own style, to individualize himself by expression; he succeeds only by destroying his language, violating its rules, undermining its structure, its magnificent monotony. This process is one it would be foolish to attempt to avoid; we contribute to it in spite of ourselves, and it must be so, on pain of literary death. From the moment French declines, let us declare ourselves a part of its destiny, let us profit by the profundities it displays, as by its insistence on prevailing over the modesty of its limits. Nothing more futile than to expostulate against its lovely autumn, its Indian summer. Let us try to rejoice, rather, at living in an age when words, used in any sense, free themselves from all constraint, and when meaning no longer constitutes a demand or an obsession. No doubt about it: we are attending the splendid disintegration of a language. Its future? Perhaps it will know a few spasms of delicacy or, more likely, will end by serving in the modern Councils, worse than those of antiquity. A rapid death-agony could just as well be its fate. Whether or not it is on its way to a vestigial state, the fact remains that we see more than one of its words losing what remained of its vitality. Will the genius of prose leak into other idioms?
  To speak of decadence in the absolute signifies nothing; linked to a literature and to a language, it concerns only the man who feels himself attached to one and the other. Is French deteriorating? The only person to be alarmed about it will be the one who sees it as a unique and irreplaceable instrument. It matters little to him that in the future another, more manageable, less exigent idiom might be found. When one loves a language, it is a dishonor to survive it.
  Attack is merely the desire to free oneself from infatuation or to punish oneself for it. I shall never forgive myself for being inwardly nearer the first novelist I meet at a party than the idlest sage of antiquity. Our passion for the rubbish of Western civilization, a civilization of the novel, has its penalties. Overshadowed by its literature, our culture grants the writer something of the same credit antiquity attributed to the philosopher. Yet the patrician who purchased his Stoic, his Epicurean, was thereby enabled to reach a level to which the bourgeois who reads his novel cannot pretend. To the objection that the philosopher of antiquity, when he was not an impostor, expatiated on themes as hackneyed as destiny, pleasure or pain, I reply that this sort of mediocrity seems to me preferable to our own, and that even the charlatanry of wisdom has more truth in it than the fabrication of novels. And as for charlatanry, let us not forget the worthier, more genuine kind—the charlatanry of poetry.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It is nevertheless doubtful that by relying on the "historical" aspect of the experience of death we shall manage to penetrate further into its original character, for history is merely an inessential mode of being, the most effective form of our infidelity to ourselves, a metaphysical refusal, a mass of events with which we confront the only event that matters. Everything that aims at affecting man—religions included—is tainted with a crude sentiment of death. And it is to seek a true, purer sentiment of this kind that the hermits took refuge in the desert, that negation of history which they rightly compared to the angels, since—they maintained—both were unaware of sin and the Fall into the realm of time. The desert, in fact, provides the image of duration translated into coexistence: a motionless flow, a metamorphosis bewitched by space. The solitary retires there less to expand his solitude and enrich his absence than to produce within himself the tonality of death.
  In order to hear this tonality we must institute a desert within ourselves... If we succeed, certain harmonies flow through our blood, our veins dilate, our secrets and our resources appear upon the surface of ourselves where desire and disgust, horror and rapture mingle in obscure and luminous festivity. The dawn of death breaks within us: cosmic trance, the bursting of the spheres, a thousand voices! We are death, and everything is death—death seduces us, sweeps us away, carries us aloft, casts us to earth, or hurls us beyond the bounds of space itself. Death, forever intact, unworn by all the ages of our history, makes us accomplices in its apotheosis: we feel its immemorial freshness, and its time unlike any other... death's time, which ceaselessly creates and decomposes us. To such a degree does death hold us, immortalize us in agony, that we shall never be able to indulge ourselves in the luxury of dying; and although we possess the very science of destiny, although we are a veritable encyclopedia of fatalities, we nevertheless know nothing, for it is death that knows everything within us.
  Unable to see in death the positive expression of the void, the agent that awakens the creature from itself, the summons resounding in the ubiquity of drowsiness, I knew nothingness by heart, and I accepted my knowledge. Even now, how could I mistake the auto-suggestion that produced the universe? Yet I protest against my own lucidity. I must have Reality at any price. I have feelings only out of cowardice; very well, I wish to be a coward, to impose a "soul" upon myself, to let myself be devoured by a thirst for immediacy, to destroy all my evidence and find myself a world whatever the cost. And if I could not find a world, I would content myself with a shard of being, with the illusion that something exists, whether before my eyes or somewhere else. I would be the conquistador of a continent of lies. To be duped or die: there was no other choice. Like those who have discovered life by the detours of death, I would hurl myself upon the first deception, upon anything that might restore my lost reality.
  Our unprovoked natural sufferings being far too incomplete, it is up to us to augment, to intensify them, to create others for ourselves—artificial ones. Left to itself, the flesh encloses us within a narrow horizon. Only if we put it to the torture will it sharpen our perceptions and enlarge our perspectives: the mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself. The anchorites knew how to remedy the insufficiency of their ills... After having joined battle with the world, they had to declare war against themselves. What tranquility for their neighbors! Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our own murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish. We shall never be able to estimate the number of horrors which those primitive monkish colonies spared humanity. Had all those hermits remained in the secular world, how many excesses would they not have committed! For the greatest good of their time, they had the inspiration to exercise their cruelty upon themselves. If we would moderate our manners, we must learn to turn our talons inward, to develop the technique of the desert...
  Moreover, if you are dissatisfied with yourself, if you want to change your nature, you engage yourself twice over in an act of faith: you desire two lives within one. Which is precisely what our ascetics are attempting when, by making of death a means of not dying, they take pleasure in their vigils, their cries, their nocturnal athleticism. By imitating their excesses, even outstripping them, the day will come, perhaps, when we shall have mistreated our reason as much as they did. "I am guided by whoever is madder than myself"—thus speaks our thirst. Only our flaws, the opacities of our clairvoyance, can save us: were that transparence perfect, it would strip us of the senseless creature which inhabits us, the self to whom we owe the best of our illusions and our conflicts.