Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview With E.M Cioran

[ToALonelyPeace]

Interviewed by Michel Jakob.

Wakefulness_and_Obsession_An_Interview_with_E-M-Cioran.pdf

Originally available on jstor, but you've to be a member there.

Some highlights:

Quote

"XIII: When do you usually listen to music? XIII: I listen to music all the time, especially now that I have stopped writing. I don't feel that it is worth the effort to continue, and music more than makes up for this dryness. To live without music would be a torment for me, an absurdity. One can very well not write. One ought not to write, because one desires, without admitting it, to bring about through words what only music can accomplish. An emotion whose origin is musical gets lost in verbal transposition, whereas in the music it reveals its sense directly. Why should one write anymore, in that case, and why write at all, why always want to add to the immense number of books, why want to become an author at any price? These days, too much has already been written. We live in a period of absurd and completely unnecessary overproduction. The whole world writes these days, especially in Paris. I myself originally thought that I would write only a little, but one allows oneself, unfortunately, to be seduced. Nevertheless, I now understand that I can no longer play out this comedy. Earlier on it had nothing to do with comedy; it was a kind of necessity for me. It offered me the possibility of acquitting myself, for the only way to simplify everything is to express oneself. As soon as one has written something down, it loses its secret at once, it gets lost, is killed: one has "killed" the thing and oneself. But writing has precisely this function. I have noticed, by the way, that those who do not write have more resources, because they store up everything within themselves. To have written something down means to have dragged it out of oneself, to have uttered definitively everything that came from inside. A writer is someone who gives away that which is most original to him, finally losing, in this manner, his whole substance. That is why writers are so uninteresting as a rule and I mean that quite seriously: writers are people who have exhausted themselves. Only the dregs of themselves still exist; they are pitiful marionettes."

[graywyvern]

enjoyed this

[GirlyGirlMask]

Thank you for sharing this, it was fantastic.