The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch-—and watch themselves watching.

Fifty-nine seconds out of each of my minutes,” I reflected as I walked through the streets, “were dedicated to suffering or to .The interval between Cioran's relocation and the appearance of A Short History of Decay coincided with World War II. Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse. Cioran, in short, mercilessly strips away our most cherished illusions and confronts us with the stark truth of our predicament, a truth that is far from pleasant.

And if we had a miraculously present memory which sustained the totality of our past pains, we should succumb beneath such a burden. Ideally, the final stage of a literature and of a civilization: imagine a Valéry with the soul of a Nero. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity. Having substituted concepts for their myths and symbols, we consider ourselves ‘advanced’; but these myths and symbols expressed no less than our concepts. Misery constitutes the texture of all that breathes; but its modalities have changed course; they have composed that series of irreducible appearances which lead each of us to believe he is the first to have suffered so.Except for the ancient skeptics and the French moralists, it would be hard to cite a single mind whose theories, secretly or explicitly, do not tend to mold man. The initiates were doubtless obliged to keep silence; yet it is inconceivable that not a single chatterbox was among their number; what is more contrary to human nature than such stubbornness in secrecy?