by Rob Doyle
The day after our visit to Montparnasse, Zoé left early for work and I brought my various notebooks to a nearby cafe. My hope was to construct some kind of cohesive theoretical statement from the notes I had been taking over the past year or so on Cioran’s books. I had convinced myself that I needed to wait till I was in Paris to begin the essay, and now here I was in the city, with conditions as favourable as they would ever be; yet as I sat down at a small, darkly varnished table with a view on to the street outside, I found myself fighting the temptation to put off working until I was back in Dublin. There, I imagined, I would be able to sit at the comfort of my own desk, without distractions, and work for sustained periods without having to worry about whether I was in anyone’s way, or if I should order a slice of cake I didn’t want so as not to incite the resentment of the cafe’s proprietors. The problem was, I had no energy for writing. I sat there with my laptop open in front of me, a couple of notebooks placed on either side, and could not for the life of me rouse myself to begin. I wanted to get started but on the other hand I didn’t want to get started at all, I didn’t want to do anything. I was more than happy to sit there drinking my coffee, looking out the window at the pair of twelve-year-old soldiers with assault rifles who were walking past. Such troughs of fatigue, a factor in my life for as long as I could remember, seemed to be growing deeper and more frequent as I got older. I was hardly into my thirties but already I felt the diminishment of vitality associated with middle age – in fact, I had always felt it, even when I was twenty-one, or seventeen. Perhaps I was born middle-aged, I thought. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I suffered from an undiagnosed case of chronic fatigue syndrome – or whether, more simply, I was a lazy bastard.
But fuck this shit, I said to myself, sitting in the cafe – I had work to do and I was going to get it done. I drank an espresso to fire myself up, then began to put some shape on my notes. Just as I was making progress, it began to seem to me that, since I was in Paris after all, I ought to get out of the nineteenth arrondissement and do my writing in a livelier, more Parisian cafe in central Paris, where I would find greater inspiration than I would here. I paid for my coffee, packed away the notebooks and laptop, and walked to the Métro station.
Sitting opposite me on the Métro was an impossibly chic woman who was reading a book by Félix Guattari. In Paris, you could have been forgiven for reaching the conclusion that the printed word and literature as we know it were not issuing their death rattle. People read, often in public, on the Métro or alone in cafes. And their choice of reading material was generally not the bloodbath bestsellers and child-wizard fuckery to be seen on the metros of other capitals, but books by authors whose very emblem of authority was their unreadability. I had already spotted a pretty teenager burying her face in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity as her boyfriend tried to plant kisses on her neck, and a tiny woman who looked to be pushing one hundred thumbing through Derrida’s The Archaeology of the Frivolous while wearing an expression of indulgent scepticism. An indelibly glamorous race, the French even managed to make reading seem cool again. In Paris, you didn’t need to feel obsolescent every time you took out a book in a public place, rather than a phone, tablet or e-reader. Books were still fashion accessories in a way they had ceased to be elsewhere.
The Parisians were also, of course, exceptionally beautiful people. Even the staff at the McDonald’s outside the Métro station at Saint-Michel were stunning. Like anyone else, I had noted the gorgeousness of the Parisians on my previous visits to the city. The quantity of not just highly attractive but outstandingly beautiful women had at first been a torment. Back then, I had made it my business, felt it was my duty, to desire every beautiful woman I saw. To do less, I imagined, would have been to dishonour the miracle of it, this implausible concentration of exquisite human specimens. Consequently, those prior visits to Paris had had the character of a long, melancholy sigh. This time around, though, a change had occurred. The women (and the men) were as gorgeous as ever, but a profound inner shift had taken place in me: I found I could no longer be bothered to do all that desiring. It was completely exhausting, and so obviously futile. It would be an exaggeration to say I stopped noticing the million beautiful girls of Paris, any more than I’d stopped noticing those of Sicily when I’d lived there: I just stopped actively wanting them, in both the bluntly carnal and the more yearningly romantic ways. This idea – that I was not beholden to a state of constant, acute and frustrated longing – came as a revelation to me. The process by which I had made this breakthrough – fatigued surrender after years spent cracking my head against the brick wall of desire – seemed to herald a broader fate, possibly a salvation: as I grew older, I would gradually find I no longer had the vigour to desire anything at all, and then I would be free, as serene as a mountain peak, and then I would die.
Here lies Rob. He couldn’t be fucked, not even to be fucked.
However, as I sat in a cafe on Rue des Écoles, at a table looking on to the busy shopping street, the place became so preposterously crowded with knockout women that I quickly gave up hope of getting any work done whatsoever and resigned myself to gazing about, lovesick as a schoolgirl and horny as a seminarian. After an hour and a half, having withstood the serious temptation to go and wank myself off in the gents, I packed up my notebooks again and took the Métro back to Zoé’s flat.
It was that same evening, while reading aloud for Zoé excerpts from Cioran’s massive Cahiers, the journals he kept from 1957 to 1972, that I realised why I had, so far, been unable to get started on the essay. It wasn’t my lack of energy, which seemed now like an illusion: I was actually feeling quite perky, as I often did in the evenings. It wasn’t even the distractingly beautiful women of Paris. No. The real reason I was finding it difficult to write about Cioran was that Cioran did not want to be written about. At least, the work of the Parisian Cioran – E. M. rather than Emil – the mature, aphoristic books that I considered the jewels of his oeuvre, resisted being written about. The whole point of his crystalline, perfectly weighted aphorisms is that they are just what they are: they neither require nor permit extrapolation or even counter-argument. Each aphorism is the singular, unimprovable expression of itself. As such, it was pointless to add to them, through criticism or commentary. Cioran never cared to defend his arguments: he simply recorded the explosions of his temperament, artfully vented his inexhaustible bile while taking glee in his outrages, paradoxes and contradictions. Just as his work repelled attempts to expound critically upon it, so too was Cioran’s life in Paris deflective to biographical writing – and not only because, anxious to conceal the fascist dalliances of his youth, he shunned publicity during his years in Paris, refusing to be interviewed by French journalists. Little wonder that the only two biographies available in English, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston’s Searching for Cioran and Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past, both focused on Cioran’s early life, probing the extent and significance of his involvement with fascism: after he settled in Paris, Cioran gave his biographers nothing more to write about. Just as I would never enter Cioran’s former flat on the Rue de l’Odéon, I would never know more than I knew now about the decades he spent in Paris: there was nothing else to know. Cioran had had the last laugh: he had erased himself in his writing, left nothing behind but his insults.
One of the constraints I had set for myself when I decided to write about Cioran was that I would not quote his work, the reason being that it was too quotable. If I quoted one passage, I would want to quote another, then another, and many more, until I was not so much writing about Cioran as presenting the reader with his entire body of work (as Gallimard had done when they published his single-volume Œuvres). To quote Cioran would only underscore the inadequacy of writing about him, just as underlining passages in his work had brought to light its own futility. Having already decided that I would write about Cioran without quoting him, it now seemed I would have to write about him without even writing about him. An essay on Cioran
in which both his life and his work were almost completely absent: this is what I was blundering into.
And yet, Cioran had managed to get inside me. His unremitting scepticism, his bitterness raised to the status of a cosmic principle, now felt like my own, whether I wanted them or not. Cioran was like the Cheshire Cat who vanished leaving not a grin but a sneer, a malicious sneer from beyond the grave. As I sat with Zoé in her flat, light-headed from the day’s exertions, it began to seem to me that all I could see now was Cioran’s sneer, the sneer that had burrowed deep into my being, that tainted everything I saw, ridiculed everything, everyone. I felt that if I were to stand up and look out the window, over the brooding skies of Paris, I would see Cioran’s sneer, vast and malevolent, gaping across the heavens, and the noise of his laughter would thunder all around. I imagined sinking my teeth into the flesh of Cioran’s face and tearing it off. What had Cioran ever given to my life, other than pessimism and discouragement? He had exacerbated the very tendencies in myself I had spent my whole adult life trying to curb: withdrawal, cynicism, nihilism, despair, spleen, derision, scowling, indifference, resentment, defeatism, contrarianism, torpor, detachment, provocation, rage, arrogance, insolence, bitterness, hostility. He had urged me to cultivate my antipathies, finally to turn away from the world, like the Buddhas and naysayer sages down the millennia, Cioran’s ancestors and inspirations. I thought of the year I had spent living in solitude in Rosslare Harbour, County Wexford, where I had gone to recover from a devastating break-up: all I’d had down there for company, in a silent house on a half-deserted estate, was a stack of Cioran’s books. Heartbroken and drinking too much, cut off from all culture, all social and political life, I had too readily embraced Cioran’s insistence that the one honourable response to the world was to turn away from it, to ignore its noise and simply fade back into non-existence. All engagement, enthusiasm and commitment had seemed to me contemptible and delusional states, to be disdained in others and snuffed out in myself. But I was so fucking depressed down there! In Rosslare Harbour I was so depressed, my depression was so total, that I thought I was fucking happy! Or not happy, exactly, but I was unaware of just how miserable I was, sitting alone day after day, night after night, on a windswept beach where I was invariably the only human being, or in the silent house in a transit town where I knew no one, where I didn’t even have a car to take me into Wexford town. What did I expect, when the only company I had was this sneering bastard?
And yet, behind Cioran’s sneer, there was a point he tirelessly made that still seemed to me worth heeding. The most cursory survey of the global situation confirmed that, yes, it really was the worst who were full of passionate intensity – the ones to be feared and resisted were not the preachers of decline, the diviners of our civilisation’s exhaustion, but all those wild-eyed zealots who strove to create a heaven on earth, refusing to see that, in so doing, they would inevitably unleash hell. Absolutists, zealots, demagogues, jihadists, messianic utopians – all manner of fanatics thrived in the contemporary chaos, exploiting the frightening complexity of the age to hawk their simplistic narratives, their archaic binaries that brooked no ambiguity and sanctioned bottomless bloodshed. It was not only the elegance and philosophical extremism that I found so gratifying in Cioran, it was his hostility to all fanaticism, the lucid insistence that every mania we indulged in, whether political or metaphysical, would only mire us deeper in agony.
Suddenly weary of the back-and-forth of my thoughts, I sighed and closed the Cahiers. Through the window, the Paris skyline was slowly lighting up the late-winter dusk. I said to Zoé, ‘It’s funny. The writers who mean the very most to me, often there’s a part of me that wishes I’d never read them at all.’
‘You mean like Cioran?’
I nodded.
‘But why? You’re free to take or leave any ideas you come across. That’s responsibility, that’s what it means. Nobody forces you.’
‘But there are tendencies that writers like Cioran or Schopenhauer can encourage. Despair, withdrawal. In the religions, in Christianity, despair is a sin. That’s interesting.’
She considered this, then shook her head. ‘I find it very easy to step out of that tunnel when I close the book. I’m not going to reject the universe just because Schopenhauer or anybody else said so.’
‘Of course not. But you don’t have those inclinations waiting to be triggered. What I mean is, it’s a choice. This withdrawal. I feel that it’s dangerous, the danger is real. Burning down the world. Despairing. I feel I’m already hanging on with the tips of my fingers. Seriously, it seems very easy sometimes to just stop engaging, turn away from everything. But that’s a kind of suicide, a spiritual suicide. That’s acedia.’ I cleared my throat, hesitant. ‘And it would finish me as a writer,’ I added.
We heard the young German couple next door leave their flat, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell. The room fell silent. Zoé went to the attached kitchen and poured two glasses of wine. When she returned she handed one to me. She picked up the Cahiers and sat back down in her chair, facing the window. She leafed slowly through the pages.
‘It is very beautiful, though,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘And addictive, if you go in for this kind of thing.’
‘That’s the problem.’
She sipped her wine, then she said, ‘Imagine this. Even if the most extreme pessimism accords with how things are, and existence is a nightmare, and consciousness is a chamber of hell, and Western civilisation is awaiting its coup de grâce, and we’re all adrift in the Unbreathable, or the Irreparable, or the Incurable, or all these things he writes about; what if, in spite of all this, the very articulation of this pessimism was so exquisite, so profound, that it redeemed our moments here in the nightmare? What if the writing itself, the beauty of it, not only pointed towards but provided reason enough to stick around a while longer? Wouldn’t that be strange?’
I took this in, tried to connect with her meaning. A week later, after I returned from France, the world would watch, or feel as if it had watched, the burning to death of a young man locked in a steel cage, out in some dusty wasteland in a territory resembling hell. Life on earth had perhaps always been this terrible, had offered no less validation to those who thought it better it had never existed at all. But it seemed worse, in the new proximity of things.
‘Listen to this,’ Zoé said, holding up the Cahiers.
‘Don’t quote him …’
‘Just once.’
Before I could object further, she read: ‘Nous sommes tous au fond d’un enfer dont chaque instant est un miracle.’
I watched her in profile, across the space between us. Still holding the book, she was gazing out the window, over the roof of the Jewish slaughterhouse below, towards the hazed peripheral high-rises in the distance.
She said ‘We are all deep in a hell, each moment of which is a miracle.’
Maybe the afterlife is like this, like Paris in the autumn. The last time I met Ellie – in a bar at the top of the Parc de Belleville overlooking the city – I admitted to her how intoxicated I was with Paris. She, having lived here for ten years, replied that it was her mission to disenchant people like me, and point out all that is stifling and regressive in Paris and in French culture generally. No doubt she was right, and what I’m enamoured of is superficial – but only in the way that the initial months of falling in love with somebody are superficial. The experience doesn’t show you what isn’t there, but rather what you might never again see so vividly, as it gets muddied beneath layers of habit and ambivalence.
You are wrong about drug culture. I’ve known women with an attraction to drugs equal to my own. I don’t take drugs anywhere near as frequently as I used to, though there are periods when this is not true. Last summer in Dublin, I got locked into a prolonged binge involving psychedelics and modafinil. I used the modafinil to work: when it wore off in the evenings it triggered fits of anxiety that necessitated alcohol. It fuck
ed with my sleeping too (remember we kept chatting late into the night and I couldn’t wind down?), so that I was stuck in a frazzled, eye-twitching state that required increasing quantities of modafinil if I was to keep working: a vicious circle. I was staying in my friend Matt’s flat in East Wall. There was a balcony, and an Indian takeaway downstairs. Friends stayed over for days on end and the flat became spectral and sordid, no one sleeping, dishes piling up in the sink, lines being snorted off all surfaces. There were incense sticks and Buddha statues, and a huge clothbound edition of Carl Jung’s The Red Book. There seemed to be a terror attack every day somewhere in the world: France, Germany, America. We would go down in the morning to buy alcohol and tobacco, and read headlines announcing new atrocities. When the fog lifted I found I had a different girlfriend.
In the midst of all that I had a panic attack when I started wondering: What if death is no oblivion and we are locked into existence, round after round of anguish and bewilderment? But maybe I’m repeating myself. I slept terribly last night. I worked too late and drank too much coffee and was unable to turn off the awful thoughts even with a tumbler of vodka. I masturbated, twice, in the manner of torture victims who wish to wear themselves out before their next ordeal.
