Let us return to original chaos! Let us imagine the primordial din, the original vortex! Let us throw ourselves into the whirlwind which has preceded the creation of form. Let our being tremble with effort and madness in the fiery abyss! Let everything be wiped out so that, surrounded by confusion and disequilibrium, we participate fully in the general delirium, retracing our way back from cosmos to chaos, from form to swirling gyres. The disintegration of the world is creation in reverse: an apocalypse upside down but sprung from similar impulses. Nobody desires to return to chaos without having first experienced an apocalyptic vertigo.
How great my terror and my joy at the thought of being dragged into the vortex of initial chaos, that pandemonium of paradoxical symmetry—the unique geometry of chaos, devoid of sense or form!
In every whirlwind hides a potential for form, just as in chaos there is a potential cosmos. Let me possess an infinite number of unrealized, potential forms! Let everything vibrate in me with the universal anxiety of the beginning, just awakening from nothingness!
I can only live at the beginning or the end of this world.
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Excerpt from:
On the Heights of Despair
By E. M. Cioran
Translated and with an Introduction
by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston
the university of chicago press, chicago
the university of chicago press, ltd., london
© 1992 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. ISBN (cloth): 0-226-10670-5 |
