3/25/12

Look at Me Don't Look at Me!

Cioran picking the nits from his eyebrows.

     "Next to the contemporary 'maker' with his sufferings and his sterility, the creators of the past seem embarrassingly healthy. They were not made anemic by philosophy. These days no one escapes this exacerbation of the intellect and its corresponding diminution of instinct. The monumental, the spontaneously grandiose is no longer. The best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. No age has been so self-conscious."
          -E.M. Cioran (1956)

     Ouch. Fortunately for him, I think (though maybe I shouldn't think), he didn't live to see what we've become (I think). I hope that's clear, maybe I should change it. You should've read what I was going to write. Namely mostly that Cioran was a self-professed "Hitlerist" and an overall dickhead. Really. Still, he's right. We are infested with our own we ares. It's become a kind of In Fest, Ed.

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