A good friend is not going to die after all. So we have coffee and he makes me an honorary colon cancer survivor, a mousketeer sorta, like Annette Funicello. There are rules: Eat what you want, but as soon as it doesn’t agree with you, stop. Do what you want, but as soon as it doesn’t agree with you, stop. Heal and wait six months before doing anything much, and if you find yourself doing otherwise, stop.
from A Short History of Decay, E.M. Cioran (an oxymoronic title if ever there was one):
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. For each of us will do anything in order not to be doomed to himself. Our kind is not a fatality but the temptation to fail. Incapable of keeping our hands clean and our hearts undiluted, we soil ourselves upon contact with strange sweats, we wallow—craving for disgust and fervent for pestilence—in the unanimous mud. (Is this guy an upper or what?) And when we dream of seas changed into holy water, it is too late to dive into them, and our advanced state of corruption keeps us from drowning there: the world has infested our solitude; upon us the traces of others become indelible.
trespassers william – i know (mp3)