(Randall - 2 years and 2 months ago)

The man who can no longer take sides because all men are necessarily right and wrong, because everything is at once justified and irrational-—that man must renounce his own name, tread his identity underfoot, and begin a new life in impassibility or despair. Or otherwise, invent another genre of solitude, expatriate himself in the void, and pursue—by means of one exile or another—the stages of uprootedness. Released from all prejudices, he becomes the unusable man par excellence, to whom no one turns and whom no one fears because he admits and repudiates everything with the same detachment. Less dangerous than a heedless insect, he is nonetheless a scourge for Life, for it has vanished from his vocabulary, with the seven days of the Creation. And Life would forgive him, if at least he relished Chaos, which is where Life began. But he denies the feverish origins, beginning with his own, and preserves, with regard to the world, only a cold memory, a polite regret. (From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live, he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. “I shall never meet myself again,” he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate—in his forgiveness— all beings, all things.) —A Short History of Decay | E. M. Cioran