“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world? There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely. We are so closed to one another! And yet, were we to be totally open to each other, reading into the depths of our souls, how much of our destiny would we see? We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. Can there be any consolation at the last moment? This willingness to live and die in society is a mark of great deficiency. It is a thousand times preferable to die somewhere alone and abandoned so that you can die without melodramatic posturing, unseen by anyone. I despise people who on their deathbed master themselves and adopt a pose in order to impress. Tears do not burn except in solitude. Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they die do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone. They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don’t they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits? We are so isolated from everything! But isn’t everything equally inaccessible to us? The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.”
–E.M. Cioran, On The Heights of Despair
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“No church, no civil institution has as yet invented a single argument valid against suicide. What answer is there to the man who can no longer endure life? No one is qualified to take another’s burdens upon himself. And what power does dialectic have against the assault of irrefutable despairs and against a thousand unconsoled manifestations? Suicide is one of man’s distinctive characteristics, one of his discoveries; no animal is capable of it, and the angels have scarcely guessed its existence; without it, human reality would be less curious, less picturesque: we should lack a strange climate and a series of deadly possibilities which have their aesthetic value, if only to introduce into tragedy certain new solutions and a variety of denouements. The sages of antiquity, who put themselves to death as a proof of their maturity, had created a discipline of suicide which the moderns have unlearned. Doomed to an uninspired agony, we are neither authors of our extremities nor arbiters of our adieux; the end is no longer our end; we lack the excellence of a unique initiative – by which we might ransom an insipid and talentless life, as we lack the sublime cynicism, the ancient splendor of an art of dying. Habitués of despair, complacent corpses, we all outlive ourselves and die only to fulfill a futile formality. It is as if our life were attached to itself only to postpone the moment when we could get rid of it.”
-E.M. Cioran, A History of Decay