Interview with David Benatar : The Case for Not Being Born

The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.

By Joshua Rothman. November 27, 2017.


David Benatar may be the world’s most pessimistic philosopher. An “anti-natalist,” he believes that life is so bad, so painful, that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion. “While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place,” he writes, in a 2006 book called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.” In Benatar’s view, reproducing is intrinsically cruel and irresponsible—not just because a horrible fate can befall anyone, but because life itself is “permeated by badness.” In part for this reason, he thinks that the world would be a better place if sentient life disappeared altogether.

For a work of academic philosophy, “Better Never to Have Been” has found an unusually wide audience. It has 3.9 stars on GoodReads, where one reviewer calls it “required reading for folks who believe that procreation is justified.” A few years ago, Nic Pizzolatto, the screenwriter behind “True Detective,” read the book and made Rust Cohle, Matthew McConaughey’s character, a nihilistic anti-natalist. (“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution,” Cohle says.) When Pizzolatto mentioned the book to the press, Benatar, who sees his own views as more thoughtful and humane than Cohle’s, emerged from an otherwise reclusive life to clarify them in interviews. Now he has published “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions,” a refinement, expansion, and contextualization of his anti-natalist thinking. The book begins with an epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”—“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”—and promises to provide “grim” answers to questions such as “Do our lives have meaning?,” and “Would it be better if we could live forever?”

Benatar was born in South Africa in 1966. He is the head of the philosophy department at the University of Cape Town, where he also directs the university’s Bioethics Centre, which was founded by his father, Solomon Benatar, a global-health expert. (Benatar dedicated “Better Never to Have Been” “to my parents, even though they brought me into existence.”) Beyond these bare facts, little information about him is available online. There are no pictures of Benatar on the Internet; YouTube videos of his lectures consist only of PowerPoint slides. One video, titled “What Does David Benatar Look Like?,” zooms in on a grainy photograph taken from the back of a lecture hall until an arrow labelled “David Benatar” appears, indicating the abstract, pixellated head of a man in a baseball cap.

After finishing “The Human Predicament,” I wrote to Benatar to ask if we could meet. He readily agreed, then, after reading a few of my other pieces, followed up with a note. “I see that you aim to portray the person you interview, in addition to his or her work,” he wrote:

One pertinent fact about me is that I am a very private person who would be mortified to be written about in the kind of detail I’ve seen in the other interviews. I would thus decline to answer questions I would find too personal. (I would be similarly uncomfortable with a photograph of me being used.) I understand entirely if you would rather not proceed with the interview under these circumstances. If, however, you would be happy to conduct an interview that recognized this aspect of me, I would be delighted.

Undoubtedly, Benatar is a private person by nature. But his anonymity also serves a purpose: it prevents readers from psychologizing him and attributing his views to depression, trauma, or some other aspect of his personality. He wants his arguments to be confronted in themselves. “Sometimes people ask, ‘Do you have children?’ ” he told me later. (He speaks calmly and evenly, in a South African accent.) “And I say, ‘I don’t see why that’s relevant. If I do, I’m a hypocrite—but my arguments could still be right.’ ” When he told me that he’s had anti-natalist views since he was “very young,” I asked how young. “A child,” he said, after a pause. He smiled uncomfortably. This was exactly the kind of personal question he preferred not to answer.

Benatar and I met at the World Trade Center, where The New Yorker has its offices. He is small and trim, with an elfin face, and he was neatly dressed in trousers and a lavender sweater; I recognized him by his baseball cap. On the building’s sixty-fourth floor, we settled into a pair of plush chairs arranged near windows with panoramic views of Manhattan: the Hudson on the left, the East River on the right, the skyscrapers of midtown in the distance.

Social scientists often ask people about their levels of happiness. A typical survey asks respondents to rate their lives on a scale of one (“the worst possible life for you”) to ten (“the best possible life for you”); according to the 2017 World Happiness Report, Americans surveyed between 2014 and 2016 rated their lives, on average, 6.99—less happy than the lives of Canadians (7.32) and happier than those of citizens of Sudan (4.14). Another survey reads, “Taking all things together, would you say you are (i) Very happy, (ii) Rather happy, (iii) Not very happy or (iv) Not at all happy?” In recent years, in countries such as India, Russia, and Zimbabwe, responses to this question have been trending upward. In 1998, ninety-three per cent of Americans claimed to be very or rather happy. By 2014, after the Great Recession, the number had fallen, but only slightly, to ninety-one per cent.

People, in short, say that life is good. Benatar believes that they are mistaken. “The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling,” he writes, in “The Human Predicament.” He provides an escalating list of woes, designed to prove that even the lives of happy people are worse than they think. We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes. Life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations”—waiting in traffic, standing in line, filling out forms. Forced to work, we often find our jobs exhausting; even “those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled.” Many lonely people remain single, while those who marry fight and divorce. “People want to be, look, and feel younger, and yet they age relentlessly”:

They have high hopes for their children and these are often thwarted when, for example, the children prove to be a disappointment in some way or other. When those close to us suffer, we suffer at the sight of it. When they die, we are bereft.

The knee-jerk response to observations like these is, “If life is so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” Benatar devotes a forty-three-page chapter to proving that death only exacerbates our problems. “Life is bad, but so is death,” he concludes. “Of course, life is not bad in every way. Neither is death bad in every way. However, both life and death are, in crucial respects, awful.
Together, they constitute an existential vise—the wretched grip that enforces our predicament.” It’s better, he argues, not to enter into the predicament in the first place. People sometimes ask themselves whether life is worth living. Benatar thinks that it’s better to ask sub-questions: Is life worth continuing? (Yes, because death is bad.) Is life worth starting? (No.)

Benatar is far from the only anti-natalist. Books such as Sarah Perry’s “Every Cradle Is a Grave” and Thomas Ligotti’s “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” have also found audiences. There are many “misanthropic anti-natalists”: the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, for example, has thousands of members who believe that, for environmental reasons, human beings should cease to exist. For misanthropic anti-natalists, the problem isn’t life—it’s us. Benatar, by contrast, is a “compassionate anti-natalist.” His thinking parallels that of the philosopher Thomas Metzinger,
who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence; Metzinger espouses digital anti-natalism, arguing that it would be wrong to create artificially conscious computer programs because doing so would increase the amount of suffering in the world. The same argument could apply to human beings.

Like a boxer who has practiced his counters, Benatar has anticipated a range of objections. Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones. “For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good,” Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” he continued, because it suggests that “all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.”

Some people argue that talk of pain and pleasure misses the point: even if life isn’t good, it’s meaningful. Benatar replies that, in fact, human life is cosmically meaningless: we exist in an indifferent universe, perhaps even a “multiverse,” and are subject to blind and purposeless natural forces. In the absence of cosmic meaning, only “terrestrial” meaning remains—and, he writes, there’s “something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another.” Benatar also rejects the argument that struggle and suffering, in themselves, can lend meaning to existence. “I don’t believe that suffering gives meaning,” Benatar said. “I think that people try to find meaning in suffering because the suffering is otherwise so gratuitous and unbearable.” It’s true, he said, that “Nelson Mandela generated meaning through the way he responded to suffering—but that’s not to defend the conditions in which he lived.”

I asked Benatar why the proper response to his arguments wasn’t to strive to make the world a better place. The possible creation of a better world in the future, he told me, hardly justifies the suffering of people in the present; at any rate, a dramatically improved world is impossible. “It’ll never happen. The lessons never seem to get learnt. They never seem to get learnt. Maybe the odd individual will learn them, but you still see this madness around you,” he said. “You can say, ‘For goodness’ sake! Can’t you see how you’re making the same mistakes humans have made before? Can’t we do this differently?’ But it doesn’t happen.” Ultimately, he said, “unpleasantness and suffering are too deeply written into the structure of sentient life to be eliminated.” His voice grew more urgent; his eyes teared up. “We’re asked to accept what is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable that people, and other beings, have to go through what they go through, and there’s almost nothing that they can do about it.” In an ordinary conversation, I would’ve murmured something reassuring. In this case, I didn’t know what to say.

Benatar had selected a vegan restaurant for lunch, and we set out to walk there, along the Hudson. At the end of Vesey Street, we passed the Irish Hunger Memorial—a quarter acre of soil transplanted from Ireland, in 2001, to commemorate the millions who had died during the country’s Great Famine. At Benatar’s suggestion, we spent a few minutes exploring and reading the historical quotes displayed in the entryway. The famine lasted seven years; recalling it, one man wrote, “It dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow.”

It was a warm day. In Battery Park, mothers picnicked with their small children on the grass. A group of co-workers played table tennis. Down by the water, couples strolled hand in hand. There were runners on the path—shirtless men with muscular chests, women in stylish workout gear.

“Do you ever feel a dissonance between your beliefs and your environment?” I asked.

“I’m not opposed to people having fun, or in denial that life contains good things,” Benatar said, laughing. I glanced over to see that he had removed his sweater and was now in shirtsleeves. His cap appeared not to have moved. We reached the spot where, eight weeks later, a twenty-nine-year-old man in a van would kill eight people and injure eleven others.

Like everyone else, Benatar finds his views disturbing; he has, therefore, ambivalent feelings about sharing them. He wouldn’t walk into a church, stride to the pulpit, and declare that God doesn’t exist. Similarly, he doesn’t relish the idea of becoming an ambassador for anti-natalism. Life, he says, is already unpleasant enough. He reassures himself that, because his books are philosophical and academic, they will be read only by those who seek them out. He hears from readers who are grateful to find their own secret thoughts expressed. One man with several children read “Better Never to Have Been,” then told Benatar that he believed having them had been a terrible mistake; people suffering from terrible mental and physical afflictions write to say they wish that they had never existed. He also hears from people who share his views and are disabled by them. “I’m just filled with sadness for people like that,” he said, in a soft voice. “They have an accurate view of reality,
and they’re paying the price for it.” I asked Benatar whether he ever found his own thoughts overwhelming. He smiled uncomfortably—another personal question—and said, “Writing helps.”

He doesn’t imagine that anti-natalism could ever be widely adopted: “It runs counter to too many biological drives.” Still, for him, it’s a source of hope. “The madness of the world as a whole—what can you or I do about that?” he said, while we walked. “But every couple, or every person, can decide not to have a child. That’s an immense amount of suffering that’s avoided, which is all to the good.” When friends have children, he must watch his words. “I’m torn,” he said. Having a child is “pretty horrible, given the predicament in which it will find itself”; on the other hand, “optimism makes life more bearable.” Some years ago, when a fellow-philosopher told him that she was pregnant, his response was muted. Come on, she insisted—you have to be happy for me. Benatar consulted his conscience, then said, “I am happy—for you.”

At lunch, we sat next to a little girl and her mother. The girl was around eight years old, wearing a dress and holding a book. “Do you want to take these home?” her mother asked, pointing to some French fries.

“Yes!” the girl said.

My conversation with Benatar continued, but I found it hard to talk about anti-natalism while sitting next to the mother and daughter. We spent much of our lunch amiably discussing our work habits. On the street, we shook hands. “I’m just going to walk around a bit,” Benatar said. He planned to wander the West Village before heading to the airport. I walked south and, near the World Trade Center, descended into the Oculus, the vast, sepulchral mall and train station that has replaced the one destroyed in the 9/11 attacks. With its towering, spine-like roof and white-marble ribs, it is part skeleton, part cathedral. Standing on the escalator, I watched as a woman with one arm in her jacket struggled to insert the other. An overweight businessman, his ears plugged with earbuds, brushed past me, jostling me with his briefcase. As he reached the bottom, he held the woman’s coat, and she slipped into it.

Interview: Emil Cioran

(freely translated in english from dutch)

Beyond Nietzsche

by Fred Backus

December 14, 1994 - appeared in No. 50

Last year, E. M. Cioran published Bitter syllogisms, translated by Huug Caleis, from De Arbeiderspers. At the same publishing house, Drawn & Quartered will appear next spring, in the translation of Rokus Hofstede. The French magazine 'Magazine Litteraire', from December, contains a more than twenty page 'file' about Cioran. E. M. Cioran, the most pessimistic thinker of this century, is spending his last days in a Paris nursing home. Before he got there, he unloads once more. About Muslims, Jews and Christians. And about the uselessness of life. The last interview.

At the Shadow side from a garden of a nursing home in the center of Paris, a small, dead-tired old man is waiting under a cap - staring into nothingness. All power seems to have withdrawn from his body; speaking words is almost impossible, it costs too much air. Only his eyes react to his visitor, alternating with delighted wonder and ironic self-pity. Would he be able to speak at full strength - even if only for a few seconds - he would exclaim with a mixture of aggression, pride and self-mockery: "This is the irony!" Now, exhausted, trapped in the ruthless ethics of medical aid, surrounded by loving grief, comes out in a whisper: 'Vous me devez supprimer ...', as an unanswerable plea to his companion Simone: 'Take me away.'

Four Years ago, we had spoken to each other the last time, almost a whole day. Many of his friends, acquaintances, kindred spirits have recently dead. Michaux, Beckett ... A few years before he made a walk with them, in the Jardin de Luxembourg. He was then almost eighty years old, an unthinkable survivor, who on the age of twenty-two, described himself as "the most destructive creature in all history; an apocalyptic monster full of flames and darkness, animated by power and despair '. Anyone who engages in his work is confronted with that destructiveness and despair in a way that has thrilled many readers to throw it into the stove: this is all true, but I do not want to know! What is he? The biggest, most aggressive pessimist in history? A hysterical fanatic without conviction? A mystic? They do not know. This hybrid spirit, this brilliant stylist, who jumps from one extremity to the other in his radical skepticism, is primarily a prophet of the hopeless, a 'voyeur of nothingness' (Edward Said), a misanthrope transformed into energetic fire. bears witness to a bewildering scholarship that shatters everything, like a murderous sniper, for whom no thought is safe.

His voice had already lost strength, and now and then it sounded tired. Sometimes his memory left him for a moment. "How is your hotel?" He asked. I said, "It is between shop windows full of Freud and Heidegger." 'Unbelievably that interest in Heidegger', he reacts immediately. "You know, Heidegger could never have been a Frenchman. Why? Because of the language. Rivarol has pointed out that the probite, the integrity of language, is typical of the French style feeling. It is a kind of built-in security that does not know German. Heidegger's genius was especially his language-creating power. His profundity was a premeditation. His thinking was a preconceived In-Tiefe-Machen, and that leads to the forcing of the language, to the avoidance of common expressions, at any price. '

You do not believe in Heidegger?
'No absolutely not. Heidegger managed to turn himself out everywhere and obscure any impasse by using the most unusual, often irritating phrases and Worterfinderei. Such a thing is inconceivable in French. Vaugelas, one of the most important linguists of the seventeenth century, would not even have allowed the king to make new words. One should not think about how he would have gone against the popularity of Heidegger in France. A foreign philosopher who would create innumerable new words ... It is really absurd. '

Do you still write?
'No not anymore. Many people do not want to believe that, but ... I could have died long ago, and there's no point in thinking about the books that people could have written. Most writers write too much, they often have to correct themselves later. That's no use. " 

 Do you still write for yourself?
'Yes and no ... Occasionally, but without conviction. I have changed inwardly, and writing is a feeling. I am no longer me. My work is the work of negation. I have become tired of criticizing life, to insult the rest of the universe. You never know, of course, but I do not believe that I will return to literature.
I have never written much. This has not only to do with my views on authorship, but also with the problem of language. I was 37 when I started to write French. That is actually much too late. In Romania, French was fairly common, but that is not enough for a writer. I have made a terrible battle with French. It was an adventure, a conflict between me and the language. I have said, "I will overpower that language." Perhaps that gave my life a meaning ... I thought I would write one or two books, it turned out to be ten. "

Did you expect people to characterize you as the best French stylist?
'No not at all. I also do not believe that it is true. But you know, I've rewritten everything that I have writed at least three times, and the difference between the first, second and third versions was always very big. The first time you are ... satisfied. Only later on will the shortcomings become visible. I have always asked Simone to read my texts, to hear how they sound. This was very important in the beginning. You hear whether something is good or not. The style issue is very problematic. It is the problem of Klarheit. I read a lot of German in my youth, but I wanted my style to have nothing to do with German, nothing heavy, nothing grundlichs. " 

I read in Liberation that you were very enthusiastic about the revolutions in Romania.
'It was horrible. I let myself be swept away by the opinions of people that I trusted and who assured me of the good intentions of Iliescu and associates. It is irony at it's summit. All my life I refused to allow an interview to a French newspaper. I never wanted to have anything to do with it. After the fall of Ceausescu, a journalist called me and had me tempted into a terrible mistake: I sided with the revolution. Idiotic!'

Perhaps because it was your original homeland?
'No. Romania has no sense for me anymore. I have been away for more than half a century. Moreover, my childhood in Romania was a tragedy without end. My mother always cried because of me. If I had not left Romania, I would have committed suicide. Paris saved me. I promised to write a thesis here. I did not do it, but I never felt guilty. Romanians generally believe in nothing, that is their only merit, the only positive thing about them. To write a thesis, you must attach faith to a philosophical jargon. That is too much honor for life. Life does not deserve a philosophical depth.
Translated into normal language, a philosophical text is emptied very quickly. ' 

You have always distrusted East Europe, especially Russia. Is this fragmented empire still a danger?
'I believe that it was the ambassador of the Netherlands who asked Ivan the Terrible through an interpreter why he persecuted so many people and had them murdered. Iwan replied: "Tell this idiot that anyone who does not kill the Russian, will be killed by him." That is the tradition of Russia, and it still exists. "

You do not believe that democratization continues in Russia?
"No, maybe for a moment, with the help of foreign capital. The Russians have no talent for democracy, for freedom. That freedom must have a limit, and can therefore only fail. The problem is where that limit lies. But it will not go well, it will end again in dictatorship. ' 

In Russia, as you once said, the orthodox church has great significance again.
'Yes, that can have consequences for the Russian delusion of grandeur. In that respect, we may speak of happiness that they also have to deal with the problem of the Muslims. The Russians are a very religious people. It was very stupid to try to destroy that. Religion is positive. Someone who can believe in God is not yet finished, not yet exhausted. I also believe that Gorbachev understood that too little. He was, how shall I say, very cynical, but especially irreligious. For me, that explains his unpopularity. '

In your books, in your worldview, the American continent plays no role, as if it were a negligible superpower.
'America does not have the problem of Europe. The country has nothing big. France and England were impressive in the past. America does not, it has nothing mysterious. It is a country without major defeats. Maybe they will, but I am not fascinated by it, not like Russia. "

They see themselves as the last world power: without the Americans, no Gulf War.
"That was an abnormal war, in every respect. Actually, it was not a war but a comedy. Only America could do so stupidly and therefore compromise itself, without any historical awareness. In the eyes of Arabs, Americans are only stupid rich people. And they're right. The only intelligent people in America are Jews, they control public opinion, but also force them into their politics. If America had not won that war in one blow, it would have become catastrophic. I fear that in an event of great losses, the American people would become very anti-Semitic, and wondered: why did we have to do this for Israel? Why not allow Saddam to get rid of for a million dollar by some adventurer? Nobody had blamed America. Now they have achieved a military victory, but psychologically America has lost. " 

What do you mean?
"The Arab problem still exists, it is one of the biggest problems of the future. Especially for Europe. The Arabs are already conquering France. They hate the French. They multiply incredibly, that is historically unavoidable. Many of them are already saying: this country is ours. '

With these kinds of statements you risk being typed as a right-wing extremist, as a sympathizer of Le Pen.
"About fifteen years ago I was friends with the sister of the foreign minister. Shocked, I told her about my experiences with all those foreigners in the Paris area. "You are a racist!" She said, and broke contact. Until a few years, she also saw it. Everyone sees it now, this grotesque, but it is too late now.
A year or so ago, there might was something to do about, with strict measures. No, that has nothing to do with racism, it is all much more complicated. It is all part of the suicide of Europe, out of guilt.
Spenglers 'Untergang des Abendlandes' is probably a very prophetic book. At that time it was despised, nobody wanted to believe it. The world will become intolerable, much faster than people think, I am absolutely convinced of that. ' 

The Arabs will also remain a threat to Israel?
'Doubtless.'

In 'La tentation d'exister' from 1956 you do not hint at all believing in the future of Israel. You only call Israel a 'provisional' fatherland.
'Yes, the fate of the Jews is exceptional, and even uncompromising with the help of compromises. The Jews are the only historical people that have not fallen prey to decadence. One of the reasons is the absence of a fatherland. A homeland is a kind of sleeping aid. The Jews have always been watchful wherever they were. That still applies. Their walk around the world has something unearthly. They attach to this world, but they do not belong in some way. It is incredible how many civilizations they have traversed, how much they have left their mark on it. And yet they do not belong there. Their desire for the utopian is a memory projected in the future. I believe that it is not possible to turn history back two thousand years. I believe it is their destiny to keep running their heads against the wailing wall - while they long for paradise. " 

You say that they are the first people to 'colonize heaven', but that their religion fills them with pride and with shame at the same time.
"By placing their God in heaven they have erased all other gods, all other myths. But I believe that the Jews are tired of their own God. "

You go very far in your predictions. You foresee that they will ever confess to Christianity.
"You know, that's the only prophecy that I'm really proud of. Christ was a Jew. They have betrayed him. If everyone has left Christianity, the Jews will confess, they will take Christ back to them, and they will be hated again, and persecuted, for that reason. I really believe that it will go like this. "

From childhood on you attacked Christianity. In what way does your criticism differ from Nietzsche's?
'Nietzsche's criticism was only world-historical, almost civil. I have entered into a personal confrontation with Christianity. I have never been a true Christian, although my father was a priest, but I still wanted to free myself from Christianity.As long as my powers allowed it, I went further into it. Four times I experienced an ecstasy similar to that of the great mystics. I have tried to understand the saints from the inside. That is why you can say that I have gone further than Nietzsche. My negation is on a different level than his own. His philosophy is something like an erotic letter from a weak brother. He wanted to have influence. Not me, absolutely not. I have only described what I experienced. I do not have any pretensions. "

You have "tried" Buddhism.
'Buddhism has always fascinated me, but it's nothing for me. I am too tense, too nervous. Moreover, I can not deny myself everything. That is a delusion. In the past, when I came home drunk, I read sermons from the Buddha all night, but I can not control myself as he wishes. I can not live without sex, without sensual life. I once went to a monastery ... three days, I could not stand it any longer.
I am not in control of my nature. I am a Buddhist who constantly makes concessions. ' 

Nowadays even a Buddhist with television, I see ... Do you follow the world news now through the TV?
"Sometimes I look, but usually not. I got it as a gift from a friend. I would not buy a television by myself. You have to know something, but I believe that it is not spiritually good to see the latest news. It is humiliating, depressing, in the worst sense of the word. For me it hardly makes sense, I am no longer among the people. As long as you do, you have to know a little bit about what is going on.
But that need for the latest news ... It is just like the Apostrophe program. The whole of France spoke about it. The latest literary news was the talk of the day. This is not good for a people with a literary tradition. Pivot, the presenter of the program, has invited me repeatedly, but I have always refused.
I do not want to say in a stupid way whether television is good or not. But it has something un-nice, I do not like it. It would be better if one did not want to see everything. But it is inevitable. That depravity! " 

Do you believe in any change, any progress?
"Progress was a religion, not anymore. Les progressists ... they do not believe in it anymore. There is another belief, something will change. History will get a different rhythm. Man is an adventure that is impossible to end well. If that is not true, then I am the last idiot. In my eyes, man is a depraved animal. Man was an animal. Not anymore. He is no longer an animal, but no human being either. I do not know what he is, at least not a tragic creature, that would be "too beautiful". A genius? A criminal? A corrupt animal? I do not know. But I do know that he has no future. I'll give it to you on a note if necessary. People will perish. " 

You see every turn negative?
"... Everything is corrupt. The multiplication of this animal would have some meaning if it were a rare species. But it just keeps on reproducing, incredible, people, people, everywhere! And life loses its charm. "

One can still fall in love.
"Yes, but you fall in love within a hell - and even that will not be possible for long. This negative animal destroys everything. It is not the culture, or I know what. It is man himself, and of course ... science. It is responsible for people to no longer die. Go to a hospital. It is a catastrophe. Only old people who should not live anymore. One prolongs lives that have no meaning anymore. The result is that young people can no longer find a home. That is the criminal of the doctors. The results of science are extraordinary, but they all have a negative downside - that is history, that is the universal irony. In principle everything seems positive, but if you look deeper ... Distrusting everything is the only way to not ridicule yourself. '

Was that not always the case?
'Of course. But science has aggravated everything. When you read the Bible you see that everything from the beginning was already corrupt, that this impossible adventure was foreseen, that there was no other way out. Paradise was impossible, it was too uninteresting. "

Yet there are people who are still reasonably happy.
"Yes, a single individual. The fate of humanity is indescribable. People feel that. But yes, there are always eccentrics. You simply have people who visit a cemetery and walk away whistling. What else do you want to do in that situation, in which everything is clear? '

You never write about living together with a woman.
"No, that only makes sense if it is absolutely negative, otherwise it will not work.
It is impossible to write: I am so happy with my wife. That is unliterary. "

It is often enough wrong nowadays.
"It does not work anymore. Marriage was inevitable as long as the woman was dependent. It was her salvation. Nowadays the women work in the office, that's a lot for a wedding. For me personally, the rule always applied: everything except to marry! Marriage would have been a disaster for me. To have to earn money, to be busy all day for someone else, for nothing in this world! Even though the passion would be great. I did not think about it. Marriage is a dangerous undertaking. I have seen a lot of ending up in a catastrophe. ' 

Yet you have been living together for thirty-five years.
"I capitulated. I have to admit to myself that I can not live without a woman. I have been living as a husband for thirty-five years, but without being married. I have always thought: if life is justifiable, then only by freedom. Fortunately Simone thinks so too. '

I was at the tomb of Beckett. How was he in his last months?
"Oh, I did not visit him anymore. He was ill for more than two years in a very bad condition. He was ... how shall I say it? In the last period he was no longer the Beckett I had known. One can say: that really was not a failed life. What I so highly respected in him was his unqualifiedness. Unimaginable. People always had the impression that he had just arrived in the city, although he had lived here for more than half a century. He was really a foreigner. He did not like the English, but he himself behaved like that. He was very warm, absolutely unaffected by Paris, which pleased me very much. He was not a social person, but he could be very nice, had a lot of charm. '

What would he have thought of all that posthumous attention?
"He would have rejected it as grotesque. He was not the man. He was a great writer. Yet I fear that one will say: he was overrated. I have thought about it for a long time, and I can not say exactly why, but one will consider him overestimated, fantastically overrated. I say that with regret, we were very good friends. He used to support me financially, his wife even more. "

Was she nice?
'Absolutely not. She was unbearable! She scorned everyone, had no friends. Everyone was uninteresting, or idiotic. I have always admired Beckett that he was with this woman. It was a very curious relationship. They always behaved as if they did not know each other, never went somewhere together. It is hardly imaginable that two such incompatible people have lived together for so long. Later on they separated from each other, living in two apartments. '

Rue Casimir Delavigne, Rue Monsieur Le Prince, we walk to the Jardin de Luxembourg, the conversation does not stop, goes on and on. Cioran takes me to a path, far right.
"We have renamed this avenue with some friends to Beckettallee, here he always walked, here he was never disturbed." Then we say goodbye, as if nothing is wrong.
Only a few years later we see each other again, in another garden, that of a nursing home. A wordless encounter; hands that grasp, no longer letting go.
Simone reads from a pile of mail. "This letter," she says, "is from a reader who wants to correspond about French with Joseph de Maistre in relation to ... and so on."
Cioran frowns his gaze, leaving everyone in limbo or hearing what has been said. Then, in a whisper, he says, waving: 'Pff, pas urgent', and chuckles, infectiously ... 'Pff, pas urgent!'

Original text.

At One O'Clock In The Morning - Poem by Charles Baudelaire

Alone, at last! Not a sound to be heard but the rumbling of some belated and decrepit cabs. For a few hours we shall have silence, if not repose. At last the tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and I myself shall be the only cause of my sufferings. At last, then, I am allowed to refresh myself in a bath of darkness! First of all, a double turn of the lock. It seems to me that this twist of the key will increase my solitude and fortify the barricades which at this instant separate me from the world.

Horrible life! Horrible town! Let us recapitulate the day: seen several men of letters, one of whom asked me whether one could go to Russia by a land route (no doubt he took Russia to be an island); disputed generously with the editor of a review, who, to each of my objections, replied: 'We represent the cause of decent people,' which implies that all the other newspapers are edited by scoundrels; greeted some twenty persons, with fifteen of whom I am not acquainted; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and this without having taken the precaution of buying gloves; to kill time, during a shower, went to see an acrobat, who asked me to design for her the costume of a
Venustra; paid court to the director of a theatre, who, while dismissing me, said to me: 'Perhaps you would do well to apply to Z------; he is the clumsiest, the stupidest and the most celebrated of my authors; together with him, perhaps, you would get somewhere. Go to see him, and after that we'll see;' boasted (why?) of several vile actions which I have never committed, and faint-heartedly denied some other misdeeds which I accomplished with joy, an error of bravado, an offence against human respect; refused a friend an easy service, and gave a written recommendation to a perfect clown; oh, isn't that enough? Discontented with everyone and discontented with myself, I would gladly redeem myself and elate myself a little in the silence and solitude of night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me, support me, rid me of lies and the corrupting vapours of the world; and you, O Lord God, grant me the grace to produce a few good verses, which shall prove to myself that I am not the lowest of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise.

TO STAY ALIVE by Michel Houellebecq

TO STAY ALIVE A method By Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Richard Davis.


FIRST, SUFFERING "The universe cries. The concrete blocks of a wall bear a record of the violence with which they have been struck. Concrete cries.
Grass moans between the teeth of animals. And man? What shall we say of man?"
The world is suffering unfolded. At its origin it is a node of suffering. All existence is an expansion, and a crushing.
All things suffer into existence. Nothingness vibrates with pain until it arrives at being, in an abject paroxysm.
Beings diversify and become complex without losing anything of their original nature. Once a certain level of consciousness is reached, the cry is produced.
Poetry derives from it. Articulate language, equally. The first step for the poet is to return to the origin; that is, to suffering.
The modalities of suffering are important; they are not essential. All suffering is good. All suffering is useful. All suffering bears fruit. All suffering is a universe.
Henri is one year old. He is lying on the floor. His diapers are dirty. He is bawling. His mother is walking back and forth, her heels clicking against the tiles of the floor,
looking for her bra and her skirt. She is in a hurry to go to her evening rendezvous. This little thing covered with shit, moving around on the tiles, exasperates her.
She begins to cry herself. Henri bawls all the more. Then she goes out. Henri has got off to a good start in his career as a poet.
Marc is ten years old. His father is dying of cancer in the hospital. This pile of worn machinery, with tubes going down the throat, and intravenous drips: this is his father.
Only his eyes are alive; they express suffering and fear. Marc suffers too. He too is afraid. He loves his father. And at the same time he is beginning to wish that his father would die, and to feel guilty about it.
Marc has work to do. He should cultivate in himself this suffering, so particular and so fertile: this Most Holy Guilt.
Michel is fifteen. He has never been kissed by a girl. He would like to dance with Sylvie, but Sylvie is dancing with Patrice, and she is manifestly enjoying it.
He is frozen. The music penetrates to the deepest core of his being. It is a magnificent slow dance of surreal beauty. He never knew he could suffer so much. His childhood, up until now, had been happy.
Michel will never forget the contrast between his heart, frozen with suffering, and the overwhelming beauty of the music. His sensibility is being formed.
If the world is composed of suffering, this is because it is, essentially, free. Suffering is the necessary consequence of the free play of the parts of the system.
You ought to know this; you ought to say it.
It will not be possible for you to transform this suffering into a goal. Suffering is, and by consequence can never become a goal. In the wounds which it inflicts upon us,
life alternates between the brutal and the insidious. Know these two forms. Study them closely. Acquire a complete knowledge of them. Distinguish that which separates them,
and that which unites them. Many contradictions will then be resolved. Your voice will gain in force, and in amplitude. Given the characteristics of the modern era,
love can scarcely manifest itself anymore. Yet the ideal of love has not diminished. Being, like all ideals, fundamentally atemporal, it can neither diminish nor disappear.
Whence a particularly striking discordance between real and ideal, and a particularly rich source of suffering.
The adolescent years are important. Once you have developed a sufficiently ideal, noble, and perfect sense of love, you are done for.
Nothing, henceforth, will suffice.
If you do not date women (whether through shyness, ugliness, or for some other reason), read women’s magazines. You will experience suffering that is almost equivalent. Go right to the bottom of the absence of love. Cultivate self-hatred. Hatred of oneself, contempt for others. Hatred of others, contempt for oneself. Mix it all up. Form a synthesis. In the tumult of life, always be the loser. The universe is like a discotheque. Accumulate frustrations in great number. To learn to become a poet is to unlearn how to live.
Love your past or hate it, but let it remain present to you. You should acquire a complete knowledge of yourself. Thus, little by little, your deep self will detach itself from you, and slip beyond the sun, while your body will remain in place, swollen, blistered, irritated, ripe for new sufferings.
Life is a series of destruction tests. Pass the first of them, and fail the later ones. Ruin your life, but not by much. And suffer, always suffer. You should learn to feel the pain in every one of your pores. Each fragment of the universe should be a personal injury to you. And yet, you must stay alive—at least for a certain time. Timidity is not to be looked down upon. It has been considered the sole source of inner wealth; this is not far wrong. In fact, it is in the moment of delay between will and act that interesting mental phenomena begin to be manifest. The man for whom this delay is absent remains little more than an animal. Timidity is an excellent point of departure for a poet.
Develop in yourself a profound resentment toward life. This resentment is necessary for any veritable artistic creation.
Sometimes, it is true, life will appear to you as simply an incongruous experience. But your resentment should never be far, never out of reach—even if you choose not to express it. And return always to the origin, which is suffering.
When you provoke in others a mixture of horrified pity and contempt, you will know that you are on the right track. You can begin to write.

TO ARTICULATE
"A force becomes movement once it enters into action and develops in time."
If you do not succeed in articulating your suffering within a well-defined structure, you are done for. Suffering will swallow you whole, from the inside, before you have had the time to write anything at all.
Structure is the sole means of escaping suicide. And suicide resolves nothing. Imagine if Baudelaire had succeeded in his attempt at suicide, at twenty-four. Believe in structure. Believe in the ancient metrics, equally.
Versification is a powerful tool for the liberation of the inner life.
Do not feel obliged to invent a new form. New forms are rare. One per century is already a brisk pace. And it is not necessarily the greatest poets who are at the origin of them. Poetry is not a reworking of language,
not essentially. Words are the responsibility of society as a whole. Most new forms are not produced from scratch, but by slow deviation from an antecedent form. The tool is adapted, little by little;
it undergoes light modifications; the novelty which results from their conjoined effect generally does not appear until the end, once the work is written.
It is entirely comparable to the evolution of speciesYou will emit, at first, inarticulate cries. And you will often be tempted to regress to that stage. This is normal.
Poetry, in reality, precedes articulate language, though not by much. Plunge again into inarticulate cries, each time you feel the need. It is a rejuvenating bath.
But do not forget: if you do not manage, at least from time to time, to emerge from it, you will die. The human organism has its limits.
At the height of your suffering, you will not be able to write. If you feel you have it in you to do so, try all the same. The result will probably be bad—probably, but not certainly. Never work.
Writing poems is not work; it is a charge. If the use of a specific form (the alexandrine, for example) requires an effort, renounce it. This type of effort never pays off.
The same cannot be said of the general, on-going, and consistent effort to overcome apathy. This is indispensable. On the matter of form, never hesitate to contradict yourself.
Bifurcate, change direction as often as necessary. Do not try too hard to have a coherent personality; this personality exists, whether you like it or not.
Neglect nothing which could possibly procure for you a modicum of equilibrium. In any case, happiness is not for you; this has been established, and for quite some time.
But if you can manage to grasp one of its simulacra, do so. Without hesitation. In any case, it will not last.
Your existence is nothing more than a tissue of sufferings. You think you can manage to lay them out in a coherent form. Your objective, at this stage: to live long enough to do it.

TO SURVIVE
"The literary career is all the same the only one where you can make no money without looking ridiculous."
(Jules Renard)
A dead poet does not write. Whence the importance of remaining alive. This simple reasoning will sometimes be difficult for you to adhere to. In particular during periods of prolonged creative sterility.
Your clinging to life will appear, at these times, painfully pointless; in any case, you will not be writing.
To this, only one reply: ultimately, you know nothing about it. If you examine yourself honestly, you will have to agree. Strange cases have been known to occur.
If you are no longer writing, this is perhaps a prelude to a change of form. Or a change of theme. Or both. Or it is perhaps, in effect, a prelude to your creative death. But you know nothing about it.
You will never really know this part of yourself which compels you to write. You will know it only through contradictory forms which merely approach it. Egotism or devotion? Cruelty or compassion?
Any of these possibilities could be argued for. Proof that, ultimately, you know nothing about it; thus, do not behave as if you did. Before your own ignorance, before this mysterious part of yourself, remain honest and humble.
Not only do poets who live to an old age produce more work overall, but old age is the seat of particular physical and mental processes, of which it would be a shame to be ignorant.
That said, survival is extremely difficult. One could consider adopting what could be called Pessoa’s strategy: find a little job, publish nothing, and await death peacefully.
In practice, one would be going forward to meet significant difficulties: the feeling that one is wasting one’s time, that one is not in one’s place, that one is not being esteemed at one’s true value. . .
All this would rapidly become unbearable. Drinking would be difficult to avoid. In the end, bitterness and acrimony would lie in wait at the end of the road, soon to be followed by apathy and irreversible creative sterility.
This solution, then, has its disadvantages, but it is generally the only one. Do not forget psychiatrists, who have at their disposal the power to grant sick-leave.
However, a prolonged stay at a psychiatric hospital is to be proscribed: too destructive. One should use this only as a last resort, as an alternative to destitution.
The mechanisms of the welfare state (unemployment payments, etc.) should be taken full advantage of, as well as the financial support of friends who are better off.
Do not cultivate excessive guilt with regard to this. The poet is a sacred parasite.
The poet is a sacred parasite: like the scarabs of ancient Egypt, he can thrive upon the body of wealthy societies in a state of decay. Yet he also has his place at the heart of frugal and strong societies.
You do not have to fight. Boxers fight, not poets. All the same, it is necessary to publish a little bit; this is a necessary condition for posthumous recognition to take place.
If you do not publish a certain minimal amount (be it only a handful of texts in some second-rate review), you will go unnoticed by posterity—just as unnoticed as you were during your life.
Even the most perfect genius must leave behind a trace; leave it to the literary archaeologists to exhume the rest.
This can fail; it often fails. You should repeat to yourself at least once a day that the important thing is to do your best.
Studying the biographies of your favorite poets may be useful to you; this may permit you to avoid certain errors. Never forget that as a general rule,
there is no good solution to the problem of material survival, although there are many very bad ones.
The problem of where you spend your life will generally not present itself; you will live where you can. Try simply to avoid overly noisy neighbors,
who are capable quite by themselves of bringing on a definitive intellectual death.
A little professional experience can provide some knowledge, usable eventually in a later work, about the functioning of society. But a period of destitution,
where you would plunge into marginality, can provide other kinds of knowledge. The ideal is to alternate.
Other realities of life—such as a harmonious sex life, marriage, and children—are both beneficial and fruitful. But these are almost impossible to attain: as far as art is concerned, they are virtually unknown territories.
In a general way, you will be tossed back and forth between bitterness and anguish. In both cases, alcohol will help.
The important thing is to obtain the few moments of remission that will permit the realization of your œuvre. They will be brief; make an effort to seize them.

Have no fear of happiness; it does not exist.

STRIKE WHERE IT COUNTS "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."
(II Timothy 2:15)
Do not pursue knowledge for its own sake. All that which does not precede directly from emotion is, in poetry, of no value. (The word "emotion" should be understood, of course, in the broadest sense.
Certain emotions are neither agreeable nor disagreeable; this is in general the case with the feeling of strangeness.) Emotion abolishes the causal chain. It alone is capable of making possible the perception of things in themselves. The transmission of this perception is the object of all poetry.
This shared goal of philosophy and poetry is the source of the secret complicity which links the two. This does not manifest itself essentially through the writing of philosophical poems;
poetry must discover reality in its own, purely intuitive ways, without passing through the filter of an intellectual reconstruction of the world. Much less through philosophy expressed in poetic form,
which is most often nothing other than a miserable dupery. Yet it is always among poets that a new philosophy finds its most serious, most attentive, and most fruitful readers. Likewise,
only certain philosophers will be capable of discerning, of bringing to light, and of using the truths hidden in poetry. It is in poetry, almost as much as in direct contemplation—and much more
than in antecedent philosophies—that they will find material for new representations of the world.
Respect philosophers; do not imitate them. Your path, unfortunately, lies elsewhere. It is indissociable from neurosis. The poetic experience and the neurotic experience are two paths which cross,
intersect, and most often end up merging; this by dissolution of poetic ore in the bloody torrent of neurosis. But you have no choice. There is no other way.
Your unceasing working over of your obsessions will end up transforming you into a pathetic wreck, consumed by anguish and devastated by apathy. But, I repeat, there is no other way.
You must attain the point of no return. Break the circle. And produce some poems, before crushing yourself into the ground. You will have glimpsed immense spaces. Every great passion opens up a prospect on eternity.
Ultimately, love resolves all problems. Likewise, every great passion leads ultimately to a zone of truth. To a different space, an extremely painful one, but from which one can see far, and clearly.
Where purified objects appear in all their clarity, their limpid truth. Believe in the identity of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
The goal of the society where you live is to destroy you. You have the same goal with regard to society. The weapon that it will use is indifference. You cannot allow yourself to have the same attitude. Attack!
All societies have their points of least resistance, their wounds. Put your finger on the wound, and press down hard.
Delve into the subjects that no one wants to hear about. The other side of the scenery. Insist upon sickness, agony, ugliness. Speak of death, and of oblivion. Of jealousy, of indifference, of frustration,
of the absence of love. Be abject, and you will be true.
Belong to nothing. Or else belong, and then immediately betray. No theoretical engagement should hold you up for very long. Militancy makes one happy, and yours is not to be happy.
You are on the side of unhappiness; you are the dark adversary.
Your mission is not, above all, to propose, neither is it to construct. If you can do this, do it. If you end up with insupportable contradictions, say so.
Because your most profound mission is to delve toward the True. You are the grave-digger, and you are the cadaver. You are the body of society. You are responsible for the body of society.
You are all responsible, in equal measure. Embrace the earth, you scum!
Determine innocence, and guilt. First in yourself; this will furnish you with a guide. But also in others. Consider their behavior, and their excuses; then judge, in all impartiality.
You have not spared yourself; spare no one. You are rich. You know Good, you know Evil. Never renounce the separation of the two. Do not get bogged down in tolerance, that poor stigma of the age.
Poetry is capable of establishing definitive moral truths. You should hate liberty with all your force.
The truth is scandalous. But without it, nothing has any worth. An honest and naïve vision of the world is already a masterpiece. Compared with this prerequisite, originality matters little.
Do not preoccupy yourself with it. In any event, a certain originality will necessarily emerge from the sum of your defects. Of that with which you are concerned, simply say the truth; simply say the truth, neither more nor less.
You cannot love the truth and the world. But you have already chosen. The problem now is to adhere to this choice. I urge you to keep up your courage. Not that you have the least cause for hope.
On the contrary, know that you will be very alone. Most people come to terms with life, or else they die. You are living suicides.
As you approach the truth, your solitude will increase. The edifice is splendid, but deserted. You are walking through empty halls, which send back to you the echo of your footsteps.
The atmosphere is limpid and invariable; the objects seem turned to statues. At times you begin to weep, so cruel is the clarity of your vision.
You would love to turn back, into the fog of ignorance, but ultimately you know that it is already too late.
Continue. Have no fear. The worst is already past. To be sure, life will tear you apart again, but, from your point of view, you do not really have that much more to do with life.
Remember this: fundamentally, you are already dead. You are now face to face with eternity.

© 1997 Flammarion pour le texte original.
© 2000 Richard Davis pour la traduction anglaise. Tous droits réservés.

The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe (1933)

The first English version of a classic essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe, originally published in Janus #9, 1933. Translated from the Norwegian by Gisle R. Tangenes.

 

One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself.
He saw that he was naked under cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.
Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, a fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger’s bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.
That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next new moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole.

II
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life’s embrace.
So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion’s claw. But man became fearful of life itself – indeed, of his very being. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happen arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother’s womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself – he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved – there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice – he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.
But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.
From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

III
Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?
Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was vocated by creation’s hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.
The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.
Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the ‘healthy’ and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, ‘fear of life,’ refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of antibiological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced – correctly – as a betrayal of ego’s highest potential.
The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction and sublimation.
By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engström: “One should not think, it is just confusing.”) A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on.)
In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of ‘tact,’ the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.
The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated ‘infantile bonding;’ the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘ephemeral’ as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. “In Autumn, I will attend middle school.” If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, ‘feelings of inferiority,’ over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.
Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one ‘adopts a goal’.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who ‘sacrifices himself totally’ for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among ‘decadent’ playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one’s life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one’s point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering cases (‘living lies’); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.
Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the law of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).
The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.
Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones (‘the limited duration of Truths’) – and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.
The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.
Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer that segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences (‘disappointments’); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole right to the bottom, and the scene is instantly transformed from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.
The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).
Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feeling and thought. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature’s deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.
We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).
When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.
A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. “Mom, what am I to do.” A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: “What happens now?” The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the ‘high society’s’ tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine – made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.
The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.
A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.
Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent on feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to ‘die standing up’), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases’ death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm – “it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat...”
When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of ‘saving’ the suicidal is based on a hairraising misapprehension of the nature of existence.
Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere ‘changes’, whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as ‘yearning’ or ‘transcendental tendency.’ Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it – the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one’s life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of ‘progressive optimism’ are removed by this major psychological law.
The human yearning is not merely marked by a ‘striving toward’, but equally by an ‘escape from.’ And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing for, but one has always a heartfelt awareness of what one is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one’s own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfilment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.
The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.
Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it – anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from – betray – the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.
The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.
The ‘martyrdom’ of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation – they gain in significance thereby.
Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.

IV
Is it possible for ‘primitive natures’ to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul¹, subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.
And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.
Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind’s common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share.²
The current phase of life’s chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio – ‘the rhythm of the times’). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable – all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts (‘corpses in the cargo.’) Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.

V
If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.
And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.
Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth’s collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:
“– The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth’s is a pond and a backwater.
– The sign of doom is written on your brows – how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?
– But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.
– Know yourselves – be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.”
And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails.
He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933

Notes:

1 A distinction for clarity.
2 I emphasize that this is not about fantastic reform proposals, but rather a psychological view of principle

Many thanks to Mrs Berit Zapffe for permission to publish this translation.