Flights

GUIDANCE FROM CIORAN

Another man – gentle, shy – always took a book of Cioran with him when he travelled for work, one of the ones made up of very short texts. At hotels, he’d keep it on his bedside table, and every morning on waking he would open it at random and find his guiding principle for the day to come. He believed that hotels in Europe ought to replace all their copies of the Bible with books by Cioran as soon as possible. From Romania all the way to France. That for the purposes of predicting the future, the Bible was no longer any good. What use is the following verse, for example, come upon at random one April Friday or December Wednesday: ‘All the articles used in the service of the tabernacle, whatever their function, including all the tent pegs for it and those for the courtyard are to be of bronze’ (Book of Exodus 27:19)? How are we supposed to take that? In any case, he said it didn’t necessarily have to be Cioran. There was a challenge in his eyes as he continued: ‘Feel free to suggest something else.’

Nothing came to my mind. He took from his backpack a worn, slender volume, which he opened to a random page. His face lit up.

‘Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps – toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze the dust in search of a mystery stripped of anything serious.’*

* (Anathemas and Admirations, by Emil Cioran, translated by Richard Howard).