Early Cioran: "A Short History of Decay"

If primarily seen as Cioran's response to WWII, the unrelenting darkness of  A Short History of Decay (love the title) might be more understandable, but for me it's more than that.  The older Cioran seems to have chipped away at the younger Cioran's lyricism for lyricism's sake and moved toward a less baroque and word-glutted text. I could be wrong -- I've only read two Ciorans: Drawn and Short History -- but thus far that's my feeling. Short History is a slower read for me, but not without some humorous and thought-provoking passages.

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Excerpt from A Short History of Decay (from a short section titled "Turning a Cold Shoulder to Time"):

     Yesterday, today, tomorrow -- these are servants' categories. For the idle man, sumptuously settled in the Inconsolable, and whom every moment torments, past, present, and future are merely variable appearances of one and the same disease, identical in its substance, inexorable in its insinuation, and monotonous in its persistence. And this disease is coextensive with Being -- it is Being.
     I was, I am, or I shall be -- a question of grammar and not of existence. Fate -- as a carnival of chronos -- lends itself to conjugation, but, stripped of its masks, is revealed to be as motionless and naked as an epitaph. How can we grant more importance to the hour which is than to the one which was or which will be? . . .

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