Cioran on Work

...Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil.  In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity...

It's the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us.  Work is the negation of eternity.  The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity.  Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions.  I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity.  To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness...




catalog