Ship smith clued me in to Cioran; I don't know whether this passgage has been translateed earlier and better than this, but what I'm reading right now particularly sez it:
" If an obscure universal force has decreed that you will belong to the order of victims, you'll go to the end of your days stumbling, squishing the scrap of paradise that you hide inside under your feet, and the bit of force that pierces out from your smoldering stares and from your dreams will soil itself in the face of the filth of time, matter, and men. You'll have a compost heap for a stage and your tribune will be an instrument of torture. You'll only be allotted a leprosy-infected glory and a crown of drool. Feh, you would try to walk alongside those to whom everything is due, for whom all paths are clear? Dust and cinder will rise to bar time's exits to you, will bar the escapes of your dreams. No matter where you turn, your feet will stumble, your voice will only call hymns of filth, and, past your heads which are bent toward your hearts, where only self-pity lives, the breath
of the happy will barely pass -- the happy, those blessed toys of a nameless irony, and just as guiltless as you are!"
Pardon my tortured translation, I've had a few. And cioran wasn't a native French speaker anyway, so pardon his tortured fucking Romanian.
