Cioran on music
A few musical aphorisms by E. M. Cioran (1911-1995):
What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.
Musical Offering, Art of the Fugue, Goldberg Variations: I love in music, as in philosophy and in everything, what pains by insistence, by recurrence, by that interminable return which reaches the ultimate depths of being and provokes there a barely endurable delectation.
The first two are from The Trouble with Being Born, the last one from Drawn and Quartered. Both volumes are translated from the French by Richard Howard and published by Arcade.