A paragraph of E.M. Cioran on pleasure

"This world was not created in joy. Yet we procreate in pleasure. True enough—but pleasure is not joy, it is joy’s simulacrum: its function consists in deceiving, in making us forget that creation bears, down to its least detail, the mark of that initial melancholy from which it issued. Necessarily illusory, it is pleasure too which permits us to carry out certain performances which in theory we repudiate. Without its cooperation, continence, gaining ground, would seduce even the rats. But it is in what we call the transports of the flesh that we understand how fraudulent pleasure is. In the flesh, pleasure reaches its peak, its maximum intensity, and it is here, at the zenith of its success, that it suddenly opens to its unreality, that it collapses in its own void. The voluptuous flesh is the disaster of pleasure." (from "The New Gods" by E. M. Cioran, Richard Howard)