E. M. Cioran (1911–1995)

Cioran is a little bit one note for sure - you despite this being a collection of wide-ranging aphorisms, he achieves a remarkable unity of tone and topic over the length of this book. On the surface, you might find his writing to be almost absurdly depressive - he put a lot of work into writing about being sad, anxious, and petty. But as a fellow depressive I can relate to his lines of thought. For me, depression doesn’t spring from pain or really even sadness. Rather it’s a void where no feeling can enter, a think wall of opaque jelly that separates you from the world, a world that you very much want to participate in but feel incapable of, separated as you are from the causeways of living. Throughout this book, Cioran develops a line of thought that has as many connections with Buddhist conceptions of life as suffering and abnegation of the self as it does with any kind of western pessimism or cynicism.
I think it’s a bit deceptive to call this a work of philosophy. If you read the book, you’ll see pretty quickly that Cioran doesn’t have much patience for philosophers. Instead, this seems to me to be a man struggling to in the first place, justify his desire to live in the face of the meaningless of existence, and secondly to articulate and exorcise the neurosises that keep him from taking part in the world, where we are given so little time to feel and experience so much. Cioran mentions an affinity for diary and letter writing - this seems to me to be a kind of polished up notebook, or, if it he had been writing today, a very highbrow Twitter stream. Personally, i like this style very much, and it jives very well with the author’s sensibility.… (mais)

"Io non ho fatto che sognare un paese senza uomini, senza clima, senza ideali, indifferente alla terra e agli astri, che non assomigliasse alla vita e forse neppure alla morte, un regno di nebbia vagamente argentea su cui, stregato dalla tentazione di un'inesistenza fatata, fisserei lo sguardo."
(226)

Sicuramente non è la finestra di Cotugno:

Affaciati alla finestra bella mia
T'invento una canzone e una poesia
E metti il vestito più bello e andiamo via
Un gatto, un cuore e tu che compagnia.

Nel momento in cui sono alla finestra e guardo il nulla penso che alle mia spalle ci sia qualcosa: Dio è morto è ormai storia vecchia, il superuomo è rannicchiato in un angolo con la testa fra le gambe, ... alla fine, preferisco non girarmi e continuo a stare dove sono.

Alcuni brani:

"Una volta espresso, il sublime perde tutto. Non ha stile. Trasferiti nella parola umana, gli ultimi paesaggi della natura o del cuore assomigliano a disastri di cattivo gusto, o a tremende insulsaggini. La perfezione bandisce qualsiasi brusio."
(18)

"Ogni goccia di pensiero scava nello spazio la tomba di un altro pensiero."
(25)

"Limite fatale della filosofia: nessuno trova nelle idee quel che ha perduto nella vita."
(80)

"Quando si spreca il tempo in compagnia dei propri simili, il disgusto si trasforma in una domanda: continuare a tenersi in posizione verticale non è un supremo sforzo, una distinzione eccessiva?"
(96)

"Per vivere, l'uomo non avrebbe neppure dovuto scoprire il Tempo."
(129)

"La Storia? Il fomento delle mandrie umane per mezzo di ideali."
(170)

"I battiti del cuore, di una monotonia assurda, sembrano rivelarci che la vita è un esilio in un sospiro angosciosamente insonoro."
(188-9)… (mais)

When this eleven-essay collection was first released in France, it caused a literary frenzy on the Left Bank. Cioran writes sharply about writers, novels, mystics, apostles, philosophers, and Western civilizations. Twenty years ago, Richard Howard's excellent translation of this remarkable European thinker's work, The Temptation to Exist, first introduced it to American readers. The book has subsequently turned into an underground classic, and the literary aura around Cioran has only deepened.

Cioran is a typical modern-day exponent of the metaphysical futility school. It is possible to argue that the titles of the first two articles in The Temptation to Exist, "Thinking Against Oneself" and "On a Winded Civilization," perfectly capture the tone and perspective of the entire collection as well as Cioran's body of work. Here, as elsewhere, Cioran presents a series of intensely personal observations on a variety of instructive subjects, including the collapse of Western civilization, the place of the intellectual in modern society, the end of the novel, the benefits of tyranny, the future of utopia, and other related subjects.

Cioran's persuasiveness stems from more than just the content of his argument; his style and epigrammatic tautness are just as, if not more, significant. His much-publicized efforts to master the French language have yielded a style that combines an almost Olympian coldness and intellectuality with an almost hysterical impression of passion. It is fundamentally a teenage style, like so much about Cioran: conceited, confessional, and theatrical, but full of vitality none the less. One of his most blatant rhetorical allusions to Nietzsche is the royal we, which he frequently employs to lend his work an air of authority. Cioran is also highly quotable if one ignores context and misses small details like meaning. Reading these essays is nonetheless engaging and demands the reader's thoughtful attention.… (mais)