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A review by screen_memory
The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran
5.0
The giddy, idiotic rush and a momentary intimation of a smile when you feel, at long last, understood.
Yet this relation to somebody dead to history means nothing. Of what value or worth is this confirmation?
Finally reading this man who was constantly tortured by his sleeplessness, and relentlessly pursued like a cast shadow follows its host by the thought of suicide. That he did not succumb and suffered through existence until his time impresses me greatly. The idea of suicide, that an escape from being alive was eternally available, seemed a comfort to him, he who writes in this book, "It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late," yet he opted to suffer through every boring and dreadful moment, through the sheer boredom of being alive.
Was it Montaigne who wrote that philsophy is a preparation for death? In no way is this more thoroughly confirmed in the writings of Emil Cioran who wrote not one sentence that is not without a recognition of death.
Cioran, so far, has been keeping me ideological company in thoughts of the ineradicable relativity of the world, the humorous absurdity of being thrown into existence and bearing it needlessly therefrom, and the utterly contradictory and self-defeating nature of the self.
Would Cioran not agree that man is an irrational animal?
Yet this relation to somebody dead to history means nothing. Of what value or worth is this confirmation?
Finally reading this man who was constantly tortured by his sleeplessness, and relentlessly pursued like a cast shadow follows its host by the thought of suicide. That he did not succumb and suffered through existence until his time impresses me greatly. The idea of suicide, that an escape from being alive was eternally available, seemed a comfort to him, he who writes in this book, "It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late," yet he opted to suffer through every boring and dreadful moment, through the sheer boredom of being alive.
Was it Montaigne who wrote that philsophy is a preparation for death? In no way is this more thoroughly confirmed in the writings of Emil Cioran who wrote not one sentence that is not without a recognition of death.
Cioran, so far, has been keeping me ideological company in thoughts of the ineradicable relativity of the world, the humorous absurdity of being thrown into existence and bearing it needlessly therefrom, and the utterly contradictory and self-defeating nature of the self.
Would Cioran not agree that man is an irrational animal?