The initiates were doubtless obliged to keep silence; yet it is inconceivable that not a single chatterbox was among their number; what is more contrary to human nature than such stubbornness in secrecy? Only his heart should change, but it is unchangeable; hence for him, to exist has only one meaning: to dive into suffering—until the exercise of a day-by-day nirvanization raises him to the perception of unreality. By endowing him with wickedness and perseverance our dominant qualities, we have exhausted ourselves to make him as lively as possible; our powers have been used up in creating his image, in making him agile, frisky, intelligent, ironic, and above all petty. There are something like material limits to our endurance; yet the expansion of each pang reaches and occasionally exceeds such limits: this is too often the source of our ruin. It is one of a few books in this range that includes an endorsement from a literary review on the front cover.

True, without it we are committed to an infinity of dead ends But even when we know that nothing leads anywhere, that the universe is only a by-product of our gloom, why should we sacrifice this pleasure of tottering and of splitting our skulls against heaven and earth? The man who knows nothing of ennui is still in the world’s childhood, when the ages were waiting to be born; he remains closed off from that tired time which outlives itself, which laughs at its dimensions, and succumbs on the threshold of its own .Men can be classified according to the most whimsical criteria: according to their humors, their inclinations, their dreams, or their glands. Often abandoning attention—the greatest of its privileges—such a mind yields to the temptations it has sought to escape, or becomes the prey of impure mysteries . When a nation no longer has any prejudice in its blood, its sole resource remains its will to disintegrate. I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

Having made a system of mistakes for himself, he suffers for reasons whose nullity alarms the mind and surrenders himself to values whose absurdity leaps to the eye. In his views, he was influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Chestov, Rozanov, Dostoyevsky, and poet Mihai Eminescu. And if we meet others, it is to degrade ourselves together in a race to the void, whether in the exchange of ideas, schemes, or confessions. Thus true madness is never due to chance or to the disasters of the brain, but to the false conception of space the heart creates for itself. Ever had the feeling that life is utterly meaningless, religion an elaborate joke, and philosophy a blunt tool to open the mysteries of existence?

By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. We derive our power from our forgetting and from our incapacity to conceive of the plurality of simultaneous fates. However the language is not complicated because the ideas are subtle or the language technical, it is complicated because Cioran is showing off. Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching; each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples—officialdom, with its rules—a metaphysics designed for monkeys.

Nihilistic in tone, the book consists of a series of philosophical reflections on various subjects, such as fanaticism, music, and progress. And yet, there is an enthusiasm in Cioran’s prose that comes through, in spite of his predilection towards pessimism and despair: “It is because it rests on nothing, because it lacks even the shadow of an argument that we persevere in life"; “How invent a remedy for existence, how conclude this endless cure?For any intense suffering produces a simulacrum of plenitude and proposes a terrible reality to consciousness, which it cannot elude; while suffering without substance in that temporal mourning of ennui affords consciousness nothing that forces it to fruitful action.