On the Heights of Despair

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I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide. An aged Cioran is the main character in a play by Romanian dramatist-actor Matei Vișniec, Mansardă la Paris cu vedere spre moarte ("A Paris Loft with a View on Death"). The play, depicting an imaginary meeting between Vișniec and Cioran, [40] was first brought to the stage in 2007, under the direction of Radu Afrim and with a cast of Romanian and Luxembourgian actors; Cioran was played by Constantin Cojocaru. [41] Stagings were organized in the Romanian city of Sibiu [40] [41] and in the Luxembourg, at Esch-sur-Alzette (both Sibiu and Luxembourg City were the year's European Capital of Culture). [40] In 2009, the Romanian Academy granted posthumous membership to Cioran. [42]

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence (123). Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears. I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons — moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on — no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life. I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing. In Romania in the 1960s and 1970s, Cioran was a mysterious, almost mythological, presence. One would hear that such a person existed, but it was impossible to read him. His French books were neither sold nor published in translation, and his Romanian books had disappeared without a trace. Although he had departed his homeland some ten years before the war and the communist takeover, he was as invisible as the most unspeakable, or un-nameable, of non-persons. The present book is the first translation of Cioran from his native language into English, mastered by Ilinca Zarifopol Johnston, a graduate of the University of Bucharest in 1975, majoring in English and German. Her senior thesis "Speech Acts of Permission in English" was awarded the first prize of the Romanian National Student Scientific Colloquium for 1976. After official interventions on her behalf by nearly a dozen U.S. Congressmen and Senators, she was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1977.

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There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.” Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin. Cioran started writing The Passionate Handbook in 1940 and finished it by 1945. It was the last book he wrote in Romanian, though not the last to deal with pessimism and misanthropy through lyrical aphorisms. Cioran published books only in French thereafter. It was at this point that Cioran's apparent contempt for the Romanian people emerged. He told a friend that he "wanted to write a Philosophy of Failure, with the subtitle For the exclusive use of the Romanian People". [24] Furthermore, he described his move to Paris as "by far the most intelligent thing" he had ever done, and in The Trouble with Being Born he says, "In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was." [25]

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it. The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.Out of the shadow of the abstract man, who thinks for the pleasure of thinking, emerges the organic man, who thinks because of a vital imbalance, and who is beyond science and art. Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. Cioran revised The Transfiguration of Romania heavily in its second edition released in the 1990s, eliminating numerous passages he considered extremist or "pretentious and stupid". In its original form, the book expressed sympathy for totalitarianism, [13] a view which was also present in various articles Cioran wrote at the time, [14] and which aimed to establish " urbanization and industrialization" as "the two obsessions of a rising people". [15] Great joys, why do they bring us sadness? Because there remains from these excesses only a feeling of irrevocable loss and desertion which reaches a high degree of negative intensity. At such moments, instead of a gain, one keenly feels loss. sadness accompanies all those events in which life expends itself. its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness. No one commits suicide for external reasons, only because of inner disequilibrium. Under similar adverse circumstances, some are indifferent, some are moved, some are driven to suicide.

His major works includes book such as The Book of Delusions (1936), Tears and Saints (1937), The Temptation to Exist (1956), History and Utopia (1960), The fall into Time (1964), The Trouble With Being Born (1973), Anathemas and Admirations (1986-1987), The Passionate Handbook (1991). Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 78. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR.

The University of Chicago Press

To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally... The dark, existential despair of Romanian philosopher Cioran’s short meditations is paradoxically bracing and life-affirming. . . . Puts him in the company of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard."— Publishers Weekly, starred review On the Heights of Despair was noted for its elaborate prose, aphorisms and philosophical pessimism, expressed in a style that Cioran would later be recognised for. [2] [15] Speaking on Cioran in general terms, Saint-John Perse described him as "the greatest French writer to honour our language since the death of Paul Valéry." [2] To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.