Both Eyes Open

E.M. Cioran is the essential philosopher for the end, and the beginning, of the millennium. He was born in Romania in 1911, the son of a Romanian Orthodox priest, and his writing today remains a searing antidote to the delusional empirical optimism of the ordinary life. “My vision of the future is so exact,” he wrote in 1973, “that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.” In “A Short History of Decay,” Cioran once explained his compulsion to write quite simply: “[N]ot everyone has the luck to die young.”

The very titles of Cioran’s books lay out his claim upon us: “On the Heights of Despair,” “Tears and Saints,” “A Short History of Decay,” “The Temptation to Exist,” “The Fall Into Time,” “History and Utopia,” “The New Gods,” “Drawn and Quartered,” “The Trouble With Being Born” and “Anathemas and Admirations.”

The opening sentence of his first book, “On the Heights of Despair,” published in 1934, best explains this claim, framing a question that Cioran, until his death in 1995 at age 84, spent his life refusing to answer, “Why can’t we stay closed up inside ourselves?”

Cioran’s refusal was perhaps because he felt that the most profound experiences in life are impossible to express. “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” Cordelia tells Lear. It is the same with Cioran. And yet, he is a writer. He paradoxically fails to remain silent, and we receive the fruits of his failure. How could we not benefit from the wisdom of memories such as: “In my childhood, we boys played a game: we would watch the grave digger at work. Sometimes he would hand us a skull, with which we would play soccer. For us that was a delight which no funeral thought came to darken. For many years now, I have lived in a milieu of priests having to their credit many thousands of Extreme Unctions; yet I have not known a single one who was intrigued by death. Later on I was to understand that the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one preparing itself within us.”

For more than 30 years, I have been reading Cioran’s books. Reading for consolation, for companionship, for reassurance; reading angrily, badly, inattentively, passionately: And still, I ask, what is a Cioran book? It is not what is conventionally thought of as philosophy, it is not literary criticism; it is not a religious or political tract. Like all the greatest works of world literature, it is easier to say what it is not. No one can be argued into reading Cioran. If you are of a certain disposition, you will find him. And you can start with any of his books because, as he has written, “[w]hat I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous labor of verification.” He is the inheritor of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Cynics (probably the only classical philosophers immediately accessible to the modern mind) and latter-day prophets like Nietzsche, often using an aphoristic style to create short, concentrated insights like gems (and, like gems, capable of cutting glass with their hard, truthful edges).

One could range up authors (in facile explanation) whose work will be on the same shelf as Cioran: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Rozanov, Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Leopardi (from the “Diary” of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, “Cioran’s words reek of a basement coolness and the rot of the grave”), and those to whom Cioran himself refers as touchstones: Shakespeare, the Desert Fathers, St. Teresa of Avila, Loyola and the author from whom I came immediately to Cioran, Miguel de Unamuno, whose most famous book is “The Tragic Sense of Life.”

When one reads Cioran, what one gets are, as the poet and translator Richard Howard has said, “sentences of manic humor, howls of pain and a vestige of tears.” One finds this in the forthcoming Howard translation of “All Gall Is Divided,” a work first written in 1952. “All Gall Is Divided” is an installment in fragments--outwardly disguised as epigrams--of Cioran’s autobiography, an autobiography without the tedium of recollected events (“I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away”). The centrality of music in Cioran’s life is a constant theme of the book, “music is the refuge of souls wounded by happiness.” “Without Bach,” he declares, “theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.”

Master of the sweeping statement, Cioran is also a tireless delineator of distinctions. For instance, in “The Temptation to Exist,” he urges, “Do not confuse a man who pities himself with a man who is defeated: he still possesses energy enough to protect himself against the dangers which threaten him. Let him complain! That is his way of disguising his vitality. He asserts himself as best he can: his tears often conceal an aggressive intention. . . . On the other hand, mind the man who can no longer pity himself, who rejects his miseries, relegates them outside his nature and outside his voice. Having renounced the resources of lamentation and derision, he ceases to communicate with his life which he turns into an object.”

“Anathemas and Admirations” braids two books--one composed solely of aphorisms, and the other a book of literary essays and portraits. It is written with “an appetite and genius for provocation,” which happen to be the words Cioran uses to launch himself into a long analysis of the work of Joseph de Maistre, the great French reactionary. There are also masterful essays on, among others, Paul Valery, Samuel Beckett, Benjamin Fondane, Otto Weininger and, topping all of these, is possibly one of the greatest and most provocative essays ever written about an American author--F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Finally, how to find, after all is said and done, an adequate description for Cioran, who received a traditional (of course) funeral service at the Romanian Orthodox church in Paris and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery just over from Baudelaire, Beckett and Cortazar? Maybe in this, from his own description of the Desert Fathers from “The Temptation to Exist”:

“The hermits of the first centuries of Christianity will serve us again as an example. . . . They were warriors in whose state of tension, whose relentless struggles against themselves we can scarcely imagine. There were some who recited up to 700 prayers a day; they kept track by dropping a pebble after each one. . . . A mad arithmetic which made me admire them all the more for their matchless pride. They were not weaklings, these obsessed saints at grips with the dearest of all their possessions: their temptations. . . . Their descriptions of ‘desire’ display such violence of tone that they scrape our senses raw and give us shudders no libertine author succeeds in inspiring. They were ingenious at glorifying ‘the flesh’ in reverse. If it fascinated them to such a degree, what merit in having fought against its attractions! They were titans, more frenzied, more perverse than those of mythology, for the latter would never have been able, in their simplicity of mind to conceive, for the accumulation of energy, all the advantages of self-loathing.”

What engaged amusement--and admiration--Cioran has for these zealots. Perhaps it stems from a sense of kinship. He too lived at life’s extreme margin, brandishing a unique vision of the world. (It is a vision that is, thankfully, still in print because of the heroic efforts of Howard and Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston.) According to Cioran, only three steps are necessary to free a person from the world of appearances: “Reading, conversation, leisure suffice.” Given the busyness of all life today, one can see the sheer Utopian scope of such a program.