A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also his saving. Cioran’s physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt for those who craved such sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a revolution lyrical to its evil core. Lyricism is sleep the suppression of subjectivity, the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.”Ī special type of sleeplessness being where one is oneself forever and knows it. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. Subjectivity is the state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless. But let us wrest it back for as long as we can. This last word has gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism, selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. At the same time he is a writer of solitude and subjectivity.

Reading is like consciousness in that nothing happens. (The want of elation and despair generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which is the peculiarity of consciousness.

The end of a sentence in this case a place of especial elation and despair. “… lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.” La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche 40, Existentialism, forever. Scholars read texts like drivers read diversion signs. His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents of the Nineteenth century. Or is it the other way around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of Cioran’s sentences. The gaps between groups of sentences appear like sands of the desert encroaching on an oasis. Just think of the aphorisms each sentence has the company of only one or two others.

Late in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an encounter with an over-excited dog.Ĭioran’s sentences are of little or no help. He knew Samuel Beckett, who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. In 1937 he moved to Paris and wrote, producing what are generally classified as ‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The Trouble With Being Born. He passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of an obscure Romanian city. For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the country and was moved to the city. What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox priest. “Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.”

Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M.

Squartamento by Emil M. Cioran