However the language is not complicated because the ideas are subtle or the language technical, it is complicated because Cioran is showing off. For after all He must not triumph; it is up to our irony to compromise His capital letter; up to our heart to dissolve the shudders He dispenses. After each conversation, whose refinement alone is enough to indicate the level of a civilization, why is it impossible not to regret the Sahara and not to envy the plants or the endless monologues of zoology? But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. This would not be an issue if a book is simply written, but I would say that this book is not as straightforward as the absence of an introduction implies.

It can no longer hear at close range the hum of humanity; it wants to consider from as far away as possible the accursed symmetry which links men together. Who knows, outside of the Greek and French civilizations, a more lucidly facetious proof of the elegant nothingness of things? But to embrace a thing by a definition, however arbitrary—and all the more serious the more arbitrary it is, since the soul then overtakes knowledge—is to reject that thing, to render it insipid and superfluous, to annihilate it.

About the author: Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, to an Orthodox priest (main religion in Romania) and a mother who was prone to depression.

Every absolute—personal or abstract—is a way of avoiding the problems, and not only the problems but also their root, which is nothing but a panic of the senses. Like Nietzsche, Cioran is intent on exposing the hypocrisies of the human condition; but unlike Nietzsche, Cioran never once offers a way out, a new horizon, or even words of inspiration. But, suppose we do not want to be free of suffering nor to conquer our contradictions and conflicts—what if we prefer the nuancWith the exception of the Greek skeptics and the Roman emperors of the Decadence, all minds seem enslaved by a municipal vocation.

In 1936 Cioran published The Transfiguration of Romania, a book which argued for the installation of a totalitarian government in Romania. One touch of clearsightedness reduces us to our primal state: nakedness; a suspicion of irony strips us of that trumpery hope which let us dupe ourselves and devise illusion: every contrary path leads outside of life.As New, unopened and unread, clean tight sound square, crisp corners and edges, in excellent paperback wrapper.