Towards the end of the twentieth century, a celebrated Romanian-French philosopher was invited to speak in Zurich. He was introduced with rhetorical pomp and flattering comparisons to the likes of Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.
The speaker smiled, and immediately confounded his German interpreter by beginning his presentation with the words 'Mais je ne suis qu'un deconneur'- 'But I'm just a joker'.
A few of his critics might agree, but they would be wrong. For Emil Cioran is very much worthy of inclusion in the line of the great French and European moral philosophers and writers of maxims
stretching back to Montaigne, Chamfort, Pascal and La Rochefoucauld. Cioran was born in Rasinari, Romania, in April 1911. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest.
Both facts were to be key in his later work. The writer's Romanian origins are often taken as the source of a brooding, Romantic, fatalistic temperament
while his father's ecclesiastical calling finds echoes in his son's unswerving preoccupation with themes of religion, sainthood and the dangers and joys of atheism.
In 1934, at the age of only 23, he published his first book in Romanian, On the Heights of Despair. The book contains in embryo much of the lucidly bleak, nihilistic thinking that he'd develop throughout his life.
He explained that writing had been an alternative to shooting himself. This is an author to read at moments of despair and melancholy.
He doesn't depress us, merely makes us feel less alone with our sorrows. Here is a peak inside his work 'It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. '
'Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die? '
