/lit/ - Literature

>D.C, who was writing his recollections of childhood in his Rumanian village, having told his neighbor, a peasant named Coman, that he wouldn’t be left out, received a visit from the latter early the next day: “I know I’m a worthless man but all the same I didn’t think I had fallen so low as to be talked about in a book.”
>How superior the oral world was to ours! Beings (I should say, peoples) live in the truth only as long as they have a horror of the written. Once they catch the virus, they enter the inauthentic, they lose their old superstitions to acquire a new one, worse than all the others combined.

Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

>>22301798

Bump (I am not the OP), I am finishing Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's bio, after having read Petreu (these are the two major scholarly English biographies). Pic here was likely taken by Zarifopol-Johnston, and looks about the same as other snapshots. He kept that one shitty room with books and papers and such (pic related), but there seems to have been more to the apartment, one or two living areas that looked halfway decent, an absolute requirement to keep any woman around for any length of time. The shitty side room, the thing most frequently seen (it reinforces his "brand") was probably his "man cave" where he "worked". I will probably punch up my notes on the IZJ book on this board, as I recently did with Petreu.

The ideal relationship, as far as I am concerned. Exactly the sort of relationship that I myself would like to be in. One which never involves any of the three major departments of middle aged, adult life: getting married, getting a house, or having children. Ever. Women always want at least one of those three things, especially once they enter middle age in their thirties. Both for their own sake(s), but also because they feel that if they have none of the three that they are somehow falling behind their peers in some meaningful way, forgetting that everyone dies in a few years on the outside and becoming equal again where it really counts. Boue, to her credit, was obviously a very unusual woman simply for the fact that she stayed with this prick who had little to offer in any of the conventional senses. His later "prestige" must have helped a bit, but one wonders how he actually courted her in the first place. Actually, this has honestly led me to wonder whether Cioran was well endowed. Cioran's first French book was well-liked, so that certainly must have helped the relationship. The other aspects of the relationship that I admire are that it seems not to have involved any religious performance whatsoever (although I've heard stories that Cioran would sometimes sit in church), and that its precise details were kept about as private as a notable Parisian couple's relationship could be expected to be kept. There are photos, letters, reports of suicide, yes, but again these were largely private things, nothing on the level of the abomination of today's social media. Basic social facts documented nowhere near as thoroughly as today's Satanic Eye demands. A man and a woman, simply whiling away the time and waiting to die together. Good. That is as it should be.

Cioran's biographer and translator Ilinca came along late in his life as a "fan girl", an American expat academic who took him as a project because he was the mysterious man associated with her Romanian life. In her private notes, Ilinca explicitly acknowledges what is obvious: she likes Cioran, found the process of translating him "erotic". Naturally, Boue sees her as an interloper and doesn't like this young woman coming around too much. Women are all the same.

>>21677615

"In Europe, happiness stops at Vienna. Beyond, misery upon misery, since the beginning." -Emil Cioran, who himself came from "beyond" Vienna. This line was written during the Cold War, when it was doubly true.

>b-but suffering produces good lit

It can, just saying I would never want to live there.

"Joseph, the father of Jesus, is the most compromised person in history. The Christians shoved him aside and made him the laughingstock of all men. Had he told the truth at least once, his son would have remained an obscure Jew. The triumph of Christianity originates in a virility that lacked self-esteem. The Virgin Birth originates in the world's piety and one man's cowardice." -Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 29

My boy drops such beautiful bombs on xKEKS.

>>20137643
You don't, unless you wanna kill yourself and just need a little push.
I'm at my limit right now. I've never been more depressed.

What the fuck was his problem?

>>19994339
Yes

Name one intelligent person who wasn't utterly depressed.