/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19157158]

>In my childhood, we boys played a game: we would watch the gravedigger at work. Sometimes he would hand us a skull, with which we would play soccer. For us that was a delight which no funereal thought came to darken.

Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided

>When I was about twenty years old, I lost my sleep and I am of the opinion that this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison, a thousand times worse. On account of this painful discovery, however, the wakeful nights of Sibiu were among the most adventurous moments of my entire life. I roamed the streets of the city for hours on end - the city is, by the way, marvelously beautiful, a medieval German city - I went out of the house at about midnight or later and roamed through the alleys.
And there were only a few lunatics and me, all alone in the entire city, in which absolute silence reigned.
For hours I strayed like a kind of phantom through the streets and everything that I thought in consequence and later composed was "born" during those nights.

>another important experience that I had as a twenty-year-old.
I must say beforehand that my mother was not religious, which perhaps had to do with my father' s profession as a minister. She was, in any case, a much more independent spirit than my father. Anyway, I remember very precisely, and that I do shows how extraordinarily important this experience was for me and still is, that we, my mother and I, were alone in the house one afternoon and suddenly I threw myself on a sofa and said: "I cannot live any longer. I simply can't bear it," whereupon my mother replied, "Had I known that at the time, I would have aborted you." That made a tremendous impression on me; not, however, a negative impression in any way. Instead of being shocked, I merely smiled.

>I overcame insomnia, by the way, after only seven "wide-awake" years, in 1 937, when I came to France. And it came about when I rode across France on my bicycle, as I said already. I was underway for a month and I passed the nights mostly in youth hostels, and the physical exertion of putting at least 100km a day behind me cured me. When one rides 100km a day,one must sleep;
one cannot do otherwise, and in this way I overcame the crisis.

Wakefulness and Obsession:
An Interview with E.M. Cioran

>In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.

The Trouble with Being Born

[Anonymous No.19157169]

WTF HES LITERALLY FUCKING ME!!!!!

[Anonymous No.19157219]

>>19157158
>ciorchad was /lindywalk/pilled

[Anonymous No.19157225]

>>19157169
He's fucking you?

[Anonymous No.19157255]

>>19157225
Yes.

[Anonymous No.19157291]

>>19157158
>tfw I have this hairstyle

[Anonymous No.19157296]

How did that faggot buy groceries? Family money?

[Anonymous No.19157331]

>>19157296
He had a hot sugar mommy, he was too chad to work. Also, various grants that he spent in brothels.

>>19157158
>playing soccer with a skull
This is just being a regular Romanian tho.

[Anonymous No.19157355]

>>19157331
>Romanian
"In continual rebellion against my ancestry, I have spent my whole life wanting to be something else: Spanish, Russian, cannibal—anything, except what I was."

[Anonymous No.19157377]

>>19157331
>Also, various grants that he spent in brothels.
Sauce?

[Anonymous No.19157484]

>>19157355
#ThingsRomaniansSay

>>19157377
I believe he mentions it in an interview I read in a book Cioran - Entretiens.
He practically boasted about paying whores with University money, lol. He also wrote that philosophers should learn a lot from prostitutes, the ultimate sceptics, the least dogmatic of all creatures.

I think the guy genuinely loved to hang with prostitutes and enjoy their company, it wasn't just perverse or hedonistic thing.

[Anonymous No.19157509]

>>19157158
>the physical exertion of putting at least 100km a day behind me cured me. When one rides 100km a day,one must sleep;
>one cannot do otherwise, and in this way I overcame the crisis.
This may stress the importance of physical exercise and how sedentarism is the true source of some of our mental maladies.

[Anonymous No.19157542]

>>19157169

You wish, bug.

[Anonymous No.19157543]

>>19157158
>>In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.
Seems comfy.
Someone make a pepe of this.

[Anonymous No.19157549]

>>19157484
>He also wrote that philosophers should learn a lot from prostitutes, the ultimate sceptics, the least dogmatic of all creatures.
Then I'm on the right way.

>>19157484
>I think the guy genuinely loved to hang with prostitutes and enjoy their company, it wasn't just perverse or hedonistic thing.
Based

[Anonymous No.19158313]

>>19157484
>I think the guy genuinely loved to hang with prostitutes and enjoy their company, it wasn't just perverse or hedonistic thing.
Of course

>For a long time I frequented courtrooms solely to contemplate habitual criminals, their superiority to the laws, their readiness for ruin. And yet they are pitiful compared to the whores, to the ease those women show in the dock. So much detachment is … disconcerting; no amour-propre whatever; insults draw no blood; no adjective is wounding. Their cynicism is the form of their honesty. A girl of seventeen, majestically frightful, replies to the judge trying to wrest a promise to keep off the sidewalks: “I can’t promise you that, Your Honor.”

All Gall is Divided

[Anonymous No.19158327]

>>19158313
Full aphorism

>It is not the precepts of Stoicism which will show us the utility of affronts or the seduction of catastrophes. The manuals of insensibility are all too reasonable. But if each man were to make his little experiment as a bum! To dress in rags, post yourself at the crossroads, to extend your palm to the passersby, to suffer their contempt or thank them for their coin — now there’s a discipline! Or to venture into the street and insult strangers, to endure their beatings …
>For a long time I frequented courtrooms solely to contemplate habitual criminals, their superiority to the laws, their readiness for ruin. And yet they are pitiful compared to the whores, to the ease those women show in the dock. So much detachment is … disconcerting; no amour-propre whatever; insults draw no blood; no adjective is wounding. Their cynicism is the form of their honesty. A girl of seventeen, majestically frightful, replies to the judge trying to wrest a promise to keep off the sidewalks: “I can’t promise you that, Your Honor.”
>One measures one’s own strength only in humiliation. In order to console ourselves for the shames we have not known, we would have to inflict them upon ourselves, spit in the mirror, waiting for the public to honor us with its saliva. God preserve us from a distinguished fate!

[Anonymous No.19158508]

Cioran may be the end of the road for me. I'm waiting on Shestov and planning to read other Cioran influences, but I believe I've reached the end of my philosophical concerns. The rest of my life will be spent staring at a wall, waiting for death

>>19157377
>Sauce?

> I was still in the Lycée, mad about philosophy and about a girl in the Lycée as well. One important detail: I did not know her personally, though she belonged to the same milieu as I (the bourgeoisie of Sibiu, in Transylvania). As often happens with adolescents, I was both insolent and timid, but my timidity prevailed over my insolence. For over a year this torment lasted, culminating one day when I happened to be reading some book or other, leaning against a tree in the town park. Suddenly I heard giggling. Turning around, I saw — who? Her, accompanied by one of the boys in my class, the one scorned by us all and nicknamed The Louse. After more than fifty years, I remember perfectly how I felt at that moment. I forgo the details. The fact remains that I vowed on the spot to abjure “sentiments.” And that was how I became a frequenter of brothels. A year after this radical and commonplace disappointment, I discovered Weininger. And found myself in the ideal situation to understand him. His splendid enormities concerning women intoxicated me. How could I have been beguiled by a subbeing? I kept asking myself. Why this torment, this calvary, on account of a fiction, a zero incarnate? A fated figure had come at last to deliver me. But that deliverance was to cast me into a superstition that he himself condemned, for I was drifting toward that “Romantik der Prostitution™ incomprehensible to serious minds and a specialty of eastern and southeastern Europe. In any case, my student life was passed under the spell of the Whore, in the shadow of her protective, cordial, even maternal, abasement. Weininger, by supplying me with the philosophical reasons for detesting an “honest” woman, cured me of “love” during the proudest and most frenetic period I have experienced in my life. I did not foresee a time when his indictments and his verdicts would no longer count for me except insofar as they would occasionally make me regret the madman I had been.
Anthemas and Admirations

[Anonymous No.19158524]

>>19157543
He's a dopamine fiend. Gets that aerobics high and then sits down to smoke in the middle of it. Better than sex with a hooker bought with uni money

[Anonymous No.19158547]

>>19158327
He's right. And it's not some perverse sublimation, where he loves the whore. He says in Anthemas quote above that he saw women for what they are. Something admirable about their instinctual ruthlessness, like they are born to intuit the same meaninglessness that Cioran has to existentially despair over for decades, and on top of that, seem to totally accept it without angst. Maybe he was jealous

[Anonymous No.19158855]

>>19158508
>Cioran may be the end of the road for me. I'm waiting on Shestov and planning to read other Cioran influences, but I believe I've reached the end of my philosophical concerns. The rest of my life will be spent staring at a wall, waiting for death
We are same then. Although I frequent philosophical pessimist mainly.

The thing with Cioran was that he lived a normal lifestyle or at least this is the way how he talks about it in his interviews. So this kind of repels me from Cioran or leaves a bitter taste on my tongue. I know that he engaged with writing as therapy to tame down those Truths like a volcano clams down after erupting the lava. So for him paper was the surface on which he erupted his inner lava. I don't know maybe I am making same mistake as his friends who asked him that how he can be so funny when he writes such depressing books and Cioran thought how even our closest don't know us deeply. His books really are insufferable. Which makes me question on why I am reading them daily when I already know their Truth. Perhaps there's nothing better to do, perhaps I am reading like he says life is going on without any direction or purpose, perhaps only find refuge in his ruins. He himself said that we should recognize the unreality of things, their nothingness. But he also admitted that the things he wrote were momentary Truths so I don't know that how these would work outside of his life. Where was Cioran in those aphorism? There are times when I curse him and there times when I find Truth in every word of his. I don't know man. I am not making any sense here.

What do you think? What is your approach towards Cioran?

[Anonymous No.19158861]

>>19158524
>Better than sex with a hooker bought with uni money
Once again the lucky boy even has money for whores. lel

[Anonymous No.19158885]

>>19158861
>>19158855
>There are times when I curse him
Iktf pretty well.

[Anonymous No.19158889]

>>19158508

>staring at a wall, waiting (patiently?) for death

The final sentiment in All Gall is Divided captures this nicely. I won't bother to render it exactly but he describes ancient egyptian monks locked in a room, and all the emotion and pathos which goes along with such an idea, they "drop their tears". He then defuses the emotional content with a sincerely nihilistic observation: "If it were me in one of those rooms, the only thing I would drop are cigarette butts."

[Anonymous No.19158909]

>>19158855
Well first, I don't understand how you find him insufferable. To me he is one of the funniest writers I've ever come across, and his lifestyle only makes him more hilarious. Maybe we are at different points in our lives or coming to him at a different angle. For myself I exhausted all typical routes towards a meaningful life already, so I am trapped living a normal life anyways at this point. When I read him I get relief, realizing that someone else not only feels the same way, but spent a lifetime thinking about it and is giving me quick answers. So when I'm reading Cioran I'm feeling relieved and laughing.
The second part I think about: we have biological drives for socializing, sex, eating, live, and status that you can't think your way out of. So even if you believe that this is meaningless, you can still experience joy by fulfilling these biological urges. With that in mind, Cioran has no ideal to live up to, and his words make perfect sense.
Finally, I don't think his life was very normal. He couldn't afford to eat and rent at the same time

[Anonymous No.19158915]

>>19158889
> When I was barely adolescent, the prospect of death flung me into trances; to escape them, I rushed to the brothel, where I invoked the angels. But with age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss. — And although there was a time when I envied those Egyptian monks who dug their own graves in order to shed tears within them, if I were to dig mine now, all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.

[Anonymous No.19158968]

>>19158909
>Well first, I don't understand how you find him insufferable.
He is, he himself admitted that. I maybe used a wrong word to describe that feeling. But I don't find anything funny in his writings except a chuckle here and there. He was magician who choose precise words to describe what I can't pin down but I do feel. I am also anhedoniac, Cioran had music to cope I have literally nothing.

>“Your truths make it impossible to breathe.”
>“Impossible for you,” I immediately replied to this innocent. Yet I might have wanted to add; “And for me, too,” instead of swashbuckling. . . .

Yes, me and you are approaching him from a very different perspective. So it doesn't make any sense ask it from you. Life is a total contradiction and I understand. But I don't know.

[Anonymous No.19159007]

>>19158968
Good luck anon. Maybe Camus will help?

[Anonymous No.19159030]

>>19159007
>Maybe Camus will help?
Fuck you, what the fuck I have done to get insulted like that?

[Anonymous No.19159036]

>>19158968
> Young and ambitious, you will suffer no greater misfortune than to consort with those who know men. I’ve frequented three or four such: they did me in at twenty.

A warning from All Gall is Divided

[Anonymous No.19159043]

>>19159030
Lmao, I don't know man I've never read him, he's the guy who uhhhh parties in the meaninglessness

[Anonymous No.19159103]

>>19159036
Then the damage has been already done. But my life(like every life) was fucked up to being with. And when you bring fate into the picture it all crumbles. Schopenhauer also said that there is something very vulgar about the youth who know men. Despite reading these thinkers I am still naive as shit and still get very disappointed whenever I meet new people and as the interaction gets older they show their true colors.
>>19159043
Kek
Fuck Camus

This what Cioran said about him
https://youtu.be/YIkssKh0ux0

[Anonymous No.19159166]

>>19159103
I don't envy you. Being young and believing these ideas I may have never felt hope or love. I was delusional and stupid but it was nice at the time

[Anonymous No.19159204]

>>19159166
How old are you?
What are your views on death now? Does your experiences of pleasure have increased your lust for life?

[Anonymous No.19159207]

>>19158968
>Cioran had music to cope
What did he listen?

[Anonymous No.19159255]

>>19159207
Bach mainly

[Anonymous No.19159263]

>>19159255
>Bach mainly
Based

[Anonymous No.19159331]

>>19159263
>>19159255
He said in that interview he hated his own mother until she said Bach was everything to her. Then she became human lol

[Anonymous No.19159643]

>>19159204
>How old are you?
Old enough to be married
>What are your views on death now?
Death frightens me a lot less now that I feel I have not missed out on anything my life had to offer. I fear the final moments of pain and I plan to overdose on pain medication if I can get fair warning about a terminal illness in old age. I am not interested in waiting around to wake up in the middle of the night having a heart attack. I want to skip the moment of dread and just go to sleep forever.
>Does your experiences of pleasure have increased your lust for life?
Probably the opposite for me. I feel zero lust for life and simply wait around for the next good meal, next drink, next time having sex. I do my duties to my loved ones and their happiness brings me some pleasure. Seeing my friends majors me happy. I don't understand Cioran's complaints about socializing, he clearly had friends

[Anonymous No.19160547]

>>19159103
>Schopenhauer also said that there is something very vulgar about the youth who know men
source?

[Anonymous No.19160560]

just popped by /r/cioran. . . damn this one really is me

[Anonymous No.19160562]

>>19159255
an gypsy music from his youth which reportedly never failed to bring him to tears

[Anonymous No.19160575]

Once a young whoremonger, suffused with meaning, heiling Hitler with his bros.... where did it all go so wrong?

[Anonymous No.19161633]

>>19160560
Go back retard

[Anonymous No.19161870]

>>19160575
He grew up

[Anonymous No.19162680]

>>19160560
kek
this is every teenager reading Nietzsche for the first time

[Anonymous No.19162691]

>>19157158
>my mother and I, were alone in the house one afternoon and suddenly I threw myself on a sofa and said: "I cannot live any longer. I simply can't bear it," whereupon my mother replied, "Had I known that at the time, I would have aborted you."
Why didn't she just put a er through his skull? I mean it wasn't too late

[Anonymous No.19162739]

>>19162691
*hammer

[Anonymous No.19163212]

>>19162691
Because she was not a murderer.
>pro-life discussion incoming?

[Anonymous No.19163552]

>>19162691
He was relieved by the sentiment. He implies it freed him from something, and it was a pivotal moment for him. He mentions it in every interview I've read

[Anonymous No.19163805]

>>19162691
God I wish my mother had aborted me. It's merely the fact that she didn't, it's just that there's so little reason in the entire process. How is thhe world supposed to function when generic middle-class families are, even in such an age as this where fertility rates are collapsing world-wide, so incapable of making a simple decision? Is it truly so hard to understand whether one possesses the ability to raise a child? or even more than one? If they can't make a sensible decision on this how can anyone else in the lower socio-economic strata manage?

I'm so fucking tired of existence, so tired of the banal living out of the missile who's trajectory has already been determined from its earliest point of departure. Why must suicide be so scary? why must pain be such a monstrous, unthinkably awful horror? If the entrance to nothingness has so steep a price, what must be the cost of something actually existent!

[Anonymous No.19164320]

>>19163552
Oh I didn't know that
>>19163212
Well, he did ask for it

[Anonymous No.19164324]

>>19157158
>soccer
when Americans translate shit