Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #472125 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 154 pages

Synopsis
In this work, Cioran touches on nearly all the themes that preoccupied him during his writing career.

Customer Reviews

A book to return to again and again
This is a short, but beautiful book that I have returned to time and time again. It consists of usually short tightly crafted aphorisms on saints, on the ego of the Divine, along with some wonderful remarks on music. It is an avowedly Nietzschean dissection of the will to power. However, like his later French books, it transcends the isolation of Nietzsche. As Cioran himself states in 'The Trouble with Being Born', Nietzsche continually shows a singular lack of judgement for a great thinker. Whilst Cioran may be too derivative in style and content to be so great his judgement is more acute and his aphorisms full of the life affirming spirit of the true depressive. A book to treasure along with all of Cioran's books.

Cioran dissects the divide between man and God
E.M. Cioran, brought to us by the incomparable Richard Howard in French is now finding his way into our hearts from his Romanian youth. Ilinca Zarofopol-Johnston's translation is smooth, losing none of the cutting wit that is so exemplary of Cioran. The questions that Cioran asks here are the ones that Nietzsche required thinkers to ask in the preceding century. Cioran aptly describes our world, one in which the Middle Ages exhausted belief, leaving us with only appearances. His task is to find our "salvation" amongst those appearances. To find our way back to the world which we have lost and tried to regain through extratemporal belief, be it the rudimentary Judeo-Christian belief system or the universe of the Kantian transcendental ego. As Susan Sontag wrote of him, he is truly the last in a line of thinkers that includes Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. To ruminate on his tears and to breath the air of his saints in this book is indeed a heady experience. It is a book not to be taken lightly.