The end is too deep

I finally received Emil Cioran's book "The Trouble with Being Born" which is a collection of aphorisms. It is hard to swallow as a whole so I am approaching it sporadically and marking with small pencilled circles the aphorisms I think I understand and can relate to so I can later find them. I find many too pregnant with pessimism and nihilism and there are references to philosophers I only know by name (many of whom, starting from Aristotle, also get theirs).

Cioran reminds me of someone who has always been able to see the matrix without choosing the red pill. He might have appreciated the idea of the movie (it came out in 1999 and he died in 1995).

"The Fatalism was there from the very beginning, long before I had words for it," he says in an interview.

In another one: "The mistake of normal healthy people is to think of death as something that arrives at the end. I discovered very young that death is not outside of life - it is inside it. Immanent. Every agony, every bout of illness, every night when you feel the ground underneath your existence becoming uncertain - these are death showing itself from within."

Cioran's thinking was overshadowed and affected by chronic insomnia from which he suffered since he was 20. He was only relieved from it a few of years before his death by Alzheimer's which made him slip into excessive sleep. During those 60 insomniac years, he may have been awake hours worth those of 100 years of lifetime, trapped in his thinking.

"Sleep is forgetfulness: life’s drama, its complications and obsessions vanish completely, and every awakening is a new beginning, a new hope. Life thus maintains a pleasant discontinuity, the illusions of permanent regeneration. Insomnia, on the other hand, gives birth to a feeling of irrevocable sadness, despair, and agony."

I can empathize with this, having periods of nights when I wake up after four hours and my mind is already irreversibly going, stuck between yesterday and tomorrow.

I read Rob Boyle's Dublin Review article "Winter in Paris" in which he describes how he tried to trace Cioran's ghost in Paris to no avail. Boyle tells he has read "The Trouble" numerous times and to such extent that almost every sentence is underlined.

I am not underlining the book yet. For now, the end is starting to feel too deep and with my misleading degree I can barely swim dog.

I place Cioran into the same category with Pessoa but when Pessoa overwhelms the reader with his emotions, Cioran does this with his caustic philosophy and aphorisms. But I will keep the book around for sleepless nights when I want to stare into the abyss too.

Two gentler samples from page 89:

"I know peace only when my ambitions sleep. Once they waken, anxiety repossesses me. Life is a state of ambition. The mole digging his tunnels is ambitious. Ambition is in effect everywhere, and we see it its traces on the face of the dead themselves."

(Incidentally, a mole has made 35 hills on our small back lawn this summer. I can now understand its motivation.)

"Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none."

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