On the Heights of Despair

Product Information

Cioran is a kind of 20th century, Romanian Nietzsche who “denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism.” If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. Cioran was born in Resinár, Szeben County, Kingdom of Hungary (today Rășinari, Sibiu County, Romania). [1] His father, Emilian Cioran, was an Orthodox priest, and his mother, Elvira, was the head of the Christian Women's League. [2] On the Heights of Despair ( Romanian: Pe culmile disperării) is a Romanian philosophical work written by Emil Cioran, published in 1934 as his first book. It consists of several brief reflections on negative themes which later permeated Cioran's work, such as death, insomnia and insanity. As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

Still, even despite my shortcomings, I suspect that Cioran simply gives the world’s idols too much credit because in those rare moments when my indirections cease, when I stop ventriloquizing my gods, and a divine silence settles, I always still here my children calling. This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal. On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran’s first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation.No modern writer twists the knife with Cioran's dexterity. . . . His writing . . . is informed with the bitterness of genuine compassion."—Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness [...] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.

I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night. A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It's not easy to be on the wrong foot with life Pe culmile disperării (translated " On the Heights of Despair"), Editura "Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă", Bucharest 1934Gass, William H. (22 August 1968). "The Evil Demiurge". The New York Review. ISSN 0028-7504 . Retrieved 28 September 2022. How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history — greater than the fall of empires — I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence. The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself? Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact. Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Bradatan, Costica (28 November 2016). "The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran's Heights of Despair". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved 8 January 2018.

At the edge of life you feel that you are no longer master of the life within you, that subjectivity is an illusion, and that uncontrollable forces are seething inside you, evolving with no relation to a personal center or a definite, individual rhythm.", essay 2 - On not wanting to live

Reference

At 10, Cioran moved to Sibiu to attend school, and at 17, he was enrolled in the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where he met Eugène Ionesco and Mircea Eliade, who became his friends. [1] Future Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica and future Romanian thinker Petre Țuțea became his closest academic colleagues; all three studied under Tudor Vianu and Nae Ionescu. Cioran, Eliade, and Țuțea became supporters of Ionescu's ideas, known as Trăirism. [ citation needed]