Anathemas and Admirations by E. M. Cioran (tr. Richard Howard)
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Overview: Emil M. Cioran (8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) was a Romanian philosopher and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. In 1933 he started to study at the University of Berlin. Leaving Berlin in 1936, he taught philosophy at the Andrei Saguna high school in Brasov for a year. He then went to Paris in 1937 and had settled in by 1944. His first French book, A Short History of Decay, was awarded the Rivarol Prize in 1950. Soon after, he began to refuse every literary prize he was offered. The Latin Quarter of Paris became his permanent residence and he lived much of his life in isolation.
Professing a lack of interest in conventional philosophy in his early youth, Cioran dismissed abstract speculation in favor of personal reflection and passionate lyricism. “I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations”, he later said. His works often depict an atmosphere of torment, a state that Cioran himself experienced, and came to be dominated by lyricism and, often, the expression of intense and even violent feeling. William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on the modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease”. Cioran became most famous while writing not in Romanian but French, a language with which he had struggled since his youth. During Cioran’s lifetime, Saint-John Perse called him “the greatest French writer to honor our language since the death of Paul Valéry.” Cioran’s tone and usage in his adopted language were seldom as harsh as in Romanian (though his use of Romanian is said to be more original).
In this collection of essays and epigrams, E.M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations—which he calls “admirations”—of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Mircea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms—his “anathemas”—he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, mortality, God, and the lure of disillusion.
Genre: 20th-Century Philosphy; Essay Collection
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