Stuck with appearances, we keep espousing an incomplete wisdom, half-fantasy and half-foolishness.
— Emil Cioran
Every now and then, when the world seems unimaginably absurd, I’ll sit alone in a quiet room at night with a glass of red and pick up a book by the great cantankerous writer Emil Cioran. I own almost everything he’s written, and when things seem too strange to fathom, I like to turn to those morose thinkers, the sages of the dark, to remind me I’m not alone.
Sometimes, I’ll dive into the wisdom of Schopenhauer, or the horror of Ligotti, or the poems of Leopardi, or perhaps a novel by Conrad.
But tonight, it’s Emil Cioran.
As you read his essays and aphorisms, you're not just “reading” to find answers. Instead, you're entering into a dialogue with a brilliant madman who seems to understand the deep-seated unease we sometimes feel about life's inherent contradictions.
There’s no fluff in his writings, no appeasement, no desire to reinforce the illusions we’ve all grown accustomed to. But, he also understood that many of us “last only as long as our fictions.”
Cioran's words resonate with the dark side of who we are—the part that sometimes wonders if it's all worth it—the daily grind, the pursuit of meaning, the endless striving. He’s not for the faint of heart, but his bleak insight is laced with a strange beauty.
He writes: Cure yourself of your nostalgias, of the childish obsession with the beginning and the end of time. Eternity, that dead duration—only the weak are concerned with such things. Let the moment do its work, let it reabsorb your dreams.