Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Imagining Cioran ix

On Being Lyrical 3

How Distant Everything Is! 6

On Not Wanting to Live 8

The Passion for the Absurd 10

The World and I 14

Weariness and Agony 16

Despair and the Grotesque 18

The Premonition of Madness 20

On Death 22

Enthusiasm as a Form ofMelancholy 29

Nothing Is Important 33

Ecstasy 35

The World in Which Nothing Is Solved 37

The Contradictory and the Inconsequential 39

On Sadness 41

Total Dissatisfaction 43

The Bath of Fire 45

Disintegration 46

On the Reality of the Body 48

I Do Not Know 49

On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness 50

Apocalypse 52

The Monopoly of Suffering 54

Absolute Lyricism 57

The Meaning of Grace 59

The Vanity of Compassion 61

Eternity and Morality 62

Moment and Eternity 64

History and Eternity 66

Not to Be a Man Anymore 68

Magic and Fatality 70

Transfiguration of Banality 101

Unimaginable Joy 72

The Ambiguity of Suffering 73

All Is Dust 74

Love 75

Light and Darkness 79

Renunciation 81

On the Transubstantiation of Love 84

The Blessings of Insomnia 83

Man, the Insomniac Animal 85

Truth, What a Word! 87

The Beauty of Flames 88

The Paucity of Wisdom 89

The Return to Chaos 90

Irony and Self-Irony 91

On Poverty 93

The Flight from the Cross 95

The Cult of Infinity 98

The Burden of Sadness 103

Degradation through Work 104

The Sense of Endings 106

The Satanic Principle of Suffering 108

An Indirect Animal 111

Impossible Truth 112

Subjectivity 113

Homo . . . 114

Love in Brief 115

Nothing Matters 116

The Sources of Evil 117

Beauty's Magic Tricks 119

Man's Inconsistency 120

Capitulation 122

Facing Silence 123

The Double and His Art 124

Nonsense 126

E. M. Cioran: A Short Chronology 127