The Trouble with Being Born

A great book full of wonderfully relatable quotes. It's one you can flip to any page and read something nice rather than needing to read from front to back, but you can do that if you want too.

First things first - Cioran writes absolutely beautiful prose. I don't think any philosophical writer since Montaigne has really written this well (apart from the novelists who treat philosophical themes like Dostoevsky and Sartre). I really cannot adequately convey the beauty of some of the existential musings of Cioran properly. He's a great stylist. A cautionary note - Cioran is extremely well-educated in Western Philosophy, Christianity and Buddhism. Because of that, this is not really a book for someone who doesn't have strong grounding in philosophy (or at the least Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Hegel) and some familiarity with religion. Additionally, the philosophy types should know that this book is not really philosophy in the Western Sense. It's written more like Eastern Philosophy. It's entirely aphorisms. That said, if you can bear with it, this is one of the best things I've ever read. The clarity of thought and sheer brilliance of the aphorisms are unmatched apart from Lao Tzu and McLuhan. Cioran is grimly pessimistic and has an extremely mordant sense of humor. He also explores the human condition and the recalcitrant nature of existence and art. If Nietzsche had a sense of humor and lived amidst French existentialism, he'd have written this book. Cioran is a bit more of an irrationalist (and a Buddhist .... and a Christian) than Nietzsche, though (and a bit less of an anti-egalitarian). Case in point: "Sometimes I wish I was a cannibal - less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him." For me, Cioran has always been like reading Final Exit, having sex in a graveyard, or reading Nietzsche. There's something oddly life-affirming (at least in his later books - after the turn away from Schopenhauer towards Nietzsche and Buddhist studies) in his gleefully pessimistic meditations on death, decay, nihilism, and Buddhism, unlike say Schopenhauer, who is consistenly dour about everything due to his extreme narcissism. To put it in other terms, Cioran has a sense of (self-consciously absurd) pessimistic humor that is roughly in line with the modern goth subculture. If you spent your formative years listening to the Sisters of Mercy, you'll know what I mean. By all means, not a book for everyone but highly recommended for recovering goths, literary types, artists, existentialists, and theology and philosophy types with a sense of humor, or students studying 20th century Pessimism.

This is a beautiful book that burns you turning your thoughts upside down about life and society. If read closely it will rescue you from the mundane. READ IT.

Cioran has a great style, indebted to Nietzsche, in which he raves cynically, a la Schopenhauer, about life. Definitely worth reading. Also recommended: Toilet: The Novel by Michael Szymczyk (A Tribute to the Literary Works of Franz Kafka)

E.M. Cioran has been called either "the last philosopher of Europe" or an Anti-Philosopher. He has, nonetheless, created one of the greatest titles for a book yet conceived! I love to see the looks on people's faces when they pull this tome from my shelf. What Nietzsche would have written had he never died of syphilis - or how Kierkegaard would have grown out of his pseudo-St.Augustine moods. "I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws." These are one-liners any true vaudevillian would have enjoyed. The world is either tragic or vaudeville - you decide. That Cioran succumbed (if that is the word) to the side-effects of alzheimer's is surely one of this incredible man's final ironies. To watch as his intellect was whittled away completely before he died is surely too ignoble a death for someone so resolute in his irresolutions!

I am from colombia so please excuse my poor english. I had the fortune to read this book but on a spanish translation. Cioran in his typical form of writing (loose ideas gathered in short chapters), shows us his thoughts on the problem of existance. He emphasizes on the fact that being born is the greatest wrong that has happened to man, since it is from that conciousness of matter, from which man has generated a fictious value and justification to his own existance. Like Heidegger would say, the motor of human existance are his preocupations in life. Cioran feels that when discovering this truth, life looses all posible meaning and one can only hope to go back to the freedom of nulity. "I would like to be free, totaly free... free like an aborted child." This harsh quote from Cioran can sum up his reflexions. One could easily tell Cioran to commit suicide if he thinks that existance is an arquetype of ignorance, but to this Cioran answers in a cruel but in fact philosophicaly convenient way: "It is not worth taking ones life away... at the end we allways do it to late...". The book also gahthers his thought in all sort of different life aspects. Thoughts about time, space, family, religion etc, make The trouble with being born one of Ciorans best books. "God is, even if he isn't". A really negative inspection of our apparently true concepts, and a open invitation to a new form of existencialism.