Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cioran, life is at once absurd and fascinating. "Everything that a man does turns against him," he explains. "You will be punished for everything. That is the tragedy of human destiny." Mocked by life, mankind becomes "a race of convulsionaries at the center of a cosmic farce." Since philosophical systems inevitably fail, Cioran is led to denounce reason as "the rust of our vitality" and the study of history as "the terror of chronology," both of which lead men to separate consciousness from reality. To Cioran, all truth is ultimately hoax, all certainties no more than "functioning lies...
Confronting futility, Cioran neither yields to the absurd nor makes a sudden leap to faith. Instead, he adopts a perilous, intentionally irrational balance designed to sever the roots of reason. Since all life is futility, he contends, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational act of all. For once man sees through his fictions, there can .be no rational basis for living, a judgment that recalls Camus' point: the only philosophical question is suicide. "I subsist and act insofar as I am a raving maniac," Cioran writes. "It is by undermining the idea of reason...
...think he has made himself look absurd," said the observer quoted earlier...
...stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Then he announced at a party rally that Britain, which has been having more than its share of economic difficulties, was now "on the way to an economic miracle." Many friends and foes alike thought that the statement was an absurd exaggeration and would come back to haunt...
Everyone keeps track of the statistics, grim or absurd. Since the Military Armistice Commission began meeting, North Korea has charged the U.N. command with no fewer than 56,889 truce violations, most of them such minor procedural matters as the presence of improper arm bands on U.N. guards. The U.N. has admitted 93 violations and charged North Korea with 6,313. Pyongyang has admitted only two, the last one in 1953. It is so adamant about not taking blame for the increased tensions along the DMZ that it refuses to accept the bodies of slain North Korean soldiers, insisting that...