Word: cioran
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First published in France in 1964, the "fragments" of The Fall into Time are described by their author as "rather like sermons." The chapter headings are suggestive: "The Tree of Life," "Is the Devil a Skeptic?" "On Sickness," "The Dangers of Wisdom." If Cioran, against his will, can be taken as a spokesman for our times, it is because he so excruciatingly expresses the dilemma of the man born too late to be a Christian and too early to be anything else...
Dispossessed of Christian hopes but disqualified by his Christian upbringing to hope in anything else, Cioran retains all the guilt a post-Christian could possibly manage. His God may have died; his devil is alive and well...
...Cioran operates, consequently, under the peculiar affliction of the modern man who has lost most of his sanctioned motives but only a few of his sanctioned prohibitions. To think at all, he believes, is to be condemned to "an autopsy of the intolerable...
...Cioran argues in the chapter on "The Tree of Life," really chose the wrong tree in preferring knowledge to life. "Once we know," he writes, "we are at odds with everything." For instead of serving man, reason "affords him arguments against himself." History Cioran reads as the disaster of man evolving "toward a complexity which is ruining him." "Progress," says Cioran, "is the modern equivalent of the Fall...
Obviously there is a Nietzschean streak in Cioran. A chapter called "Skeptic & Barbarian" dubs the skeptic -himself, of course-"that living dead man." With bitter sentimentality he half praises the barbarian, the man in touch with his instincts and out of touch with cursed self-awareness. "He who has never envied the vegetable," he writes, "has missed the human drama...