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