A great barren man, thinker, moralist EMIL MICHEL CIORAN /1911- 1995/ was the last legendary writer. He was one of the three from the great Romanian diaspora, together with Eugene Ionesco, the father of modern theater, and Mircea Eliade, the philosopher and historian of religions. By avoiding the spotlight and ignoring honors, Cioran managed to preserve his enigma. He did not even bother to correct the inaccuracies that encyclopedias and reference books regularly made about his address.
He was born on April 8, 1911, in the village of Rasinari, near the medieval Transylvanian city of Sibiu / Hermanstadt / in northwestern Romania. There he experienced a wonderful, cloudless childhood: running freely in the hills and listening to shepherds tell their tales, springing from the depths of time.
In 1921, when he was ten years old, he was brutally torn from this bliss. His father, an Orthodox priest / of whom he was ashamed because of his profession /, sent him to study at the Sibiu high school. At that time, this old and beautiful city was populated by Romanians, Germans and Hungarians. Seven years later, Cioran went to study philosophy at the University of Bucharest. The crisis that would later shake his entire life dates back to this time: sleep left him forever. For a moment, seized by the idea of suicide, Emil Cioran preferred to follow Friedrich Nietzsche's advice - to turn his insomnia into an indispensable means of knowledge: "In one sleepless night we learn much more than in an entire year of sleep".
A brilliant student, Cioran wrote his first book at the age of twenty-two, in 1933 - "On the Peaks of Despair". He began to be spoken of as one of the great hopes of young Romanian literature. He was compared to the rising /as a critic/ Eugene Ionesco and the already famous cultural philosopher Mircea Eliade.
After a short stay in Berlin, he returned to Romania and became a high school philosophy teacher in Brasov /1936 - 1937/. It must have been a very turbulent school year, judging by the nickname given to him by his students: "The Fool"! Cioran himself claims that the high school principal wanted to treat everyone - he was so happy when he left! But "The Fool" must have left an indelible mark on his graduates, some of whom, after so many decades, went to visit him all the way in Paris. For him, his short teaching career turned out to be a valuable life experience: after it, he did not want to take up any other job or professional activity.
In 1937, he received a scholarship from the Student Institute in Bucharest, which allowed him to go to Paris and there devote himself to his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. The following years were indeed spent in persistent reading and... bicycle rides throughout France, as well as in intensive writing, but not on the dissertation - for which he never chose a topic and title. At that time, Cioran decided to translate the poetry of Henri Michaux /the poet he valued and loved the most/, but soon gave up on this "futile project", according to him, because he decided not to return to his homeland. He delved into reading and improving his French - until the end of his life he spoke it with an accent, but he learned to write so perfectly that in time he was recognized by the French themselves as one of the "greatest French stylists of all time".
In 1947, the Parisian publishing house "Gallimard" received the manuscript of his "Short Course in Decomposition". But Cioran had to revise it, after which the book was published in 1949. The reviews from critics were positive, but the readers remained indifferent. This strange situation would last for nearly three decades. It should be noted that, unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, then a leading figure in intellectual France and also in Europe, Cioran was a complete unknown. He was also a sworn enemy of communism. Romanian authorities imprisoned his brother and several friends from Bucharest, and his writings were banned throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Yet, some things allowed him to overcome the humiliations, failures, and confiscated books. These were, above all, the connections with his closest friends: Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade /the two brilliant representatives of the large Romanian diaspora in the West/, Henri Michaud, Gabriel Marcel. Then, of course, there were his readers, although not numerous, but fanatically devoted: "I am always read by such crazy types..."
Then, albeit gradually, Emil Cioran emerged from his dead end. In 1965, François Erval published a pocket edition of "A Short Course in Decomposition" and "Bitter Inferences" /or "Syllogisms of Bitterness"/, which caught the attention of a new generation of readers - mainly from student and teaching circles. Cioran has already been translated into Germany, the United States, Spain, England, and Italy. There are many positive reviews, and the circulation of his books is growing. He is now a real celebrity... But he remains true to himself. He continues to avoid the media, to turn down literary honors and awards. True to his elegant and detached style, he continues to explore the themes that captivated him during his young years in Romania: Time and Death, "the ordeal of being born and continuing to live", "the ruins of the West", religion, art, music, Shakespeare, El Greco, Bach, Judaism, literature, language...
Cioran sees his belated fame as a real misunderstanding. He writes about Jorge Luis Borges, but in fact he means himself: "To be an established writer - this is the most terrible of all possible punishments!"
His last book during his lifetime, "Confessions and Anathemas", was published in 1987. And if the rumors of a suicide attempt turned out to be false, it was true that by the end of the 80s Cioran had definitively abandoned writing. "Writing is desecration!", he said in one of his rare interviews at the time for the Parisian press. He read and walked.
Ironically, one of the brilliant minds of the 20th century fell ill with the terrible and currently incurable Alzheimer's disease. 58 years after he had left his homeland to drop anchor in the Latin Quarter of Paris /which he adored/, this great orphan, moralist and thinker - one of the last great humanists of our time - died in a Parisian hospital on June 17, 1995.
ÉMILE MICHEL CHORAN
THREE EARLY ESSAYS
THERE ARE SIDES IN THIS WORLD . . .
There are countries in this world that enjoy a special favor - everything works out for them, even their downfalls, even their catastrophes! But there are others that can achieve nothing - their triumphs are actually failures. If they try to assert themselves and make a leap, some inevitable external force intervenes, breaks them, returns them to their original position. These countries are deprived of all opportunities, even the chance to appear comical!
Yes, being French is just an indisputable fact: one does not suffer from it, one cannot rejoice in it - one simply has a confidence that justifies the old question: “How is it possible for one to be Persian?” /Montesquieu/.
The paradox of being a Persian /in our case a Romanian/ is a torture that one should know how to use well, a disadvantage that one can benefit from. I admit that years ago I felt ashamed of the fact that I belonged to a certain nationality, to a community of unsuccessful people, about whose origin no one had any illusions. I believed, and perhaps I was wrong, that we, Romanians, came from the dregs of barbarian peoples, from the scum of the great Conquerors, from those who, unsuccessful in moving forward, towards the West, remained between the Carpathians and the Danube, to push ourselves there, a crowd of traitors-deserters from the end of the Empire, scum sprinkled with the powder of “Latin”. Yes, as the past, so is the present! So is the future. What a test for my impudent and unforgiving youth!
“How is it possible for a person to be Romanian?” was a question for me that I could not answer without feeling humiliated. At that time I hated my own people, my country, these peasants, who had come as if from outside Time, numb and dull... And I blushed at the thought that I came from them, I denied them, I renounced their “under eternity”, from their certainty of petrified larvae, from their geological slumber. I searched in vain for some trembling in their features, some posture of rebellion. Alas! In them I saw the sunset of the monkey. Did they not originate from minerals?
Not knowing how to move them, to revive them, I began to dream of... their destruction. Stones do not kill them. The representation they offered me justified and disturbed, fed and disgusted my hysteria. I constantly cursed the cruel chance of being born among them. And they were obsessed with a great idea: Fate. I, on the other hand, chased it away with all my might, because I saw in it only some tricks of deceivers, excuses for all escapes, an expression of common sense and its sinister philosophy.
Yes, what was I to do? My native country, whose existence clearly had no meaning, reminded me of something like a summary of Non-existence or a materialization of the Impossible, like a Spain, but without its golden age, without its conquistadors and conquests, without its follies and without the Don Quixote of our disappointments. To belong to this country /Romania/, to be part of it, what a lesson in humiliation and sarcasm, what a misfortune, what a disease!
Yes, I was quite self-confident, quite audacious, to grasp the great idea that reigned there, to understand its origin, its experience or depth, the system of troubles that it implied. I understood all this much later. And when I was finally able to soberly feel it, I reconciled myself with my homeland and it suddenly ceased to obsess me.
In order to save themselves from action, enslaved peoples, like mine, abandon themselves to the whims of Fate - this is a salvation, but at the same time a way of interpreting events: a philosophy of history for every day, a deterministic view on a deeply sensitive, sensitive basis, a metaphysics of circumstances...
I think that if the Germans are also sensitive to Fate, they certainly do not see in it some external force, but forces emanating from their own will. And these forces finally tear themselves away from their power, turn against themselves, ready to crush and destroy them. That is, in other words, all this depends to some extent on themselves.
The despair that I once felt when the word "fate" was mentioned to me /regardless of the occasion!/ now seems ridiculous and childish to me. But then I did not know that I would come to the point of reacting in the same way, when, hidden from this sound, I would attribute to it my successes and failures, as well as all the details of happiness and unhappiness, that I would cling even more firmly to Inevitability with the ecstasy of a shipwrecked person, and that I would address my first thoughts to it before facing the horror of the new day. "You will disappear into Space, oh my Russia," wrote the poet Fyodor Tyutchev in the 19th century. I could use the same words and with even greater justification for my country, created to disappear in a different way, perfectly organized to be destroyed, possessing all the qualities of an anonymous victim. The habit of continuous suffering, the completeness of decline - just what an internship in the school of crushed tribes!
The first Romanian historian begins his famous chronicle with the words:
“It is not man who commands Time, but Time who commands man...” A stupid formulation, a program and a tombstone inscription for a distant corner of Europe. To determine the tone of the popular sensitivity of the countries of the Southeast, I think we should recall the laments of the People in the ancient Greek tragedies. According to a strange tradition, an entire ethnic space is marked by it. A routine of cries, of misery, of the weeping of small nations before the atrocities of great nations!
But let's not complain so much! It is comforting, after all, that we can contrast the chaos in the world with the compactness of our sufferings and failures. Don't we have the consolation that when it comes to pain, we are as competent as anatomical mannequins and erudites?
THE SENSE OF THE TRAGIC IN ROMANIA
One of the reasons for my deep sadness is that I cannot evaluate our reality in any other way than negatively. Enthusiasm and levity are justified only in the social and political aspect; while in the spiritual plan, a total emptiness leads to deep pessimism and serious distrust. Therefore, it is clear that now I could not speak of a single feeling - the tragic one in all of Romania /which today completely dominates us and creates a certain atmosphere/, but only of some individuals. And this is very sad and can compromise any noble effort.
Without a doubt, the fertility and productivity of a phenomenon depend on the deep, irrational spheres from which it originates, and not on the energy and dynamism of individual individuals, formed /at their own will/ from other cultures.
The sharp distinction between educated people and peasants is not the result of the superiority of the former /which we can only regret!/; on the contrary, the ignorance of our peasantry is due rather to the disinterest and complacency of the intellectuals in today's Romania.
In Spain, this moment of division, of differentiation of social strata, has caused a not very favorable situation, despite the statements of the philosopher Ortega-y-Gasset, who was accustomed to speaking of the continuous decline of his country, from its foundation to the present day. For anyone with at least a little sense of history, it is quite clear that it is we, Romanians, who have lived in a continuous non-existence.
My deep conviction /to which I hold dear/ is that the differences in historical evolution can be explained by some specific constituent and structural elements. Under the same conditions and social configurations, Spain gave the world Saint John /Juan/ de la Cruz /of the Cross/ and Saint Teresa, while our Romania has not yet “produced” not a single saint.
The Romanian's unwillingness to understand life as a tragedy is the result of one important flaw of his - an innate weakness and a certain mental attitude.
The tragedy of our situation is that we cannot speak of a spiritual trend or a moral position without counting ourselves, without summing up the number of individual personalities and values. This explains the fact that the phenomenon is experienced through individual individuals who are isolated, and that it has a “discontinuous character”, that it is without “generally significant participation”. Here I will still have to mention a few important names: Lucian Blaga, Mircea Eliade, Petre Manoliu, Joan Holban. That is why I think that we could not define the tragic as something essential. Here we are only talking about individual expressions, private forms of realization.
And if in the pre-war generation the tragic was the result of the anxiety and the complex of antinomies related to the historical existence of man, to social conflicts and antagonisms, to inadaptability, in our generation this feeling is due to much more serious conflicts; its metaphysical coloring is more distinct and brighter, and its structure can be connected with the universality of our life.
But the tragedy of the old generation was to some extent external, because it was based primarily on the dualism of the individual and society, with the undisputed preponderance of the second of these concepts, because it was assigned the truer reality and density, while in our understanding the essence of the tragedy /a result of the paradoxical tension and power of the dualism of Man and Being!/ is explained by the drama of the metaphysical existence of the personality. I will emphasize that this tragedy is experienced only by those who are able to feel the presence of the irrevocable in the dialectic of life, and who, although aware of this, do not want to give up. Yes, life can be experienced as a drama and tragedy only by those for whom its negative sides are not a problem; those who believe that it is not death itself that is fatal, but the thought and the path leading to it...
ROMANIA, SEEN BY A FOREIGNER
While I was in Munich and Berlin, I met many foreigners who intrigued me not so much with their way of thinking as with their opinions and impressions of my country. Unfortunately, everything I heard from these people then was depressing, sad. I would not have written this article if I did not believe that all is not lost, that the vitality of my country will one day return, that our past and present have served us too many bitters, so that one day there will not be an explosion ready to shake and transform us. When I talk about Romania, I always appear pessimistic, but I believe that life is still quite irrational and therefore will be able to get such a confused history and sad fate as ours off the rails.
But if I come to the conviction that the transformation of Romania is an illusion, the Romanian question will stop tormenting me.
I think that the main moral and political mission of our youth today should force them to strengthen their will in order to change the country, to fundamentally rebuild the Romanian way of life; to start living more dramatically, even with a certain amount of ferocity!
If we believe the ancient wisdom that history does not move in leaps and bounds, we should really end our lives. But our prophetic instinct, our passion, our will will help us learn from everyone, not just from the ancient sages. If we are not capable of a leap, we will surely lose the meaning of our life...
In fact, we Romanians have never had the will to make a real, major change. Dissatisfaction with our fate has never gone beyond the vague and amorphous form of skepticism. And it, skepticism, is the first step on the scale of the transformation process, the first moment capable of awakening our consciousness. It is precisely this that allows us to look at ourselves from the side, to assess our own strengths, our historical position. I think this is the reason for our Romanian superficiality - we simply did not manage to overcome this first step, because we acted as passive observers of our inertia, even only ironizing ourselves in this hopeless national agony of ours. Yes, the Romanian is capable of mocking himself, of parodying himself...
We do not live our fate dramatically - this has always surprised and outraged me: that we behave like indifferent spectators who watch from the sidelines.
If we had united in suffering, if we had despaired, because of our insignificance, perhaps thanks to one of those moral cataclysms that happen only at high peaks, today we would surely have crossed the threshold of History. Romanians have not yet crossed the first step of self-denial and self-exaltation. Our inner flame must become a fire; to rush upward and forward, and our past losses and defeats be forgotten.
We will succeed only if we accept this reality with the necessary solemnity: Romania is a country without “windows”, or more clearly - a country in which no one has yet experienced the future as something present and real, as the present; a country in which no one has been obsessed with the thrill of a great, truly national mission. Therefore, let us promise ourselves that we will change, we will burn in the fire of a blind fanaticism, we will be inspired by another image, by another thought, the thought of a new, different Romania. But if we continue to follow the current line of our history, we will slowly and surely reach our fatal end...
We need a total change, a profound restructuring of all life, of everything around us. We must give up that "clairvoyance" of ours, which reveals only insurmountable obstacles, so that even blind people/!/ can conquer the Light from which this same "clairvoyance" has separated us.
I am convinced that the future is preparing a new reality for our country. And our past? ... Absence of any freedom, of pride and dignity, of a true mission. An uneventful past that we must bury! We are only now beginning to truly live. Therefore, let us not be surprised why foreigners know almost nothing about us and our "life".
Yet, their ignorance in this regard is so great that we have the legal right to be indignant. The contempt of most foreigners for us is so great that this disgusted us once and for all. I know many who don't even know about the existence of our country or if they have heard of it, they don't know where it is!
If I were to make a list of the questions I've been asked about Romania, I believe that none of us would leave the country out of indignation or shame. I've seen Romanians laugh at such stupid, ridiculous questions. But they are also very sad...
Whatever our sins, we Romanians are still not at such a low level as is believed abroad.
Selected and translated from Romanian: OGNIAN STAMBOLIEV