Every night, during the "May Days" of the Sorbonne revolt, a greying, middle-aged man descended from his Left Bank attic flat and ambled over to the student-occupied Théátre de L'Odéon. There he listened with amused interest as youthful nihilists denounced the entire span of French history as irrelevant. Their harsh judgment did not surprise him. In five slim volumes of pel lucid, painfully distilled essays, Rumanian-born Philosopher E. M. Cioran, 57, has argued the terrible futility of human history. More originally than any other living thinker, he has defined the case for total pessimism. "Human history is an immense cul-de-sac," he says. "For me, life is a passionate emptiness, an intriguing nothingness."
Cioran's first book published in the U.S., The Temptation to Exist (Quadrangle; $5), presents his dark vision in a series of highly personal, paradoxical meditations that almost defy criticism and can only be categorically accepted or rejected. An unsystematic thinker who refers to his essays as "fragments," Cioran (pronounced Cho-ran) presents his arguments in ironic, aphoristic prose (see box). It is rather as if Dostoevsky had written Notes from Underground in the style of Pascal's Pensees. Although his gloom has affinities, with existentialism, Cioran is hard to pigeon hole; his eclectic thought contains echoes of all philosophic history, from the pre-Socratics to the mystics of the Eastern church.
Partly because of his obsession with privacy—he refuses to reveal his first name, rarely gives interviews, shuns Parisian literary circles—Cioran is hardly better known in Europe than in the U.S. Yet there are impressive testimonials to his significance. Critic Susan Sontag, in her introduction to The Temptation to Exist, calls him "the most distinguished figure writing today in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein." And Nobel prizewinning poet, Saint-John Perse, hails Cioran as "one of the greatest French writers to honor our language since the death of Paul Valery. His lofty thought is one of the most rigorous, independent and interesting in Europe today."
In part, Cioran's independence derives from the fact that he is, literally, an exile without a country. Educated in Rumania by his father, a Greek Orthodox priest, he went to Paris at the age of 26 and studied fitfully at the Sorbonne for 13 years, refusing to acquire an advanced degree. Plagued by chronic insomnia, he developed his profound sense of despair during one long nuit blanche (sleepless night) after another. Unmarried, he earns most of his modest income from part-time work as a translator and manuscript reader. "I don't make a living," he told TIME Correspondent Paul Ress last week. "I eke one out. But I don't wish to be well off." Cioran has not returned to Rumania in more than 30 years, and is a citizen of no country at all.