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Books: The King of Pessimists

4 minute read
TIME

THE FALL INTO TIME by E.M. Cioran. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. 183 pages. Quadrangle Books. $5.95.

Is it better to be a savage than an intellectual? Is it better to be an animal than a savage? Is it better to be a vegetable than an animal? Yes. Yes. And one more despairing yes.

By such determined scramblings down the tree of life, E.M. Cioran, 59, has made himself into a kind of one-man cult of the culdesac: the king of the pessimists in a bumper year for pessimists. Cioran’s recent book of essays—”fragments” he likes to call them—threatens with success a man whose first principle is to hold success in contempt. See the chapter on “Fame: Hopes and Horrors.”

But then, self-contradiction is Cioran’s game. He is a doomsayer who speaks in the voice of a French dandy wit. He is a lover of order who defines maddened civil war within the ego as the natural state of man. His first book was published in English as The Temptation to Exist (TIME, Aug. 9, 1968).

The title seemed a paradox. The self-contradictions carry over into Cioran’s life. He is not the heavy, black presence a reader might expect, but a slim, rather unformidable fellow with light blue eyes who smiles a lot. A man whom Susan Sontag has sponsored as a guru of Now happens to be the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, raised in a small Rumanian village in the Carpathian Mountains. True, he went to Paris as a graduate student of philosophy in 1937. But he is in Paris, not of it. He scrapes by as a translator and manuscript reader. He never met Camus. He does not know Jean-Paul.

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.”

Man, 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.”

What is the remedy for that walking case of psychic diseases, overcivilized man—meaning Cioran, meaning ourselves? One Cioran suggestion is “screaming-rooms” where we can, through howls, relieve “ourselves of the horror of others and of the horror of ourselves.”

Clearly Cioran has the desperate sense of excess to qualify him as a 1970s man. Professional doubters, too, are a dime a dozen these days. But the special value of Cioran is that, with all his heart, he doubts even doubt itself. He is the man with no answers who tests everybody else’s answers with a skepticism at the pitch of fanaticism. No age should be without such a man; no age needs more than one.

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