I discovered another writer.  Or did the work of Emil Cioran discovered me?  There is the old saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher will come.”  E. M. Cioran was born Romanian.  He left for Paris in the late 1930s.  I purchased his second book published in French, entitled, All Gall Is Divided.  It is a book of aphorisms.  I am sure that you catch the wry pun, the twist of language, on the words written by Julius Caesar, “All Gaul is divided into three parts,” describing his military campaign which extended Roman rule to the Atlantic ocean.

The Washington Post wrote of Cioran, “E. M. Cioran has been called the last worthy disciple of Nietzsche, and “a sort of final philosopher of the Western world” who “combines the passion of poetry and the audacity of cosmic clowning.”  Cioran was the son of an Orthodox priest.  He lived and wrote in Paris until his death in 1995.

These words were written by Eugene Thacker in the Foreward to the collection of aphorisms:

…nowadays even misanthropy is said to have its part to play, as the shifting climates and diminishing resources of an indelibly human-centric planet continue to lurch onward with all the blind determination of what was once called “progress.”

Here are some of the initial verses from Cioran which I like.

This on the gap between faith and reason.

Certainties have no style: a concern for well-chosen words is the attribute of those who cannot rest easy in a faith.  Lacking solid support, they cling to words — semblances of reality; while the others, strong in their convictions, despise appearances and wallow in the comfort of improvisation. 

And this on the dark desperation of modern life felt by so many of us in the West, a society fashioned by succeeding generations under the aegis of “Christianity”…

     Hell – as precise as a ticket for a traffic
violation;
     Purgatory – false as all allusions to
Heaven;
     Paradise – window dressing of fictions
and vapidity…
     Dante’s trilogy constitutes the highest
rehabilitation of the Devil ever underwritten by a
Christian.

Enough of Cioran on this Sunday morning.  Let us live well today.  Life is short and death is long.