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A Short History of Decay

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It's a cliche to say this, of course, but nothing else will do. Cioran is an author that you either like, or you don't. If you do like him, and he doesn't make it easy, you find that in no time he becomes your favorite author...

This is one of his earliest books, and one of his best. If you are really interested in post-modern philosophy, art theories, social theories, etc., but find most of what you read precious, posed, downright incomprehensible, or all three, read Cioran. Reading his work, whether you like him or not, agree with him or not, has about the same effect on your thinking as listening to Bach does on your music appreciation. To the extent that you "get" the master, you improve your ability to sort out the useful and original from the bizarre garbage which poses as useful and original. A must read for anyone who wants to think rather than philosophize.

Cioran became a famous young writer in Romania, but left Romania for France in 1937 and made Paris his home. This was the first book he published in French, under the title PRECIS DE DECOMPOSITION. It won the Prix de Rivarol for the best French book by a non-French author, and for decades it was the book that overshadowed everything else he published. If a reader wants to know Cioran, this book cannot be ignored. It introduces almost all of the themes he would make his own--suicide, insomnia, solitude, the importance of sickness, repugnance for professional philosophy--and it is the longest book he ever published in French. Richard Howard, the notable translator of many great French authors, has devoted his talents to translating all of Cioran's French books, and has done his typically splendid job. The translation is complete, utterly reliable, and catches all the sneer and boil of Cioran's own style.

Despite its title, this not a history. It is a series of very short essays, a few paragraphs each, on associated topics, most of which deal with his deep skepticism about God and man. Cioran spent years writing and rewriting the book and in later years complained that it was overwritten. I think the elder Cioran was correct in his assessment of the younger Cioran. It remains a book worth careful reading because the young Cioran pushed himself so hard, both in his thinking and in his attention to style.

A constant bedside book for me. It dissects our decadence with surgical precision. Its prose is more relevant and brilliant than many surrealist texts to which it invites comparison. The radical questions Cioran sets before the reader makes the book quite disturbing as it often hits the reader who is brutally honest with himself very close to dead-on bullseye. It's one of the most illuminating books of the eschaton as revealed in the immediacy of our lives, as we stand precariously balanced looking direct into the abyss and its depths of nothingness. The reader must harden his heart to withstand the abyss looking back at him straight through the eyes, into the deepest recesses of his own non-being. But then, the reader is reminded by the book's lucidity and made steady through its intransigence as it perforates the existential night with light as dense and permanent as the stars seen from the vantage point of a world steeped in pitch black. Our world.

this book changed my teenager life in quite a drastic way, and i wouldnt call it a positive way. if you can distance yourself from the fundamental ideas in Cioran's book (for example, life's a miserable meaningless empty useless joke of a sad/sadistic god), and admire the style of his prose/poetry, as the others put it, then you're safe. more than safe, you're discovering a different level of 'philosophy' that leaves a bittersweet taste in your mouth.
but if you choose to listen to Cioran and "open your eyes" (as another reviewer put it), you should be very careful, it's hard to live with the above uttered idea. and i tell u that from personal experience ;)

it's an amazing book, but poisonous.
be careful ;)

This book is so beautiful, that's why it could be dangerous. I mean, Sartre could have written about the same, but without the feeling, not "like a burst of blood" like Fante wrote about the true sense of writing. Sartre is boring. Cioran is beautiful, is dangeraous, he can utterly destroy your will to live.

So be cautios... this book is one of the best thing I've ever read (besides T. S. Eliot or Shakespaeare).

He makes fun of all "modern" ideas, all idealism... he teach us the blessing of not to believe in anything.

A great book.

PD: If you read it in frech you can find the beauty of the sentences, the rithym, everything... if you read it aloud it sounds beautiful.

An epidemic of denial seems to be sweeping through society today. I suppose the cause is a profound fear, even terror, of losing the good opinion that we have of ourselves. And one of the more obvious results of this fear is a positive hatred and rejection of any sort of criticism whatsoever. The illusion that we and our world are fine and dandy and will continue to be fine and dandy must be maintained at all costs.

For those given to viewing the world through rose-colored spectacles Cioran provides a powerful antidote. His works serve to rip away those spectacles and smash them to bits. Rather than offering us a comforting vision of things as we like to think they are, or as we wish they were, he lashes us with a vision of things as they actually are and always have been in this "slaughterhouse" of a universe in which "each being feeds on the agonies of others."

Cioran, in short, mercilessly strips away our most cherished illusions and confronts us with the stark truth of our predicament, a truth that is far from pleasant. The tender-minded are hereby warned: Cioran is a Gnostic and his thought is not for everyone. Depressives certainly and those with suicidal tendencies should give him a wide berth.

As for the tough-minded, they should note that Cioran, besides being a thinker of dark and lacerating thoughts, is also a brilliant stylist with a way of expressing his disgust that can at times be hilariously funny; for example: "Sometimes I wish I was a cannibal - less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him."

Just as the outrageous opinions of Cioran's great favorite, Diogenes (see Herakleitos and Diogenes), may be said to have "set off a stink bomb in Plato's Academy," Cioran sets off a stink bomb in our own world of comforting lies and illusions since, one way or another, he seems determined to have all of us either shuddering in horror or screaming with laughter."

This is my first Cioran -- a friend recommended him 16 years ago (!) and I finally got around to it -- well worth the wait. Like any great literature, it "says things we've been thinking" but just haven't been able to enunciate. I *am* very glad that I have thoroughly perused Plato, the Presocratics, Epicureans/Stoics/Cynics before reading this book -- that really added the depth I needed to fully appreciate "A Short History of Decay." For me, this is a book for a "mature" person, it would have gone over my head as a teen/college student (but maybe not for all).

For some, this is their favorite collection of Cioran's writings; it certainly is the most intense of his earlier writings (see my review of his later writings like "Anathemas and Admirations"). These short essays/aphorisms by a master of metaphor (a metaphorician?) contain poetic pyrotechnics that leave permanent afterimages on the psyche.

It may be necessary to do the reading around the nihilistic skepticisms (non-being, futility, annihilation, melancholy, insomnia) and access this amazing imagination that is a metaphor generator second to none. These aphorisms are some of the most intense in the history of the aphorism; a tonic and disturbing lucidity emerges in the reading.

This writing is not quite literary criticism, not quite philosophy (anti-philosophy Cioran would have it). Cioran is a big fan of Taoism and Diogenes the Cynic (the essays "Disintoxication" and "The Celestial Dog"); there is also some dabbling with the religious subject of The Saints and their "perversities" (not sure what that infatuation is about!).

Anyway, here are some quotes to prime the pump:

"Life is possible only by the deficencies of our imagination and our memory"

"Taoism surpasses all the mind has conceived by way of attachment"

"Profundity is independent of knowledge"

"The authenticity of an existence consists in its own ruin"

"Internal wealth results from conflicts sustained within oneself"

"It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other"

All in all, a good place to start with EM Cioran if you're thinking of giving him a shot. His command of language will certainly amaze.

Extracts: A Field Guide for Iconoclasts

An articulate and, at times, poetic outpouring of anger at what the author finds to be the absurdity and hopelessness of the human condition. Cioran releases his unbridled scorn upon religion and "higher" causes in general, as being the sources of most of the mischief and misery throughout history. There is no doubt a strong philosophical underpinning to this work, but it has more the character of a strongly felt outpouring of acute personal dissatisfaction with the conditions of life. Besides his fundamental dissatisfaction, he expresses his repulsion and disgust for dogmas which seek to "explain" the inequities of existence and bristles at the invariable attempts of their adherents to force these "truths" on to the world at large.

Cioran has probably gone beyond the bounds of what is usually accepted as permissible criticism and rejection of human ideals of purpose and meaning.

It seems to me that his work can be appreciated more in the sense of an individual setting forth with great courage and honesty his personal encounter with the inflexibility of the cosmos.

I have to admit that it took me quite a while to get through this one, even though I'm a huge fan of Cioran. This is one of his first books and as he says in Admirations.. he was inspired at this point by Shakespeare and Shelley. The language is dense poetry-prose, really beautiful but it requires your complete concentration like a book of poetry does. I prefer his later, more relaxed and slyly cynical essays and aphormisms but any admirer of philosophy and poetry-prose should take it on.