=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

Imagine being so pessimistic and cynical that not even Samuel Beckett can deal with your nihilistic outlook and refuses to hang out with you any more. It may be an apocryphal story but it describes in a nutshell the worldview of E.M. Cioran who, in book after book over the course of a life that lasted 84 years, never tires of making the same point: life is a meaningless suckfest.

Just a few of his titles are enough to give you a general idea of where he stands on life: A Short History of Decay, Drawn and Quartered, On the Heights of Despair, The Trouble with Being Born.

For Cioran, the trouble with being born started in Romania in 1911.

He was an early supporter of fascism. Of Hitler he once wrote: “there is no present-day politician that I see as more sympathetic and admirable.”

Oops! That was a misstep now, wasn’t it? Well, he isn’t the only smart guy to have developed an early crush on Hitler back then. We’ve lost sight of what once made Nazism so initially appealing to so many not always unthinkably ignorant people.

He left Romania and moved to Paris where he’d meet the Nazis again, finding them far less sympathetic and admirable this time around. For the rest of his life, he lived as an expatriate in France, modestly, almost reclusively, surviving on grants and writing translations.

His own books did not bring him much in the way of fame and fortune until quite late in his life—and not too much then either.

Among his surprisingly numerous friends he numbered Eugene Ionesco, Paul Celan, Isidore Isou, and Mircea Eliade. He even found a woman to share his life, proving again the old adage, “there’s an ass for every seat.”

As a philosopher, he was not a systematic thinker. He did not develop grand, overarching theories that explained everything about everything. The argument might be made that he wasn’t, properly speaking, a philosopher at all. And some philosophers did make that argument. Cioran, too, made that argument from time to time.

What’s so great about being a philosopher anyway? “In moments of great despair,” Cioran observed, “philosophy is no help at all, it holds absolutely no answers.”

Instead of grand systems of thought intended to explain everything, he wrote short, pithy aphorisms about the existential misery entailed in being an ordinary human being. Stuff like: “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?” and “The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them on the preposterous.” and “I am simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?”

Sometimes he composed what might be called mini-essays.

Despite his gloomy outlook on life, he had a good sense of humor both in and out of his books—of the gallows variety, naturally.

The E.M. stood for Emil Michel.

He suffered a period of acute insomnia that changed his life. It also nearly ended it, driving him to a consideration of suicide. He thought a lot about suicide, even after he started getting a decent night’s sleep. But he decided against it.

He concluded, “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself since you always kill yourself too late.” Besides which, “only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?”

He cured himself of insomnia by riding a bicycle.

Elsewhere, he acknowledges using the idea of suicide to go on living. Suicide was like a get-out-of jail-free card. He could use it whenever he wanted. What was the hurry? In the meantime, he wrote books. “A book,” he said, “is a suicide postponed.”

Religion? Forget it! “For two thousand years,” he wrote, “Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.”

He had a fantastic head of Romanian hair that he kept his entire life. One can’t even imagine how bitter he might have been if baldness were yet another of life’s cruel crosses he’d been forced to bear.

People, generally, like books that offer a reason to live, that reinforce the idea that life is good. They don’t appreciate being told how dumb and meaningless everything is and how everything they've accomplished is crap and they don’t heap a lot of riches and accolades on those who do.

Cioran wasn’t looking for riches or accolades, however.

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never confide to anyone.”

He did this as well as anyone ever did before Alzheimer’s disease put him out of the misery of living at last on June 20, 1995.