On the Heights of Despair

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Everyone must destroy their life. According to the way they do it, they're either triumphants or failures. If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity. At the time of writing On the Heights of Despair, Cioran was sympathetic to National Socialism. He expressed support for the Night of the Long Knives, [13] which occurred in the same year that the book was published. Despite this, On the Heights of Despair expresses attitudes which are contrary to National Socialist philosophy. The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue. It was one of several works that Cioran wrote in his native Romanian language. In 1937, Cioran left Romania and relocated to Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. This break marked two definite periods in Cioran's life and work: an early Romanian period, and a later, mature French period. Cioran later published several works in French, which brought him to wider attention. There are people who are destined to taste only the poison in things, for whom any surprise is a painful surprise and any experience a new occasion for torture. if someone were to say to me that such suffering has subjective reasons, related to the individual's particular makeup, i would then ask; is there an objective criterion for evaluating suffering? who can say with precision that my neighbor suffers more than i do or that jesus suffered more than all of us? there is no objective standard because suffering cannot be measured according to the external stimulation or local irritation of the organism, but only as it is felt and reflected in consciousness. alas, from this point of view, any hierarchy is out of the question. each person remains with his own suffering, which he believes absolute and unlimited. how much would we diminish our own personal suffering if we were to compare it to all the world's sufferings until now, to the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the mostcruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death? nobody is comforted in his sufferings by the thought that we are all mortals, nor does anybody who suffers really find comfort in the past or present suffering of others. because in this organically insufficient and fragmentary world, the individual is set to live fully, wishing to make of his own existence an absolute.”

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Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration. Danish neofolk musician Kim Larsen re-enacted Cioran's choking arms photograph on the cover of the 2021 album Your Love Can't Hold This Wreath of Sorrow.

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety. Although pessimism perspires throughout the book, still you can find traces of optimism, which was said to define his life, rather the pessimism in his works, as in the essay “Enthusiasm as a form of love”: “the joy of achieving and the ecstasy of efficiency are the essential characteristics of the man for whom life is a leap toward heights where destructive forces lose their negative intensity.” In Romania in the 1960s and 1970s, Cioran was a mysterious, almost mythological, presence. One would hear that such a person existed, but it was impossible to read him. His French books were neither sold nor published in translation, and his Romanian books had disappeared without a trace. Although he had departed his homeland some ten years before the war and the communist takeover, he was as invisible as the most unspeakable, or un-nameable, of non-persons. The present book is the first translation of Cioran from his native language into English, mastered by Ilinca Zarifopol Johnston, a graduate of the University of Bucharest in 1975, majoring in English and German. Her senior thesis "Speech Acts of Permission in English" was awarded the first prize of the Romanian National Student Scientific Colloquium for 1976. After official interventions on her behalf by nearly a dozen U.S. Congressmen and Senators, she was allowed to emigrate to the United States in 1977. True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

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His major works includes book such as The Book of Delusions (1936), Tears and Saints (1937), The Temptation to Exist (1956), History and Utopia (1960), The fall into Time (1964), The Trouble With Being Born (1973), Anathemas and Admirations (1986-1987), The Passionate Handbook (1991). On the Heights of Despair shows Cioran's first grappling with themes he would return to in his mature works: despair and decay, absurdity and alienation, futility and the irrationality of existence. It also presents Cioran as a connoisseur of apocalypse, a theoretician of despair, for whom writing and philosophy both share the "lyrical virtues" that alone lead to a metaphysical revelation. Regier, Willis (2005). "Cioran's Nietzsche". French Forum. 30 (3): 78. doi: 10.1353/frf.2006.0012. JSTOR 40552402. S2CID 170571716– via JSTOR. After returning from Berlin in 1936, Cioran taught philosophy at the Andrei Șaguna High School in Brașov for a year. In 1937, he left for Paris with a scholarship from the French Institute branch in Bucharest, which was then prolonged until 1944. After a short stay in his home country (November 1940 – February 1941), Cioran never returned again. [21] This last period in Romania was the one in which he exhibited a closer relationship with the Iron Guard, which by then had taken power ( see National Legionary State). On 28 November, for the state-owned Romanian Radio, Cioran recorded a speech centered on the portrait of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, former leader of the movement, praising him and the Guard for, among other things, "having given Romanians a purpose". [22]

Pe culmile disperării (translated " On the Heights of Despair"), Editura "Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă", Bucharest 1934 Although Cioran focuses on negative emotions and gives contrarian opinions, he also considers certain positive emotions and expresses more conventional views rejecting certain negative states, although these rejections have an anti-Christian content. Innocence and grace are described as positive states, although Cioran's grace is more secular and aesthetic, as opposed to the religious sense of the English word. [7] Although he praises the heightened emotions which suffering can induce, Cioran explicitly rejects poverty and suffering themselves as purely destructive states which have none of the nobility or catharsis which Christianity confers upon them.No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; — for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret. Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

Cioran, Emil (1992) [Originally published in 1934]. On the Heights of Despair. Translated by Zarifopol-Johnston, Ilinca. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226106717. In 1937, Cioran went to Paris with a grant from the French Institute in Bucharest and after 1940, he moved there and began writing only in French. In 1949 Gallimard, the publishing company that came to publish the majority of his books published his first French book, “A Short History of Decay”. In 1950, the book won the Rivarol Prize.Cioran praises lyricism and heightened emotional states for their ability to force humans to reconsider the truly important categories of the human condition, such as love and death. Humans may ignore such categories for several years by focusing on the routines of everyday life, or by participating in rational or intellectual endeavors. Cioran scorns the latter categories: Under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Cioran's works were banned. [24] In 1974, Francoist Spain banned The Evil Demiurge for being "atheist, blasphemous, and anti-Christian", which Cioran considered "one of the greatest jokes in his absurd existence." [1] Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?