A Short History of Decay (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Précis de décomposition is (I think) Cioran’s best book, and certainly the one that put him on the map. This passage is a revision of a piece included in the earlier book Tears and Saints; [11] the characteristic phrase "If God were a cyclops, Spain would be His eye" is found in both works. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

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. This is a really good quality print just what I'm looking for in paperbacks, in fact the quality of this paperback is better than some of my hard covers. 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. Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. To the outside observer, the absolute of each life looks interchangeable, and every fate, however fixed in its essence, arbitrary.When we carry germs of disappointments and a kind of thirst to see them develop, the desire that the world should undermine our hopes at each step multiplies the voluptuous verifications of the disease. Except for the ancient skeptics and the French moralists, it would be hard to cite a single mind whose theories, secretly or explicitly, do not tend to mold man. The man who has not given himself up to the pleasures of anguish, who has not savored in his mind the dangers of his own extinction nor relished such cruel and sweet annihilations, will never be cured of the obsession with death: he will be tormented by it, for he will have resisted it; while the man who, habituated to a discipline of horror, and meditating upon his own carrion, has deliberately reduced himself to ashes—that man will look toward death’s past, and he himself will be merely a resurrected being who can no longer live. The major theme of the book is the concept of decay, which may occur in individuals as disease or mental illness, and which may occur in societies as decline into decadence.

Cioran confronts the place of today's world in the context of human history—focusing on such major issues of the twentieth century as human progress, fanaticism, and science—in this nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe.The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst.