#e.m. cioran

[silenceintostone]

[weil-weil-lautre]

My disorders, my fatigues, my forced interest in physiology have led me to scorn all speculation as such. And if, during so many years, I have made no progress in any direction, at least I shall have learned what it is to have a body.

E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, 68-9

[thepeelingrenoir]

when Jesus comes I don't care

what the fuck he's gonna do

what the fucker's gonna do

"Spread the Word", Atticus Abasement

[anonymitie]

[incorrectlooneytunesquotes]

Ze Art of Love: knoweeng how to combine the temperament of a vampire weeth ze discretion of an anemone.

Pepe le Pew 

[adz]

"So long as we feel well, we do not exist. More exactly: we do not know that we exist. The sick man longs for the nothingness of health, the ignorance of being: he is exasperated to know at every moment that he faces the entire universe, with no means of belonging to it, of losing himself within it. His ideal would be to forget everything and, relieved of his past, to wake up one fine day naked before the future."

E.M. Cioran, On Sickness

[therealrichardpapen]

Can I have some classic lit recs…make me feel like Henry please <3

Oh, this would be my pleasure, my dear friend!

Caligula by Albert Camus (It's a play about Caligula)

Oresteia by Aeschylus

Cicero

Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare. Coriolanus speaks about men's hubris and how pridefullness brings your downfall, while Titus Andronicus, well, I'll let you discover it by yourself:))

Marcus Aurelius, amazing works regarding stoicism

Seneca, letters to Lucilius, another great stoic

Petrarca's letters to classical authors

Ovid, the roman writer exiled by Augustus to the Black Sea, at Tomis, part of the Kingdom of Thrace (now Constanța, Romania), where he kept writing.

Bacchae by Euripides

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz (a nobel awarded historical fiction about the life in Nero's Rome, written by a Polish writer)

Sappho, but I suggest finding a good translation with footnotes as her works have been barely maintained, and some of her poems are literally one word long.

Beyond good and evil by Nietzsche

Crime and Punishment by Dostoievsky (I won't add more as I recently conducted a full ass campaign here on how and why this book is worth it)

E.M. Cioran, A short history of decay, The demiurge, The troubles with being born. He is a bit of a nihilist. Romanian philosopher that wrote mostly in French

Machiavelli, The prince. This should be a good introduction into Machiavellism

The sacred and profane by M. Eliade is also worth a try

I believe there's no point in mentioning the Iliad and the Odyssey since everybody knows them by now. Hope you'll have fun!

Updated ~ with memes

Upon finishing my first year of uni and starting the second, there are more titles that could be added to the list:

The symposium by Plato (the og talk about the Androgynous, love. Beloved Alcibiades)

The Frogs by Aristophanes (comedy mostly)

Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (amazing, full of symbols short novella on the bucolic world of ancient Greece)

Dante. If you genuinely want trauma and pain and to be lost in documents trying to understand Dante's times/politics of Florence, do try it. Its full of religious substrata due to the century Dante lived in. If you want a counter, ridiculing the medieval mindset of "god is everything", I recommend The Decameron since Boccaccio takes it all and creates funny, unhinged and decadent stories.

Voltaire's Candide or The Optimist is more of a philosophical work, Voltaire being clearly influenced by the illuminist current. (Not specifically something henry would read, but it would definitely make you feel closer to the TSH aesthetic)

Russian lit. Again, not Henry vibe exactly, but deep enough and very insane vibes. Crime and Punishment if you want yearning, self guilt and inner struggles.

Gogol's Overcoat and The Nose if you want some Russian surrealism.

[dearorpheus]

This blog rules. I love all the readings and excerpts in your selfhood tag. Do you have any kind of reading list for existential philosophy you could share? I've been really wanting to dive in lately but I'm intimidated about where to start.

hey you rule also.

here's everything i've been surrounding myself with lately—not limited to existential philosophy but i think all migrating through the same waters:

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; The Stranger; The Plague Sartre, Nausea; Being and Nothingness E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay; The Trouble With Being Born R.D. Laing, The Divided Self Jung, Modern Man In Search of a Soul; Psychology and the Occult Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark Kafka, The Trial Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Andrew Scull, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry and the Mysteries of Mental Illness; Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Madmen: The Social History of Psychiatry in the Victorian Era Kay Redfield Jamison, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous Lisa Miller, The Awakened Brain: The Psychology of Spirituality The Tibetan Book of the Dead

[silenceintostone]

“For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.”

-E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

[waltfrasescazadordepalabras]

¿Han soportado la tortura de los insomnios en los que se percibe cada instante de la noche, en los que estamos solos en el mundo y sentimos que vivimos el drama esencial de la historia; esos instantes en los que ni siquiera ella tiene ya la mínima significación y deja de existir para nosotros, pues notamos que se elevan en nuestro interior llamas terribles: esos momentos en los que nuestra propia existencia nos parece ser la única en un mundo nacido para vernos agonizar - han experimentado esos innumerables instantes, infinitos como el sufrimiento, en los que el espejo refleja la imagen misma de lo grotesco?

E.M. Cioran - En las cimas de la desesperación

[blackswaneuroparedux]

When every man has realised that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

E.M Cioran

[scorcidipoesia]

Darei tutti i paesaggi del mondo per quello della mia infanzia.

(E.M. Cioran)

[thepeelingrenoir]

"I can't find a solid place to grasp. There is nothing here and even the nothing just keeps refracting so I don't even have the negative space as an outline to gauge off of."

[reelaround-deactivated05312024]

tears and saints, e.m. cioran (transl. i. zarifopol-johnston)

[adz]

“Whatever his merits, a man in good health is always disappointing. Impossible to grant any credence to what he says, to regard his phrases as anything but excuses, acrobatics. The experience of the terrible - which alone confers a certain density upon our words - is what he lacks, as he lacks, too, the imagination of disaster, without which no one can communicate with those separate beings, the sick. It is true that if he possessed that experience he would no longer be in good health. Having nothing to transmit, neutral to the point of abdication, he collapses into well-being, an insignificant state of perfection, of impermeability to death as well as of inattention to oneself and to the world. As long as he remains there, he is like the objects around him; once torn from it, he opens himself to everything, knows everything: the omniscience of terror.”

E.M. Cioran, On Sickness

[dearorpheus]

"...there is something that comes from ourselves, that is ourselves, an invisible but inwardly verifiable reality, an unwonted and eternal presence that we can conceive at any moment and that we never dare admit, which is real only before its consummation: death, the true criterion... And it is death, the most intimate dimension of all the living, which separates humanity into two orders so irreducible, so removed from each other, that there is more distance between them than between a vulture and a mole, a star and a starfish. The abyss of two incommunicable worlds opens between the man who has the sentiment of death and the man who does not; yet both die; but one is unaware of his death, the other knows; one dies only for a moment, the other unceasingly... Their common condition locates them precisely at each other’s antipodes, at the two extremities and within one and the same definition; irreconcilable, they suffer the same fate... One lives as if he were eternal; the other thinks continually of his eternity and denies it in each thought.”

— E.M. Cioran trans. Richard Howard, A Short History of Decay