At a glance, the title The Trouble with Being Born might sound like a bleak collection of existential gloom. And yes, in some ways, it is. But as I read through its short, sharp fragments of thought, some only a line or two and others a paragraph at most, I found something deeper: a mirror held up to our fragile and arrogant humanness.

Cioran’s writing is brutally honest, often darkly funny, and filled with philosophical bite. In just a handful of words, he manages to capture the sorrow and absurdity of being alive. His genius lies in that brevity. Every sentence hits like a cold splash of water.

Sometimes I would chuckle at his sarcasm, like when I read, “What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.” Then, just a few lines later, I would feel totally disarmed by a striking truth about loss, failure, or how little control we actually have in life. He reminds us that we are often unprepared for disappointment because we avoid thinking about it altogether. And yet, reading him does not feel like sinking. It feels like waking up.

Cioran encourages us, in his own way, to stay humble, to keep learning, and to open our minds. He does not sugarcoat reality, but instead speaks to the thoughts many of us keep tucked away in the dark corners of our minds. The thoughts about existence, meaning, and the strange fact of being born into this world at all.

There are a lot of lines that I like, and I have written them below.

My Favorite Bits

• I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
• What I know at 60, I knew as well at 20. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
• i do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, commted a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.
• This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distance us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
• ‘What do you do from morning to night?’ ‘I endure myself.’
• What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriches only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.
• So carefully have we been taught to cling things that when we would be free of them, we do not know how to go about it. And if death did not come to our aid, our stubbornness in subsisting would make us find a recipe for existence beyond wearing out, beyond senility itself.
• Everything is wonderfully clear if we admit that birth is a disastrous or at least an inopportune event; but if we think otherwise, we must resign ourselves to the unintelligible, or else cheat like everyone else.
• A book is a postpone suicide.
• Fanaticism is the death of conversation. We do not gossip with a candidate for martyrdom. What are we to say to someone who refuse to penetrate our reasons and who, the moment we do not bow to his, would rather die than yield? Give us dilettantes and sophists, who at least espouse all reasons.
• The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyine regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
• Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
• By a certain age, we should change names and hide out somewhere, lost to the world, in no danger of seeing friends or enemies again, leasding the peaceful life of an overworked malefactor.
• Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do, one so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
• Curiosity to measure our progress into failure is the only reason we have to grow older. We thought we had reached the limit, we thought the horizon was blocked forever, we lamented in the thrall of our discouragement. And now we realize that we can fall still lower, that there s something new, that all hope is not lost, that it is possible to sink a little further and thus to postpone the danger of getting stuck, even paralyzed..
• Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser
• Life would become endurable only among a humanity which would no longer have any illusions in reserve, a humanity completely disabused and delighted to be so.
• Once upon a time writing seemed important to me. Of all my superstitions, this one seems the most compromising and the most incomprehensible.
• Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.

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Author: E.M. Cioran

Publication date: 15 September 1998

Number of pages: 224 pages

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