On the Heights of Despair

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Imagining Cioran ix On Being Lyrical 3 How Distant Everything Is! 6 On Not Wanting to Live 8 The Passion for the Absurd 10 The World and I 14 Weariness and Agony 16 Despair and the Grotesque 18 The Premonition of Madness 20 On Death 22 Enthusiasm as a Form ofMelancholy 29 Nothing Is Important 33 Ecstasy 35 The World in Which Nothing Is Solved 37 The Contradictory and the Inconsequential 39 On Sadness 41 Total Dissatisfaction 43 The Bath of Fire 45 Disintegration 46 On the Reality of the Body 48 I Do Not Know 49 On Individual and Cosmic Loneliness 50 Apocalypse 52 The Monopoly of Suffering 54 Absolute Lyricism 57 The Meaning of Grace 59 The Vanity of Compassion 61 Eternity and Morality 62 Moment and Eternity 64 History and Eternity 66 Not to Be a Man Anymore 68 Magic and Fatality 70 Transfiguration of Banality 101 Unimaginable Joy 72 The Ambiguity of Suffering 73 All Is Dust 74 Love 75 Light and Darkness 79 Renunciation 81 On the Transubstantiation of Love 84 The Blessings of Insomnia 83 Man, the Insomniac Animal 85 Truth, What a Word! 87 The Beauty of Flames 88 The Paucity of Wisdom 89 The Return to Chaos 90 Irony and Self-Irony 91 On Poverty 93 The Flight from the Cross 95 The Cult of Infinity 98 The Burden of Sadness 103 Degradation through Work 104 The Sense of Endings 106 The Satanic Principle of Suffering 108 An Indirect Animal 111 Impossible Truth 112 Subjectivity 113 Homo . . . 114 Love in Brief 115 Nothing Matters 116 The Sources of Evil 117 Beauty's Magic Tricks 119 Man's Inconsistency 120 Capitulation 122 Facing Silence 123 The Double and His Art 124 Nonsense 126 E. M. Cioran: A Short Chronology 127