Chapter 6: The Trouble With Being Born

Nihilism through aphorisms and observations

The Trouble With Being Born by E. M. Cioran

Romanian-born French philosopher E.M. Cioran's book "The Trouble With Being Born" is filled with aphorisms on the burden of existence and the futility of living.

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Eleven chapters of aphorisms spread across two hundred pages encompass a philosophical landscape of existence, suicide, the burden of being, nihilism, sickness, Buddhism, folklore extracts of existence, insomnia, and more.

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These chapters have no titles; as a reader, feel free to read them in any order. The book strikes you because of its profound honesty, brutal reality, and piercing observations of being.

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“A book is a suicide postponed.”

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Unlike other philosophers, Cioran refuses to follow the conventional style of explanation, adhering instead to his unconventional pithy observations and deductions. The literary style consists of observations of fragments of human life. Initially hard to follow, once you settle in, you become comfortable with observation without explanation.

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His willingness to embrace contradiction gives his work a peculiar authenticity lacking in more methodical philosophical treatises. As he writes in one particularly revealing aphorism:

"We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it."

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Dark from the outset and definitely not an easy read. It's possible to engage with it only during one's darkest days. A somewhat melancholic heart and cynical mind are prerequisites. In return, you witness crystalline text and devastating insights on life.

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“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

Such loaded statements deliver philosophical payload with the impact of poetry, leaving you simultaneously stunned by their beauty and disturbed by their implications.

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The central theme of the book is that birth is the greatest catastrophe, and all subsequent suffering follows from this event. What is haunting is that he offers no solution to this catastrophe. Unlike existentialists who find freedom in the absence of meaning, Cioran provides no such comfort.

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The book is replete with bleak aphorisms, and its only solace is unflinching honesty. He captures moments of human existence as evidence of the darker aspects of human experience.

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“What do you do from morning to night?"

"I endure myself.”

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Despite its relentless negation, the work contains an implicit affirmation of human dignity through its very insistence on confronting the most difficult truths of our condition.

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“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know where that elsewhere is.”

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The book remains one of the most powerful expressions of philosophical pessimism ever written. While certainly not for everyone—particularly those seeking affirmation or hope—Cioran's stellar work offers a necessary counterpoint to optimistic philosophies that too easily dismiss the genuine difficulties of consciousness.

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“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

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📝 Poems I enjoyed from the web

I have to tell you by Dorothea Grossman

I have to tell you

there are times when

the sun stikes me

like a gong,

and I remember everything

even your ears.

RAIN by Raymond Carver

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

April Morning by Jonathan Wells

You are living the life

you wanted as if you'd known

what that was but of course

you didn't so you'd groped

toward it feeling for what

you couldn't imagine, what

your hands couldn't tell you,

for what that shape could be.

This Sunday the rain turns cold

again and steady but the window

is slightly open and there is the vaguest

sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps

between the buildings because it's spring

the calendar says and the room where

you are reading is empty yet full

of what loves you and this is the day

that you were born.

After the Divorce, I Think of Something My Daughter Said about Mars

Once you go, you can never come back.

If you returned to Earth,

the gravity would turn your bones

to noodles. I mean your skeleton

would sort of melt.

So if you go, you have to stay gone.

From The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.

Quotes that hit me

“Absence, the highest

form of presence.” - James Joyce

"It is the same rain that you

loved that drowned you”- A line from Arabic Poetry

"Hug me as if I were to die tomorrow, and hug me

tomorrow as if I were back from the dead." - Nizar Qabani

“Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they're evaporating.”- Mahmoud Darwish

“Eating strawberries in the

spring, yes, that's part of life.” - Vincent Van Gogh

"Deep rivers

run quiet”- Haruki Murakami

From the Vault

Joyce exhibiting his Piano skills to his son, Giorgio. Source

A rare time when Beckett socialized with his friends in outdoors 😄 Source