In Emil Cioran's book "The Trouble With Being Born", he takes the unusual position that it is not in the prospect of death that disaster lies, but in the fact of birth, that 'laughable accident'. Not that he comes up with any answers, for, in contrast to some of his peers, he knows there are no answers, only questions.
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late. Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists.”
“What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.”
“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.”
“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”
“To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.”
“I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.”
“Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.”
“If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?”, I now put the same question about anyone alive.”
“I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass—which is better than trying to fill them.”
“My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.”
“I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.”
“Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!”
“If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?”
“The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.”
“What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know what that elsewhere is.”
“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach.”
“The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.”
“The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.”
“There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.”
“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.”
“In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left — ignorant how to react — with a foolish grin.”
“We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.”
“Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.”
“When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less….”
“Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life.”
“The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it.”
“Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.”
“You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady. “You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”
“I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living.”
“Whatever people try to do, they’ll regret it sooner or later.”
“My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding.”
“We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.”
“If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.”
"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."
Are you still with me? As I wrote, this is my favourite pick-me-up book.
