“The warrior who knows his weakness is stronger than the one who considers himself invincible.”
I’ve always known my mind to be both the curse and the gift. I’ve always understood my mind to be my greatest weakness. Reading Emil Cioran’s work… I knew I was not alone. Time may separate us but the madness, his and mine, feels weirdly the same.
Cioran did not write to inspire. He did not write to rescue anyone from despair. He wrote because it was the only way not to drown. His words are not answers but survival. For him writing was postponed suicide. A cry not for meaning but for endurance. “To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.” And I… I am that echo. For things that never stop speaking inside me. A writer listens and writes not to explain, but to give those thoughts form, however imperfectly, through language.
Where others ignored death, Cioran kept it close. Where others searched for meaning, he stayed in its absence. His words were not arguments they were moodscapes. “We define only the borders of our ignorance. The rest is poetry.”
His most radical belief? That birth is the original sin. The ultimate tragedy. He saw existence not as a gift, but as a burden. To be born is to be forced into a life we never chose. “Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.” His rejection of life wasn’t rooted in trauma or personal misfortune, but in the very imposition of existence. To be trapped, without consent, in a consciousness painfully aware of its own end and inevitable suffering… that, to him, was the ultimate tragedy. The problem isn’t what happens in life. The problem is life itself.
Animals live without thought… blessed beasts. But we….we’re cursed with awareness. With consciousness. We reflect, we question, we decay from within. “Thinking is a sickness. Consciousness, a deformity.” It suggests that self awareness doesn’t enlighten us, it torments us. The ability to reflect, to foresee death, to question meaning, these aren’t advantages. Cioran understood: to think truly is to suffer. To question endlessly. “A mind is fertile only when it is self-destructive,” he wrote. And perhaps he was right.
The pursuit of truth is not freedom, but maddening. To see life for what it is, is not freedom. It hurts.
His view on modernity and progress? To him, civilization had exhausted itself…drunk on its own illusions. Our ideologies, our rationalism, our carefully constructed “meanings”, like individuals, they too eventually die. Animals can spend hours doing nothing. Is boredom unknown to them? On the contrary, animals crave boredom and fear its end. For when boredom stops, it is only replaced by fear, the root of all activity. Inaction is divine, yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Only man struggles to endure monotony. Only man demands that something, anything, must happen, no matter the cost.
But what he mourned wasn’t the loss of belief itself, but the innocence of believing. “I do not believe in God. But I miss Him.” There is something painfully human in that. Wanting to believe in what you can no longer believe in.
And still, despite everything, he did not kill himself. On the contrary, he lived a long life. He thought about it often. After all, if life is so intolerable, why not simply end it? But he couldn’t. “I do not think myself capable of dying. I have too much lucidity to end my life. A true suicide is beyond my powers.” In a beautiful way, it was the clarity of his mind that kept him here. His piercing awareness made life unbearable, but it also stripped death of any meaning. And so he remained trapped between the agony of existence and the futility of escape.
He envied those who could go through with it. He saw suicide not as tragedy, but as an act of ultimate freedom. But not for him. Not for those of us who see too clearly. We cannot lie to ourselves enough to make death appealing and we cannot fully embrace life either. That is the painful double-bind we return to again and again. “Only optimists commit suicide. The optimists who can no longer be optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”
He did not romanticize death. For him, it was a companion. A relief. The mere fact that death is always available offered a strange comfort, easing the pressure of living. Even love, even art, even faith, he saw them as distractions. Attempts to conceal the abyss. But he did not mock them. He admired the effort, even if he believed it was futile. He understood that humans must create meaning where there is none, because without illusion, we go mad. So, he wrote: “Man starts over again every day, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.” Because in the end, true suicide is to continue living while renouncing the illusions that make life tolerable.
What frightened him wasn’t death. It was the loss of his mind. When Alzheimer’s came, he feared it more than dying, because thought, however painful, was his identity. Without it, he would no longer be himself.
Cioran doesn’t advocate for denial or avoidance of suffering. Instead, he confronts pain, seeing it as an inseparable part of existence. In pain we find the realization that existence is a wound without remedy, and to remain conscious is to press a finger into that wound, endlessly. Pain is not a detour, it is the destination. It is this very recognition that frees us. Not from suffering, but from living a lie. It compels us to live more authentically, to face life with clarity and honesty about its brutal truths.
The one who embraces pain stops asking why. He walks through life not hoping to be spared, but prepared to endure.
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
(Given all I know. How could I, in good conscience, bring a child into this world?
Cioran called procreation the most selfish act. Ethically, what does it mean to create life, knowing that to exist is to suffer? To bring another human into this world is to expose them, without their consent, to a life inevitably marked by pain. How can that ever be justified?)
(My attempt to make sense of Emil Cioran’s work and honestly, I’m just relieved to know I’m not alone in these thoughts😂. Maybe I am a little mad, but if so, I share my madness with many. Even Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, said it plainly: “It is all useless. It is like chasing the wind.” I try, I really do, to see life and death through a different lens, but it’s hard… unbearably hard at times. It makes me wonder about the people who go through life seemingly unmoved by these thoughts. What do they know that my mind so stubbornly refuses to understand?But still I rise😊
Tuko wengi😊)
(“Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die anytime, except when one has to die.”)
“ is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”
“One simply cannot reason their way out of the fact that they will die.”
“Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die anytime, except when one has to die.”
“We do not rush towards death, we flee the catastrophe of birth survivors struggling to forget it.”
“To live is to suffer, and the honest man is he who is ashamed of his existence.”
“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”
PIECESBYRUTH 