How does one live 48 years, in the way I have, having read Camus and Beckett in college, and have not heard of Emil Cioran? HOW?
It started while searching for something to plug into the fantastic poetry machine savelost.
Then this delightful video:
📽️ Emil Cioran - The Trouble With Being Born Book Review
Engaging with these ideas, confronting them, really does hold one’s feet to the fire, as if to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “Okay, what is really going on here in this life of yours, if anything?” If one were to sincerely do that they might irreparably shatter their entire image of themselves. I’m not at all saying that’s a good thing or you should do it, by the way. Be careful.
But I love him because so much of modern philosophy or commentary or culture just seems to be strange adult individuals making shit up. None of it has any substance or truth, like none of it. Even the ones who seem to be contrarians, you know what I’m talking about? There’s so many of these talking heads and it’s all just…a waste of life. It’s just like pretentious like political or self-help goofballism. It’s like what is this?
So he’s not for everybody, thank God. Frankly, why would you want to read somebody that is? If you’re feeling exhausted with the sanguine bovinity of the modern world and are looking for a philosophical cyanide pill in order to crush your hopes and dreams, well my friend, look no further.
This is one of his most quoted one of his most famous and it’s written as if somebody is asking him this question and he’s replying: “What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.” Classic.
I had to search for “sanguine bovinity” because I assumed it was a borrowed phrase, but all I found was this noise (I don’t know what genre to use here, to be honest) track from China:
🎧️ Life Suppression: Sanguine Bovinity
We are fulfilled only when we aspire to nothing, when we are impregnated by that nothing to the point of intoxication.
– Emil Cioran
I once owned the domain iaspiretonothing.com. I owned it for quite a while, in fact. It was the domain I picked when I first signed up for a web host and I had to pick a domain as part of the process. I didn’t have danielsjourney.com yet so I just picked the first thing that came to mind. Because it was the “root” domain of my hosting plan, this site was actually hosted at daniel.iaspiretonothing.com for a long time and DNS just took care of the actual domain. The root domain showed only this image for a long time:
I’m still trying to figure out if the weird kerning was due to the font itself, or if I did that on purpose.
📽️ The School of Life: Emil Cioran
