He was born born Emil Cioran in 1911, in a small Transylvanian village, Rasinari. He moved to Paris in 1937 and died there in 1995. He was a Romanian philosopher and essayist who was known for his pessimistic and nihilistic perspectives.
Literature
Alberto Moravia’s La Noia
My boredom resembles a repeated and mysterious interruption of the electric current inside a house: at one moment everything is clear and obvious- here are armchairs, over there are sofas, beyond our cupboards, side tables, pictures, curtains, carpets, windows, doors; a moment later there is nothing but darkness and an empty void.
Ursula Le Guin & social anthropology
In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin introduces the concept of shifgrethor and that was my introduction to the wonderful, wonderful and rich world of Le Guin’s social anthropology.
Kobayashi Issa & Death
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) along with Basho and Buson, is considered one the greatest Haiku poets of Japan. His most endearing gift was attention to detail, with such intense delicacy and sometimes playfulness, that the ordinary came to transcend its everyday mundaneness. Even though my interest today is in his focus on death, but I will start with the birth of his daughter.
Kafka and Marriage
I don’t believe that I have ever met a single person who in the long run in his ordinary human relationships, in normal everyday life (and what else is it all about?), could be more hopeless than I.
Bureau-crazy
A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.
FRONT DOORS
No 10 Downing Street is probably the most famous front door in the world. It is different from the other centres of power because it has the appearance of an unassuming, ordinary front door on an ordinary street. So, it’s not the White House, nor is it the Kremlin. The doorway could be the doorway…
Houses and Their Noises
All houses or should I say, each house has a particular noise, a kind of signature that is like a finger print identifying and memorialising it. I remember our first night at the Moskva, a modern hotel, in the Soviet style in Moscow, in 1984. Remarkably, it groaned and spluttered at night more or less…
The Unmentionable Odour of Death
In his poem ‘September 1, 1939’ WH Auden (1907-1973) referred to the ‘unmentionable odour of death’. That was at the outbreak of the 2nd World War. But now we are into the second month of Putin’s war against Ukraine and the revelations from Bucha recalls Auden’s line, but sadly, even if the odour of death is unmentionable, we can well imagine it, all that way, away from the actual grim and unspeakable horror that is Bucha.
Slaughter House 5- not a theatre of pleasure
Like everyone else, I have been full of admiration for the valour, the courage and grim determination of the Ukrainian people, this past week.
MindReadings 