Cioran

excerpts Fighting for an idea for forty years – the idea of liberating your country from communism; never yielding for one single moment, being consistent in this action and in this hate (constantly fuelled and substantiated); organizing your despair, turning it into

January 5, 1940 On Monday I must get down to work seriously and consistently. Apart from this, my life has become unbearable. I don't know what the devil is the matter with me, I feel as if I were growing old and stupid. I suppose I have some obsessions of my own,

 I must admit I didn't quite understand in the beginning why, shortly after 1989, the Western mass-media has so hastily labeled us as suffering from a deep identity crisis. I was downright indignant: after having sadistically experimented Communism on us for half

Chapter 3Romania's Psychological and Historical Voids If it were true that the Romanian's spiritual disposition does not surpass the one evinced in the past and that the future is not going to uncover any hidden sides to the Romanian soul, then any attempt to

Chapter IIROMANIANISM AND AUTOCHTHONISMexcerpts Continuing the clash of ideas of the previous decades, the 1930s too witnessed a confrontation on the evolution formula of the Romanian make-up. Two directions were pitted against each other. One favorable to the maintenance

*More than a century ago Europe was not yet known as a cultural construction, an intellectual day-dream, a heap of broken images, a copy in a world without originals. Artists tried to escape the big fortress ensconced in coal smog and torn by wars, social conflicts, and

The summon sounded imperative, I had positive interests, thank goodness – I was to receive by the hands of professor Cioranescu the second volume of his memoirs - this, as he had no intention of coming to the country this year – moreover, my curiosity was not inconsiderable.

1947. The year of the most despotic deeds of the communist regime come to power in the shadow of the Soviet tanks. The ordeal of the Romanian intellectual elites (and not only) begins. The Slătineanu family find themselves treated like common criminals. The whole family

The chance passers-by through the quiet Cotroceni neighbourhood could discover, at the end of a well tended garden, a two-storey house with no other adornment than its iron-wrought latticework. What was strange was that leaning against the wall separating it from the house

Ciprian Vălcan - La concurrence des influences culturelles françaises et allemandes dans l'oeuvre de Cioran

When the issue of happiness undermines that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its own domain in order to dedicate itself to a strange activity: it starts dealing with the human being… Nowadays it is interested in answering as thoroughly and as seriously as possible questions

A civilization starts decaying when Life becomes its only obsession. Flourishing ages aim to values per se: life is but a means of attaining them; the individual being is not aware that he lives, he just lives – a happy slave of the shallowness that he breeds, nurses and