A review by insecam
The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran

challenging dark funny reflective slow-paced

3.5

the best (and worst) crisis book - brutally funny and agonizingly true. i really adore Cioran's prose, truly the most alienated man to ever live? everything he experiences contradicts himself in the most mind-numbingly painful way possible. consciously being locked out of understanding anything about the Absolute, while still feeling a heavy call to Buddhism (but still convinced of the futility of both.) torn between the chasm of accepting withdrawal or accepting a love of life. convinced to condemning man as a plague or passively coming to terms with mankind's existence in a defeated and dramatic way (as he tends to do). Cioran truly never could find peace. but weaved in between agonizing aphorisms about the unbearable yearning to return to pre-birth/non-existence, is the occasional and completely sublime, BEYOND poignant aphorism that shatters reality. this is a crisis book, rummage through his ramblings and pull what you need

& the aphorism about the alienated gorilla is unparalleled 

"i've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now i don't know where to turn, what to run for ..."

"...'the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.' I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed in this extraordinary banal formula ..."