Earlier Thoughts

The New English Review ^ | 1/7/20 | Theodore Dalrymple

[Eleutheria5]

.....

Few are the Alexander Popes of this world, however, who think anything at the age of twenty that is worth repeating or pondering nearly three hundred years later. I blush to think of the banality of my own opinions at that age.....I came across a book I bought in 2015 and had always intended to read, a collection of E. M. Cioran’s early journalism.

Cioran, a Romanian born in 1911, left his country definitively in 1941 and lived the rest of his life in France. There he became a celebrated if unsystematic philosopher....He was fond of aphorisms: here are three from his last book, Anathemas and Admirations:

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

and:

One work of piety declares that the inability to take sides is a sure sign one is not “enlightened by divine light.” In other words, irresolution, that total objectivity, is the road to perdition.

and:

Vehement by nature, vacillating by choice. Which way to tend? With whom to side? What self to join?

It is difficult not to see, in these and in many others, a reflection of Cioran’s past, which he partly admitted the better to disguise it. For the fact is that, in his youth (aged 22) to his early maturity (aged 30), having previously been apolitical, became an ardent admirer of Hitler and as late as the age of 29 wrote a fulsome, indeed nauseatingly hagiographic article in praise of Codreanu, the vicious, murderous leader of the Rumanian Iron Guard, a kind of Romanian S.A. and S.S.

.....

[Eleutheria5]

I wonder how many university students idolize Cioran.

[RatRipper]

The guy sounds completely unworthy of my time.

[Eleutheria5]

Dalrymple?

[RatRipper]

I’m sorry. . . Cioran

[Eleutheria5]

He’s famous as a philosopher...in France. Having been in sympathy with Hitler and the Romanian guard is just diarrhea frosting on that fart cake.