..... 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...