Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Trouble with Being Born
Aphorisms that see the misfortune not in death but in birth, and lucidity as the only remaining dignity.
Introduction
“The Trouble with Being Born” (1973) is one of Cioran’s most concentrated collections of aphorisms and short fragments. Its central idea reverses a long philosophical tradition of meditation on death: the catastrophe is not dying but having been born, since birth brings all evils with it, including the knowledge of death. Cioran writes against the will to act and to produce and finds consolation, if anywhere, in idleness, in ancient scepticism, in Buddhism and in the Gnostic suspicion of creation. Insomnia, illness, his Romanian origins and his ambivalent relation to religion return as motifs. The book is often cited as a classic of modern aphoristic writing and read as a counterpart to existentialist philosophies of commitment.
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