All language subtitles for 1995 Cioran En

World history is nothing else than a repetition of catastrophes waiting for a

final catastrophe.

Over thousands of years we've been nothing more than mortals; here we are,

finally, promoted to the rank of the dying.

We are nothing more than messengers, buglers of a Judgment without the

Judge.

Barely gone out in the street, I exclaim: "What a perfect parody of the

Inferno !"

Mankind's show - - what a disgusting action !

I believe in mankind's salvation, in the cyanide's future.

Apocalypse according to Cioran

Paris - an apocalyptic garage.

Paris - 1990, 21 rue de l'Od�on, Latin quarter.

A camera enters this amazingly modest space

In which one of the most shattering works of this century was born.

Its author - a contemporary Nietzsche who went through the school of

French moralists

Was considered, one at a time, the "skeptic on duty of a declining world",

"the century's nihilist", "the King of Pessimists",

"The procurator of the human species in the endless process which was

opened between mankind, God, and world."

At 20 years old, He was recommending himself as a specialist in the problem

of death.

And near the end of his life, like a stranger to the police, the metic

through excellence, for God and for himself.

He demanded that his insomnia be financed, obliging himself, in

return, to tear any illusion and to preserve for us the unaltered

memory of nihility.

Let us not be fooled; the poisoned history of the end of our millennium,

happened outside of this attic,

but hardly here - in the pages written between these humble walls, it

gained the perfume's prestige and it became the consciousness of our

unhappiness.

In June 1990, after his entire life has been left in the shadow of his work,

refusing to become a public person, Emil Cioran accepts to be filmed

by a crew who specially came from his own country - Romania - ,

which he left for good, 53 years ago.

How do you look at your destiny ?

My destiny is done with. I took a decision a year ago or more that i shouldn't

write anymore.

Because

This decision has a physiological basis, or how should i say...

I felt that something changed in me.

In what way?

That something... "casser", or how do you say...

Broke

Broke

And...

How all the writers especially in France, write till death.

And...there is no sense...

For what should one multiply books?

All the writers wrote too much, in my opinion.

Is this your case as well ?

Mine as well

And even the great writers like Shakespeare exaggerated.

All of them wrote too much.

And...

The line that i formulated for myself was: "I got bored to slander the

universe"

And... I stopped caring.

But how could you write on the same theme on over 15 volumes?

But...this is a problem of obsession. My "masterpiece"... -

although this word makes me vomit

I wrote all my books for therapeutic reasons.

You wrote the same book over and over again,

the same obsession,

on the theme of futility and death.

All the other problems have no importance.

I noticed that for me it represents liberation,

so that, for myself, i truly wrote from necessity.

For myself it's therapy.

And literature was only a pretext; same with philosophy.

Are you cured at the moment?

I'm not cured. I'm tired.

How can a work which pleads for futility help?

...for nonsense.

It helps because it formulates things that others feel.

It gives them the conscience to find themselves.

To fix despair, isn't it a way to make it function more coherent?

Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.

You understand... Expression - that is the cure.

What is the definite purpose of confessing to a priest that you did that

or that? It is liberation.

As in, everything that is formulated is degraded with intensity.

This is therapy and the purpose of therapy.

Truly, my depressions that i had during my lifetime could've led me to madness

or total failure.

The fact that i formulated them, had a remarkable efficiency

If i had never written, I'm fully convinced that... "tourne mal"...

everything would've badly ended,

That i wrote 5 in Romanian and 8 or 9 in French.

9.

And for myself, "�a suffit" - the way you say it in french. I stopped

writing because something changed in me.

It is a diminution regarding intensity - the intensity of an emotion or

sentiment.

And I started observing some sort of fatigue in myself, a disgust of

expression, that I stopped believing in words.

And then the show of literature in Paris, where everybody writes from

morning to evening without stopping.

To negate - like I did all my life, I arrived at some sort of fatigue and

therefore i stopped caring.

As in, my warrior-aspect serving negation as means to liberation, is what i

stopped caring for. That I don't need that anymore.

It is a simple phenomenon, truly of tiredness.

Does this tiredness bring with itself some sort of reconciliation?

No, no, but a diminution.

I had all my life this extraordinary aspiration of being the most lucid

man I've ever known.

It is a form of megalomania.

It is true that all my life i had the feeling that everybody lived in

illusion with the exception of myself.

And truly, i had this profound conviction. Although it is not a form

of disdain.

The feeling that i had, that everybody is wrong, that everybody is naive,

made me give myself the chance of not to be wrong.

As in, not to participate to anything,

And to act only in a sort of comedy for others, without participating in

this comedy.

Therefore you were right in the end.

Absolutely.

Born in 1911 in Romania, Cioran arrives in Paris in 1937, after leaving 5

books to the Romanian culture. He was 26 years old at that time.

He made his debut 12 years later in 1949 at the publishing company -

Gallimard.

The title of the book, which meanwhile became a classical work of

"nihilism" in the 20th century, is: "Treaty of decomposition."

The critics reacted promptly.

Behold him - the one that we've been waiting for, the prophet of the

concentration-camps era, of the suicidal community,

the prophet that the nihilistic and absurdist philosophers were waiting

for his coming, the true bringer of the "evil" Annunciation.

Let us salute him and watch him closer. He is the one that will testify

for our epoch.

The books that, starting from 1949 appeared at Gallimard from 4 to 4

years, being afterwards translated in Germany, U.K., Spain, Italy, USA,

and Japan,

As long as they were not printed in the portable-pocket version,

they printed around 2000-3000 number of copies.

The literary awards which were discerned to him: Rivarol, Sainte-Beuve,

Combat, Nimier, sometimes only substantial, are with the exception of the first

refused one by one.

One can't write a book about the "shortcoming of being born" and then

accept a literary prize.

In 1977, when he refuses the Roger-Nimier prize, attributed to his general

work, Cioran writes to his brother:

"The press talks about the fact that I refused a literary award, in my

opinion, of no importance. Although, some don't understand that it is

possible to turn away from 10 000 francs. A long time i made this decision, of

not to accept any distinction of this kind."

In 1987, Figaro-Magazine presented Cioran as "the most clandestine of

philosophers", as the "renowned stranger".

In Germany he was known as "ein...." - "a secret fellow, for those who

know" and since he generally refused interviews and any

appearance on TV,

the french public didn't know too much about him, more than what it could've

been found on the 4th cover of his books.

I was disgusted of the Literature Awards in Paris.

The fact that all the writers were doing everything possible to

obtain an awards.

And therefore i realized that either i accept all the prizes or nothing at

all.

the fact that i accepted in the beginning an insignificant prize that

had a ridiculous amount...

The Rivarol prize.

Of course, that one I couldn't refuse because it was my first book and

because i was unknown to the old men in the literature committee. It

would've been pure impudence for me to refuse it.

And the prize was insignificant and of no importance.

Although, after being acquainted with the literary life in France, i

said to myself that it's a profoundly unpleasant thing, and compromising,

for me personally: "I refuse all of the prices".

And...I must confess that i was offered enormously important prizes,

especially from a financial point of view.

Isn't this a form of reversed-publicity ?

No, no.

Doesn't it increase...

No. I decided a long time ago, that it would be impossible... that i won't

accept prizes.

Was it for the same reason that you didn't accept interviews or TV

apparitions ?

Yes.

You are considered the most withdrawn writer in the Parisian scene.

Well, when you come round Paris and you see the show of the literary life, you

must make a decision: you either do everything or nothing.

But shouldn't you assume the exterior side of your work? Any literary

production is linked to the public, any public means publicity...

Every writer has his own destiny.

I personally don't want to get involved directly in this.

It is a decision against the literary life in France.

"The dignity of a man born in a small culture is always wounded." - These

words which Cioran wrote in one of his books can give us the key,

if not for his French work, at least for the character which

accompanied it from the shadow.

Because, to remain in the shadow while the signs of your existence penetrate

the world, challenge it, whip it and steal it's illusions, is the steady

sea of the injured pride.

The world gives up by realizing you exist, but just in the moment in

which, in the starting of masochism which defines it, the public wants to

see him, and to cheer for him, for the one who provided them the

voluptuousness of the stylized torments,

their author returns even deeper behind his books, of these plots thoroughly

prepared, and makes from his silence, from this modesty - judgment,

simultaneously: punishment, disdain and revenge.

But maybe every wounded dignity, which ends by placing the author in a

mysterious space, is a benevolence for the work itself,

because any major work must be like a temple in which the god is never

present, but only felt and dubious.

The absence, penumbra, the enigmatic, have always the advantage of not to

disappoint.

This science of this success, of the resistance at cultural fashions, was

next to a magnificent work, Cioran's other major success.

Let us try to enter this world of penumbra, which is the life of Emil Cioran.

Hidden in one of the earth's attics, Cioran requires to be searched

for and discovered.

But for the foreign reader, the curiosity and indiscretion, never passed

the limits of the Latin Quarter.

Cioran is equally a French writer, so that the thought that he lived

another life, in another place in Europe, and that he wrote 5 volumes in

another language is implausible for most people.

Cioran's life hides in this way, once again surrounding by mystery the

ages in which his obsessions sprouted and deeply articulated his

entire work: his childhood and his youth.

My childhood was paradise. Truly.

He was born in a Romanian village of shepherds and foresters, Rasinari,

located in Transylvania - "the land beyond the forests" - which for

foreigners is nothing else than Dracula's legendary country.

"This cursed, this splendid Rasinari" - the way Cioran calls it, which

image followed him without stopping, as a place which liberates and calls

afterwards for itself in order to gather his whole life, is one of the oldest

Romanian settlements in Ardeal.

A document from 1488, later on stated as of Transylvanian Saxon

origin, advances the origin of the village till the king of the huns -

Attila the Hun,

and in any case way before the arrival of the Saxons in Transylvania, and the

creation in the 2nd half of the 13th century of Hermann's fortress -

Hermannstadt - Sibiu.

Towards the 14th century this village, located 10 km from Sibiu, goes from

being led by the Hungarian kings to being led by the Romanian voivodes, in

order to remain afterwards, many centuries under Hungarian

domination, until 1918, after the Treaty of Trianon,

Transylvania separates from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and joins Moldavia

and Muntenia, in order to give birth to the Greater Romania.

The time spent in Rasinari until the age of 10, when he left to Sibiu in order

to attend high school, was marked in Cioran's mind as an image of the

terrestrial Paradise, the rest of his life being registered as a constant

deviation from a moment of completion.

"There wasn't even a moment in which I wasn't aware of the fact that i

was outside of Paradise."

The topography of this paradise has some close characteristics. First,

the childhood's alleyway which began on the right-hand side with

Cioran's house, the side with the windows of the 3 rooms facing the Main

Street and towards the "River of Houses".

Across the gate half by a massive party wall, which enclosed any access and

blocked any view to the courtyard, there could be found the stairs which

lead to the entrance of the old United Church.

From the belfry located in the church's tower, which opens and guards the left

side of the alleyway,

the view falls down in the courtyard of Cioran's house, and in the

distance, beyond the boundaries of the village, the view stops in the

acclivous field, covered by meadows and wooded here and there,

the craved playground, evoked without stopping throughout his life, the

famous "Coasta Boacii" (Boaca's slope).

The landscape is a capital thing... or how should I say it...

How it arouses in your mind. How everything else appears as mediocrity.

It is the primitive poetry.

Although, i must confess that for me "Coasta Boacii" was an essential

thing. I was dominating the village...

Aurel Cioran - E.M. Cioran's brother -

My brother, after many years in Paris, was evoking with endless

admiration: "A quoi bon avoir quitt� Coasta Boacii?" - "To what

benefit did I leave Coasta Boacii? To what benefit did I leave Paradise?"

Near the cemetery on the hill, the family had a garden in which during

summer, young Cioran was going to everyday.

"For how many times did I keep company to the gravedigger... You can't

even imagine in what degree these images remained in my mind.

Between them and I, interposed, without erasing them, an imbecile

period which you're ashamed you lived."

In all the letters that you wrote to your childhood friends a few

things come up over and over: the cemetery, the garden near the cemetery,

the church. Do they have a special significance?

Yes, yes.

Especially the cemetery.

I was friends with the gravedigger.

I was friends with him. He was a very pleasant man.

And he knew that my greatest pleasure was to give me skulls.

When he was burying somebody, I immediately rushed there in order to

see if he could give me a skull.

Why did you have a special pleasure for this?

I liked to play football with the skull.

I had a frailty for skulls.

I had a pleasure seeing the guy taking the skull...

Was it a morbid or a childish-unconscious thing ?

Sort of both...

My pleasure was to play football with it.

To throw the skull in the air and then to precipitate myself to

catch it.

And... I don't think it was a morbid pleasure. It was a kind of naive sport.

The infamy, the permission to play football with a skull...Because it wasn't

a absolute permissible action.

I was aware that it was something abnormal.

The truth is that i wasn't telling anybody about this.

Although, I didn't have any morbid feeling towards this activity. Surely not.

After that you have the proximity of the cemetery and the funerals...

Good, but this should've helped to detach yourself from the problem of death,

to give you some sort of distance, and not to become a central theme.

No, no.

So therefore, this experience should've given you a clear perspective of

death, or at least the ignorance of it. Though, it became an obsession.

No, no, because I was very young, I was in primary school.

7-8 years old.

And even younger.

And the obsession with death, probably it played its role unconsciously

later on.

Although, the obsession with death is tardy. It's at 16-17 years old -

around then it started.

And I think it reached it's highest peak in "On the heights of despair."

Where you were saying that you turned 21, and you were already a specialist

in the problem of death.

Yes, yes.

Although it is not excluded, the fact that the experience at the

cemetery marked me. I used to witness funerals, passing by, especially the

wails and laments. All of these things couldn't've left me indifferent.

Although it's hard to specify when I started to turn sensations into

problems.

In 1921, the "Fall of Man" took place.

For myself, the drama, the most challenging day of my life was the day my father

took me to Sibiu.

To high school.

I will never forget it. And this happened in 1920 or around then.

When you were 10 right?

I will never forget it. The fact that I had the impression that everything

was tworn apart in my life, that I was condemned to death.

I will never forget it.

The child is left at a host in Sibiu, and registered at the

"Gheorghe Lazar" high school.

In 1924, the priest Emilian Cioran, also known as an arch-priest, moves

with his entire family to Sibiu, on "Tribunei" street, No. 28.

What i want to point out from my brother's life, a very interesting episode,

which meant a breakage in his life.

Behind me, where the entrance can be seen, till the 4th grade of

high school, he used to practice playing the violin 2-3 hours everyday.

So that one day, to completely quit playing, and since then he never

touched the violin.

From that moment, that's why i said that a breakage happened, he started

reading.

And he read all of his life, libraries, truly, entire libraries.

When he was 15 years old, in the 6th grade of high school, for Cioran

starts the period of philosophical lectures: Solovyov, Lichtenberg,

Dostoyevsky, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

With time, the lectures became a form of existence.

"Over the years, in order to escape the ordinary responsibilities, I read.

I read everything, hours and hours everyday. I gained nothing special,

except for the fact that I managed to give myself the illusion of an activity.

Very few devoured as many books as I did."

"In the first years of my youth, the only things that seduced me were

libraries and brothels."

I remember I was reading Kierkegaard, and there was a gardener... And one day

he asked me: "Why do you read all the time?"

I said: "Well...because I like it, because...."

He replied: "No, it is not there that you will find an answer. No, no, not in

books..."

And I looked at the gardener and thought: "This guy actually thinks,

and realizes..."

He said: "No, no, one shouldn't search in books."

Then why, after realizing this, you were one of the most extreme readers of

the century?

I read enormously. It is like some sort of desertion.

I read enormously, that is true.

It is an escape in books.

And probably a thirst for, I don't know what...

But it is though, the leap into somebody's philosophy, point of view,

etc.

It is a way of escaping from oneself.

Maybe there are other causes as well...

But why didn't you fall into other ways of "escaping from oneself"?

You could've become an alcoholic for example.

I used to get drunk very often.

You?

Yes, yes.

Very often even, at that time, I was thinking that I was going to become a

drunkard.

I was even convinced of this fact.

And I used to like, the state of unconsciousness, truly.

And also the insane pride of the drunkard.

And I used to enormously admire the classical drunkards in Rasinari.

Which were drunk everyday.

And i used to see them singing, passing by, and I had a great admiration for

them.

When everybody was working in the fields, they were the only ones on the

street, playing the violin...

I had a great admiration for them, since I said to myself that they were the

only interesting guys in the whole village.

Everybody was working, and they were the only ones having fun.

But after two years, the village's drunkard died. He was the only guy who

actually realized something.

Could you please tell me, when you are making this praise of these people, of

our decline, most people say that it's a simple dreadfulness, like a

trifling teenage angst.

No, no.

An angst of a curious young man. That you are the predecessor of the

curious young men.

This explication is the simplest one can find.

Although, in a way, I was very unhappy that i had normal parents.

Kind parents.

And I remember in that time of insomnia that i used to have, that one

day, when my mother was at home, I threw myself and started saying that I

couldn't take it anymore.

My mom then replied that if she knew, she would've aborted me.

This gave me an extraordinary pleasure. That I thought that I was

a simple accident.

What was tormenting you though ?

This fact, that I had a colossal nervous tension.

At 17 years old, Cioran was a dreadful teenager. "I was just like a demon,

tormented by insomnia and obsessed with the problem of death."

"I was thinking of death in every moment. It was an obsessive representation,

which followed me even when I was eating."

Before I knew insomnia, I was a normal human being.

This was a revelation for myself, when i lost my sleep. And I realized that

sleep is an extraordinary thing.

And that life is bearable only because of sleep.

In the morning you start a new adventure, or the same adventure but with

interruption.

Insomnia is an extraordinary revelation because it suppress

unconsciousness.

As in, you spend 24 hours being lucid, an impossibility for man to

handle.

It is an heroic act - that every day is a battle, which you lose from the

beginning.

Because life is only possible through forgetfulness.

It makes you every evening to forget, and this makes illusion possible.

In the morning, you start a new life, truly.

Although, insomnia forces you to experience consciousness, lucidity

without interruption.

You are in conflict with everybody else.

And you can't consider yourself a human being anymore.

Because all the others live in unconsciousness.

The first reaction which is an insane dignity - the pride of catastrophe, is

the only thing that gives you courage.

Because one could say: "I don't have the destiny of the others."

And also the flattered feeling that you are not belonging to humanity.

You're flattered and punished at the same time.

And this makes the experience of insomnia, a capital experience, with

the condition that it will last a long time.

When i debuted in philosophy, consciousness was the problem that

intrigued me the most, on a philosophical plan.

And the idea that consciousness is a fatality - that was my

obsession.

I could say that my interest in philosophy started with this

interrogation, and it ended it.

It was my essential problem.

Mankind is a being that is vigilant, and insomnia is the punishment for this

philosophical instinct.

The punishment of vigilance.

As in, for myself, he who never experienced consciousness is naive.

As in, life without forgetfulness - this is for me the morbid aspect

in a sort of way.

Consciousness may be a wonderful adventure, although the excess of

consciousness is fatal.

And this is a very complicated reason...

When I was suffering of insomnia, I was despising everyone else who was

sleeping. They were "animals" to me.

How could they permit themselves not to have consciousness?

Yes, yes.

It was the envy and disdain.

Vigilance is mankind taken to his limit.

The emotional tonality of the Cioranian ego is of a crepuscular origin.

In the Transylvanian fortress - Sibiu, he faced the fatigues that come

with the crepuscule, he had the revelation of the sunset and kneeled at the

foot of a golden agony.

The sun is celebrated with it's value of maximum uncertainty, when the

light is caught on the brink of it's own disappearance, when the

light is in conjunction with death - the crepuscule.

Therefore, everything that is crepuscular, for this type of ego vitally

important, is the negative caught in its positivity.

The verve of exhaustion - the fatigue with pomp.

The individual failure, the tired fortress, the decline of a nation, the

fatigue of a language, the exhaustion of a civilization and of

history itself, are all projections of the crepuscular soul, which

constantly regrets that something, nevertheless, had to exist.

Nothingness is undoublty more convenient. How hardly it is to break into

being !

In 1928, when he was 17 years old, Cioran went to the Faculty of Philosophy

in Bucharest.

The years in university are dedicated especially to the german

philosophical lectures: Simmel, Worringer, Wolfflin, Kant, Fichte,

Hegel, Neo-Kantians, Husserl, Bergson and Chestov.

At the end of these lectures, Cioran's option remains clear.

Against all formalisms, subtleties and cultural distinctions,

existentially unemployed, nothing has value except the writings sprung from

life's tensions, from the organic obsessions, from the loneliness' and

night's intuitions.

Philosophy, at the bottom of it's profoundness, isn't it really void? Made

by people without temperament and history, philosophy ignores the

miseries of the ego.

Its prestige and arrogance, didn't actually deserve to be abandoned

for the sake of experience, of lived things and of daily

madness ?

In the generation of young romanian intellectuals from the 30s, Cioran

wasn't the only one to find that the philosophical system and

life, were irreconcilable in the end.

In the refined capital of The Balkans, which was the antebellum Bucharest,

ideas were escaping through the University's walls, arriving in saloons

and caf�s, where they caught life and became characters.

Here one could've assisted at their strays and their occurrence, at their

glory, downfall and death.

For Paul Morand, who knew Bucharest well at that time, the legendary Capsa

on Calea Victoriei reunited the virtues of the Caff� Florian in

Venice, of the Rumplemeyer sweet-shop in Paris, and of the "Zahar"(Sugar)

hotel in Vienna.

I took the time to revise Cioran's biography, and I had some white-spots in

this biography.

Petre Tutea - E.M. Cioran's friend since adolescence -

I know very little how your relationship with him started.

At the caf�.

You are older than him...

Older, and at that time i was practicing an idiotic Marxism.

He was lucidly moving on the universal history's spiral and was confronting

me, because he was burning with intelligence.

At Capsa, the place with the prestige of endless conversations, where any

speaker could've become temporary the leader of the state or the univers,

Cioran met those dreadful adolescents, of which some, Ionescu, Eliade,

Benjamin Fondane, Victor Brauner, were to mark later on, in different

In short time after finishing university, Cioran goes to Germany as

a scholar of the Humboldt foundation.

In Berlin, towards the end of 1933, Cioran lived step by step with a part of the

European intellect, the belief that democracy is a compromised political

system.

Nazism, with it's expansion he watches in real life in Berlin or at

M�nchen, appears to him as a new style of life, in which "the irrational cult

and vitality's exaltation, are definite elements. And who knows if this nations'

vitality is going to cost us more ? - wrote Cioran, intuitively, in December

"What seemed to me to be troubling and engaged in Nazism is a character of

fatality, of an inexorable collective as if everybody would be the instruments

of a demonic formation, fanaticized till imbecility into an obscure

clearness of the present."

"In Nazism, one falls just like one falls in any mass trend with dictatorial

tendencies."

Cioran becomes the spectator of a whole nation, in a fanatical

forest. In Germany, he writes later on:

"In order not to be intoxicated or contaminated by Nazism, I

started studying Buddhism."

The manifestations of the military parades, provoked Cioran terrible

meditations, about the precariousness of the instinct of freedom in

man.

"It has been forever that people aspired towards liberty and rejoiced every

time they lost it. The mortals never loved with passion except those who

handcuffed them. And whom did they turn into myth? - The executioners of their

freedom."

Cioran saw Hitler as being welcomed by his crowd. He assisted at the birth of

the odd fury of obedience, of the necessity of blindness, of the

voluptuousness of kneeling.

"It seemed to me at that time, that all those mortals, were raising

their hands towards him, asking for a yoke in which they could all fit, and

sob for a punishment that shouldn't be delayed."

A dictator has the soul of a Christhood executioner, stained with blood and

sky. The crowd wants to obey him. The most sublime visions and ecstasies,

communicated through angel flutes, can't start it like a military march.

Adam was only a warrant officer."

And though, when in 1935 he goes back to Romania, Cioran is contaminated by

the vision towards which, history is made with nations awakened from

numbness, and with visionaries capable to introduce the absolute in

their everyday breath.

The idea was flowing beyond the borders of Germany or Italy and it

was spread into Europe which for the most people appeared apathetic for

both right-wing and left-wing intellectuals.

"Today, there is only one way to love France - to detest her in the way she

looks." - wrote Drieu La Rochelle in the French press of that time.

Cioran lived what he later on named: "a pathological story, characterized by

the fascination for everything that falls into extremes."

He believed that Lenin or Hitler were making history, just because

through their terror, they provoked the mystical collective effort of the

nation.

Romania appears to him to be under a destiny of mediocrity, generated by a

warm, fading and passive population.

"The only possibility that Romania will not become an ephemeral apparition, is

the infiltration of the Spartan spirit, into a country of cunning,

skeptical and resigned people." - wrote Cioran.

"On these ideas, humiliated by the conscience of the

membership of a minor historical destiny, I imagine Romania with the

same destiny as France, and with the population of China."

Cioran discovers, in the Romanian legionarism and in Zelea Codreanu - its

charismatic leader, "a promise of Romania's transfiguration."

"I am against the foreigners' great democracies and i have no

attachment for the society of the nations in which i do not believe.

In 48 hours, after the legionary movement's victory, Romania will have

an alliance with Rome and Berlin, entering therefore in the line of its mission

in history: the defender of the cross, culture and Christian civilization.

This doesn't mean that we hate France and the French nation, because the nation

will do the same as us, re-enter in the same historical mission in the

world.

What exists today, is a simple neo-masonic digression, of which the

French nation, in its time of resurrection, will shake itself with a

definite energy." - wrote the captain in his declarations in November

1937.

The scholar from Germany, which defended himself from Nazism, by taking

refuge in the study of Buddhism - distant and atemporal, falls into

history, in the prestige of time which can be directed.

"At this time, no man can be saved through books." - wrote Cioran when he was

25 years old, in 1936.

If later on he would unravel with such acrimony the foundation of illusion

of any future belief, is because he himself couldn't forgive his

ephemeral slide into a belief and in the illusionary time of

history.

Cioran's excessive skepticism, is the philosophical forged

expression of an infinite regret and the retort given over and over to

this excess of youth.

In 1946, Cioran wrote to his brother: "I have become immune to anything:

to the old beliefs and to any future belief. I've changed my opinion

concerning historical realities. Any participation at the

temporal unrests is a waste of time and a useless dissipation.

A man, if he wants to keep a spiritual dignity, he must forget his quality of

contemporary. How far could I've been now, If I knew this when I was 20

years old."

In 1937, when he takes the road to Paris, with a scholarship from the

French Institute in Bucharest, Cioran was heading towards a moment

of his life in which his old identity would've been repudiated and evacuated.

Studying in a different language and the decisive entrance in the territory

of skepticism, were the followings of a quarrel redirected towards his

interior, and they marked the discord with a part from himself, and the

separation from a whole period of his life.

France was, as he himself declares, "a liberation from my own past".

Every time he turns his eyes towards this past, the other, the adolescent,

the stranger who encounters him remains to populate his perplexities.

"How could I've been, the one I was?"

- End of part one -

English Subtitles by Marius Ticu (epistemologicalenlightenment - Karagarga account)