Cioran Withdrawal: Bits and Pieces

A few final excerpts from the last few essays (all centered on Cioran's thoughts, observations re various people).

On an anonymous woman (She Was Not of Their World . . .):

Adieu was the sign and the law of her nature, the flash of her predestination, the mark of her passage on earth; hence she bore it like a nimbus, not by indiscretion, but by solidarity with the invisible.

*

On F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Thus Fitzgerald's admirers deplore the fact that he brooded over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. It is a second-order mind that cannot chose (sic) between literature and the "real dark night of the soul."

*

On Weininger (from a brief letter):

In Weininger it was the dizzying exaggeration that fascinated me, the infinity of negation, the denial of common sense, the murderous intransigence, the search for an absolute position, the craving of carrying a piece of reasoning to the point where it destroyed itself and ruined the structure to which it belonged.