From Cioran's Essay on Eliade

Excerpts:

I first met Eliade around 1932, in Bucharest, where I had just finished some sort of studies in philosophy. He was at that time the idol of the "new generation," a magic formula we were proud to invoke.
*
 I have never been able to read Balzac; to tell the truth, I stopped trying on threshold of adolescence. His world is closed to me, inaccessible; I never manage to enter it; I am refractory to it. How many times has Eliade tried to convert me! He first read the Comedie humaine in Bucharest; he reread it in Paris in 1947; perhaps he is rereading it in Chicago now.
*
Since Pascal and Kierkegaard, we can no longer conceive of "salvation" without a procession of infirmities, and without the secret pleasures of the interior drama.
*
We are all, Eliade first of all, ci-devant believers; we are all religious spirits without religion. 

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