Emil Cioran – Autograph manuscript on birth.

Emil Cioran (1911.1995)

Autograph manuscript.

One large quarto page. No place or date (Circa 1969-1970). Right margin frayed.

"To ruminate on birth is to sigh and pray for another mistake than that of being."

A remarkable manuscript by the Romanian philosopher – preparatory to his work On the Inconvenience of Being Born – questioning the meaning of existence and the human sufferings resulting from being born.

It is certain that if I have become attached to this problem, it is out of inclination, out of a passion for the unsolvable. In other words, out of a need for torment. For where can this imagining of the phenomenon of birth lead me? To nothing, except perhaps more suffering. But perhaps suffering is a vital necessity for some. They believe they can only move forward by torturing themselves, by inflicting defeat upon defeat. I circle around my own birth, and start from every birth, but I cannot stop what has been set in motion, what has already happened.

But perhaps this flight has a more serious meaning. It might represent a roundabout way of questioning creation as a whole, for without a doubt, birth is the starting point of all being and all power. To question birth is tantamount to attacking origins . That there is no longer an origin is also the will that nothing has taken place, that what has been is not, that nothing is and that it would have been preferable that there were nothing, that being is an error ; as if one could conceive of any other error than that of Being! To ruminate on birth is to sigh and pray for another error than that of being.