Emil CIORAN - Manuscript on knowledge and work.

Emil CIORAN (1911.1995)

Autograph manuscript.

A large octavo page crossed out in red pen. Slnd

Missing at the head of the page with a slight damage to the text.

Cioran recalls the memory of two childhood friends and cynically compares them to Napoleon Bonaparte.

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The image of two high school friends comes to mind. Both of extremely poor peasant extraction. What makes me think of them is an inexplicable thing that had already struck me at school: they knew everything without ever working. Excellent in all areas, they immediately understood any detail of the sessions and remembered every detail that the teachers could rattle off. Everything that could be known, they knew. I don't think once they had to make an effort to understand. They simply understood, as if it were just commonplaces. Even in geometry it seemed as if they remembered everything they learned, but, in their case, the word learn is meaningless, because precisely they were not learning. In this way they resembled Napoleon, who, having fought sixty battles, affirmed at Saint Helena that in the last he knew no more than in the first about the art of war. My comrades also carried within them this innate knowledge, with this difference that one became a judge and the other something even less brilliant.