Reading some poetry tonight, I came across the name Emil Cioran, with whom I wasn’t familiar. Apparently, the Philosophy Department of my university didn’t think his work noteworthy, and others have a different opinion. What struck me in reading about him wasn’t so much himself but this quote:

William H. Gass called Cioran’s work “a philosophical romance on modern themes of alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as a agony, reason as disease.”

Gass did come up at the good ol’ alma mater, and I still keep Omensetter’s Luck handy for inspiration. And “awareness as a agony” – the torture of consciousness – is a more recent theme in my own, as yet unpublished, work. Small world, y’all, in which Gass’ 1954 dissertation at Cornell was entitled “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor.”

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought