Book Review: "The Trouble With Being Born" by E.M Cioran

I read this whole book in one night and honestly, it was one of the best books I have read this year. It really requires you to think about every single word because of its deep and philosophical stance on the fact that we should not be concerned about death but actually hate the fact that we were ever born. The book is formatted in various small bites of information and so, it makes it easier to read.

The main reason I loved this book though is because with each and every one of these small bites, whether they are one sentence or one page, you have to stop and think about them for a few seconds or a few minutes depending on the depth. There is a different thought about each and every piece and with every chapter, there is a new thought.

The book is very well organised so that the chapters make sense in the way you read them. It is not just random bits of information here and there. Each bit of information builds on the last and one chapter builds upon the last one. The book is surprisingly easy to get through and how it covers the philosophies of life and death in the context of being born is just mind-blowingly thought-provoking. Let's take a look at some of the quotations I enjoyed in this book:

"We do not rush towards death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant, of course, to treat as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good - have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives? Yet evil, the real evil is behind, not ahead of us. What escaped Jesus did not escape the Buddha: 'If three things did not exist in the world, O disciples, the Perfect One would not appear in the world...' And ahead of old age and death he places the fact of birth, source of every infirmity, every disaster."

This quotation just made me shiver. It has some incredible amounts of philosophy concerning religion, life and death, the good and evil argument and the way in which we only fear death because of the fact we were once born in the first place. Something that it takes a while to understand but there it is.

"The vision of non-reality, of universal default, is the product of an everyday sensation and a sudden frisson. Everything is a game - without such a revelation, the sensation we haul through our usual lives would not have the characteristic stamp our metaphysical experiences require to be distinguished from their imitations, our discomforts. For every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience."

[Exhales dramatically] Did you hear that? This quotation shows us that Cioran is attempting to make us see that there is usual sensations that we require in order to actually think about our own existences. It is something we would normally avoid. But do this test: sit there, do nothing, and think about what will happen when you die. I guarantee you will not give a shite after a while. It's being born that was the trouble in the first place. If you were not born, you cannot die.

"For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal human being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate."

For some reason, I could hear my older brother saying this - it definitely seems like the type of thing he would say. Anyways, EM Cioran definitely has some sort of narcissism buried in there and this one actually made me just stop for quite a few minutes and stare into the void. Not only because I heard my older brother, but also because there is something about this quotation in which you kind of think whether this is how a lot of academics view the world. Is this how they see normal people? That's frightening.

Here are a couple of quotations that are a little shorter that you can think about for yourself:

"We should deprive ourselves, I forget who once remarked of the 'pleasures of piety.' Has religion ever been justified more delicately?"

"What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately, we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do."

"A book is a postponed suicide."

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one's reach."

So what do you think? I definitely loved this book and now I can go and not sleep for a few days without thinking about this text. Thanks EM Cioran, I'm going to be deep and philosophical for the next week, just what I need.