The Trouble With Being Born

Darkly comic aphorisms on time, mortality and human relationships from one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers ‘Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach.‘In The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran grapples with the major questions of human existence- birth, death, God, the passing of time, how to relate to others and how to make ourselves get out of bed in the morning.In a series of interlinking aphorisms which are at once pessimistic, poetic and extremely funny, Cioran finds a kind of joy in his own despair, revelling in the absurdity and futility of our existence, and our inability to live in the world.Translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard, The Trouble With Being Born is a provocative, illuminating testament to a singular mind.

Author Biography

E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) was one of Central Europe’s most remarkable philosophers, whose thinking was influenced by pessimism and existentialism. A Romanian, he lived most of his life in Paris. His major works in Romanian include On the Heights of Despair and, in French, A Short History of Decay and Drawn and Quartered. He refused nearly every literary prize he was awarded.