Précis de décomposition is (I think) Cioran’s best book, and certainly the one that put him on the map. It is not easy to destroy an idol: it takes as much time as is required to promote and to worship one. Within the circle which encloses human beings in a community of interests and hopes, the mind opposed to mirages clears a path from the center toward the periphery. In the 1940s, against the backdrop of world war, Cioran began a project originally entitled Exercices négatifs (Negative Exercises), then Penseur d’occasion (Second-Hand Thinker), before finally becoming Précis de decomposition, or A Short History of Decay, in the present translation. The poverty of expression which is the mind’s poverty, is manifest in the indigence of words, in their exhaustion and their degradation: the attributes by which we determine things and sensations finally lie before us like so much verbal carrion.

While it is only at their final stages, at the dissolution of a whole system of behavior and belief, that the other civilizations could enjoy that lively exercise which lends a flavor of futility to life, it was in full ripeness, in full possession of their powers and of the future that these two epochs knew the tedium heedless of everything and permeable to everything.The endorsement from the times literary supplement on the front cover reads "passionate, forensic, lyrical”, but really it should be indulgent, verbose and frequently boring. Here certitudes abound: suppress them, best of all suppress their consequences, and you recover paradise. Though its title is taken from the work of philosophy by Emil Cioran, it is not an adaptation of the book. Whether you do or do not subscribe to Cioran’s extreme form of pessimism doesn’t matter so much: it is simply a great work of literature that should be read.

And how could we endure the codes, the customs, the paragraphs of the heart which inertia and propriety have superimposed upon the futile and intelligent vices, if it were not for those playful beings whose refinement puts them at once at the apex and in the margin of society? When, on so many brinks and byroads, our eyes refused to drown in themselves, their dryness preserved the object which amazed them. For a positive science of the meaning of life would depopulate the earth in a day, and not even a madman could succeed in reviving the fruitful improbability of Desire. stationary movement, the richest expenditure of energy without gesture, the hostile and impassioned expectation of an irreparable lightning bolt. But he is the chatterbox of the universe; he speaks in the name of others; his self loves the plural.

M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid-twentieth-century Europe.

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears—just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time. We mistrust the swindler, the trickster, the con man; yet to them we can impute none of history’s great convulsions; believing in nothing, it is not they who rummage in your hearts, or your ulterior motives; they leave you to your apathy, to your despair or to your uselessness; to them humanity owes the few moments of prosperity it has known: it is they who save the peoples whom fanatics torture and “idealists” destroy. Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude. You listen, have a feel for what is said, but quickly lose interest because your friend is only talking for their own pleasure.Ever had the feeling that life is utterly meaningless, religion an elaborate joke, and philosophy a blunt tool to open the mysteries of existence? The man who managed, by an imagination overflowing with pity, to record all the sufferings, to be contemporary with all the pain and all the anguish of any given moment—such a man—supposing he could ever exist—would be a monster of love and the greatest victim in the history of the human heart. For those given to viewing the world through rose-colored spectacles Cioran provides a powerful antidote. When we have glimpsed, by an overwhelming and readily renewable intuition, anyone’s own uselessness, it is incomprehensible that everyone has not done the same.