“When I think of those moments of enthusiasm and frenzy, of the wild speculations that raddled and ravaged my mind, I attribute them now not to dreams of philanthropy and destruction, to the obsession with some unascertainable purity, but to an animal melancholy which, concealed beneath the mask of fervor, functioned at my expense though I was it's willing accomplice, enchanted not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious. The atrocious falling to my portion, what more could I ask? I had a wolf's soul, and my ferocity, feeding on itself, satiated, flattered me: I was, in other words, the happiest of lycanthropes.”

The above is excerpted from Emil Cioran’s “Letter to a Faraway Friend,” addressed to Constantin Noica (as translated by Richard Howard). It was not the first letter between Noica and Cioran after the latter relocated to Paris and sought French citizenship.

In 1978, for example, Cioran wrote a short letter to Noica that ended with comments about his newly published book, The Romanian Sentiment of Being. “Your last book is excellent; the only thing is that it could have been called just as well The Paraguayan Sentiment of Being,” Cioran wrote. “In your place, I would return to Logic: where, if not there, can one rave better?”

The book referenced—Constantin Noica’s The Romanian Sentiment of Being— was published by Punctum Books just last year, as translated by Octavian and Elena Gabor. It is available as free PDF from publisher, which also offers the following biography:

Constantin Noica (1909–1987) described his life as the autobiography of an idea and planned to write a book with the same title. The plan did not come to fruition; perhaps it was already fulfilled, since Noica’s life seems to have been absorbed in an idea, the love of wisdom, in which he and his disciples would partake. Noica published his first book, Mathesis sau bucuriile simple (Mathesis or the Simple Joys) when he was 25. Before World War II, he published three more books, in which we can see his preoccupation with the history of philosophy. The changes brought by the end of the war in his native Romania transformed the life of Constantin Noica as well. Considered an “anti-revolutionary” thinker, Noica was placed under house arrest in Câmpulung-Muscel between 1949 and 1958. In 1958, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and he was released after 6 years. Pray for Brother Alexander* covers his experiences during this time. He continued to publish after 1964 and was followed by the Securitate, the secret police of the communist regime, until the end of his life in 1987.

In their translator’s note, the Gabors contextualize Noica’s writing as well as Cioran’s letter, which asks “what would make the Romanian sentiment of being, even if it gave some insight about being itself, be more special than the Paraguayan, French, Vietnamese, Nigerian, or American ones?”

According to Noica, “every language is, after all, the wisdom of the world in one of its versions. This wisdom of the world needs the particular wisdom of language in order to explore reality in all the ways and to transfer its knowledge into words.”

For the Gabors, the fact that the Romanian sentiment is not “more special” doesn’t mean that it lacks “uniqueness.” And “revealing” the uniqueness “may increase the understanding of being” that humanity shares.

If this posited uniqueness seems at odds with the alleged “understanding of being” shared by the species, it may be due to my own incoherence, or the way in which my predeliction for pessimistic-optimism is at odds with itself.

If you’d like to read Cioran’s “Letter to a Faraway Friend” in its entirety, you can. The words, italics, and punctuation are Cioran’s, but the annotations are mine. The PDF file can be downloaded by clicking on the image below.

Au fin, Cioran in History and Utopia:

Foreseeable miseries do not excite men's imaginations, and there is no example of a revolution breaking out in the name of a dark future, a grim prophecy. Who could have guessed, in the last century, that the new society would, by its vices and its iniquities, permit the old one to preserve, even to consolidate itself; that the possible, having become reality, would fly to the rescue of the past?

Au fin redouble, Maurice Blanchot:

 The writer sees himself in the Revolution. It attracts him because it is the time during which literature becomes history. It is his truth. Any writer who is not induced by the very fact of writing to think, "I am the revolution, only freedom allows me to write," is not really writing.

* *

[* Punctum published a translation of Pray for Brother Alexander in 2018.]

Blanchot, Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction & Literary Essays. Edited by George Quasha. Translated by Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill/Barrytown, Ltd, 1999.

———. The Writing of the Disaster = L’écriture Du Désastre. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Cioran, E M. History and Utopia. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015.