Into the dust of his own mind

‘Toward a Vegetal Wisdom,’ Paul Stubbs’ essay on the writings of E.M. Cioran.

If he was not necessarily a writer of vision, certainly not of the imagination, he was nonetheless a writer of the eternal detour, possessed only of the haunted desire to waste the ghost of himself upon the template of an artificial existence. Unnaturally human, he swayed in tandem to the nerve-blades of his own despair, lost as he was to reality as if to the contingency of an always shadowy impasse. He had a Nietzschean temperament in the sense of being only a pebble of Nietzsche’s mountain. He never quite amounted to anything more than what happened to him. And despite possessing the necessary rancour and hostility to end entire cultures and civilizations, he never did. Merely he fainted into each faithless epoch of history, and on waking knew that he would always be unable to ever conform in the flesh to his own image of himself.

[Via Black Herald Press]