Tears and Saints

It is a little over the average in price but well worth the quality. The paper is off-white, making it easier on the eyes. The ink is not glossy. The cover and the material used for it makes it durable. The translator did a great job in keeping the original lyricism, it is not a word by word translation. The content of the book is up to you to judge.

Anyone who is interested in sober and sincere philosophy is a must to read. If you did enjoy Wittgenstein, Russell- you will like Cioran.

In 1937, Emil Cioran returned the saints to cynics, depressives, and blasphemers. With Tears and Saints Cioran reminds us why people have always believed in these holy Others. Not simply because they're meek, prayerful, and simple; rather, because hearing how Rose of Lima "h[u]ng herself on a cross in her room," or listening to Rumi conflate God with his lover Shams, we recall the madness of these people. Salves and charity mean little without that terrific madness--a love-spiked, lucid madness, which separated the saints from ordinary mystics.If, as Henri de Lubac suggested in The Drama of Atheist Humanism, Nietzsche was Christ-haunted, then I would suggest that Cioran, here, suffers from the haunting of the saints and the Apostles Thomas and Judas alike. And much like Nietzsche, Cioran--the son of an Orthodox priest--would spend his entire life with the Gospels and the Hebrew Prophets rattling in his head. But this is perhaps the rawest and most troubled meditation on that legacy he ever produced.In a sense, I'd say Cioran has given us a depiction of saints that would have pleased Thomas Bernhard. This is the book that introduced me to Cioran, and I've been reading him through its lens ever since.Acknowledgement of the superb work Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston did in her translation is a necessity for any review of this book: she was an adept interpreter of Cioran's bitter prose.

Whether God exists or not, the saints are facts. In this slim, aphoristic book (his last written in Romanian), Cioran sets out to measure the distance between us and the saints. He finds in them an antipode to ourselves--their sickness, melancholy, insomnia and lust for the absolute all charged positive, where for us they've become SYMPTOMS.For Cioran, the saints' tears are evidence of a special consciousness--a nostalgia for an Absolute, a dissatisfaction with the world as we find it--that we recapture at the irrational extremes of sex, boredom, illness and, above all, the melacholy rapture of music. Cioran doesn't try to psychoanalyze the saints, or dismiss them as aberrations. Instead, he uses them to explore parts of our own psychology (our souls?) that have new meanings here, on the other side of God. What's left to us since the saints have cried? "We no longer believe in them. WE ONLY ADMIRE THEIR ILLUSIONS. Hence our compassion."

Seriously, three things made me pick up this book when I had no notion of who E.M. Cioran was. First, the beautiful cover with a detail from "The Descent from the Cross"; second, the intriguing title; and third the quote from the Chicago Tribune printed on the back: "makes the postwar French Existentialists look like a 6th-grade meeting of the Future Bores of America". I enjoy the French Existentialists - I had to see what was up with Cioran.What is up with Cioran? He is absolutely top-notch: searching for the origin of tears in the lives of female saints known for copious tears ... from them he build a case against theology and institution and for intuition and sentiment ... all the while being highly political (Romanian politics).The book pieces itself together in a series of small clips. An example: "Schopenhaurer maintains that, if we were to invite the dead back to life, they would refuse. I believe, on the contrary, that they would die a second time from too much joy."An enthralling, thought-provoking book to be savored. And you can still enjoy the French existentialists.

I gave this to my friend who likes to pretend he isn't a Catholic but I know he totally is, and he loves this book. If you know a crypto-Catholic, too, and want them to know you see what they're up to, give them a copy of Tears and Saints.

excellent