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Emil Cioran, Lena Dunham, Per Petterson — Do I Really Want Them Hanging Out in My Psyche?

Emil Cioran, Lena Dunham, Per Petterson — Do I Really Want Them Hanging Out in My Psyche?

Last updated on: May 25, 2016 at 1:58 pm by Barbara Falconer Newhall

Emil Cioran, Lena Dunham, Per Petterson — Do I Really Want Them Hanging Out in My Psyche? 2016-05-25T13:58:45-08:00 Barbara Falconer Newhall

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Emil Cioran

Try this thought on for size: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”

And this: “I live only because it is in my power to die whenever I want; without the idea of suicide I would have killed myself a long time ago.”

Those are the words of Emil Mihai Cioran, a Romanian-born French writer whose somewhat obscure twentieth-century work got a reexamination by Joseph Bottum in a First Things article.

The article, “Words of Nectar and Cyanide,” notes that Cioran was an aphorist par excellence. To wit: “If I had children, I would strangle them immediately.”

And, “I long to be free – desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.”

Close Encounters With Emil Cioran . . .

Bottum, former editor of the conservative magazine First Things, is a braver soul than I. He seems to have emerged unscathed from his time spent with the downward-facing Cioran.

I’m not so tough-minded. I discourage easily. So I’m careful about the writers I allow to spend time in my psyche, rearranging the furniture. It was all I could to do read Bottum’s essay through to the end.

Reading Cioran – reading about Cioran – reminded me of a conversation I once had in the city room of the Oakland Tribune. It was with a colleague, Brenda Payton, who was writing a political column for the Trib at the time.

When I asked Brenda what she thought of a particular book that had come across my desk, she replied that she hadn’t read much by that writer.

“I don’t know whether I can entrust myself to her,” she said.

Entrust?

Is that what we do when we engage with a book – or a movie or a TV series, for that matter? Are we entrusting ourselves and our ever shape-shifting psyches to that writer? Or, in the case of a TV show, to that roomful of writers?

The Girls.

I’m taking Brenda’s point. I think we do.

My husband and I watched TV’s “Breaking Bad” from its depressing beginning to its almost-uplifting end. It painted a sorry picture of the human condition, but I let it into my brain for months on end anyway. The same goes for the evenings I’ve spent Lena Dunham and her of sad-sack bunch of twenty-somethings on “Girls.” Ditto my recent read, Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson’s novel about a man abandoned as a boy by his father.

Sometimes the psychic furniture can do with a little rearranging. But in my case, Cioran is not going to be the one to do it. I still haven’t made up my mind about “Girls;” I keep hoping those kids will grow up in time to teach me something. Petterson, on the other hand, I like. He’s invited to pull up a chair and have a seat.

If this post didn’t bum you out too much, consider clicking over to “The Trouble With Daffodils.” If you need cheering up, try “A Child Is Born — And So Is A Grandpa.” Barbara is the author of the prize-winning book from Patheos Press, “Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith.”

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