Sleep is forgetfulness: life’s drama, its complications and obsessions vanish completely, and every awakening is a new beginning, a new hope. Indeed, like many other aspects of the human condition, such as freedom, isolation, boredom, meaninglessness, and awareness of death, insomnia becomes a potent source of suffering in life however, it is perhaps more separate from these other human experiences in that chronic insomnia often has significant ramifications on one’s physical health, due to either sleep deprivation or the unnatural sleep-wake cycle that the insomniac has to deal with. In this essay we also find Cioran describing insomnia as one of the most irritating and agonising conditions to live with, which you can imagine it would be for a chronic sufferer like himself (as well as many other sleepless, strung-out people out there). Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot. The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal that cannot sleep. One such essay is titled "Man, the Insomniac Animal," in which he writes:
This book consists of short essays very short essays in fact, as none are longer than a few pages.
Insomnia: A Painful Aspect of the Human ConditionĬioran covers the subject of insomnia in his first book On the Heights of Despair (1934), published when Cioran was just 22 years old. But – at least from Cioran’s point of view – there is potentially something useful about this state of wakefulness in the night. I, too, have periodically experienced insomnia, so much so that the inability to sleep has become an all-too-familiar aspect of life, a source of mental disturbance and discomfort. I discovered a strange kind of kinship when I first read Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born (1973), I think partly for his dark, pessimistic, and self-deprecating humour, but also because of his complaints of sleeplessness. He actually found insomnia to be an insightful condition, casting it as something distinctly human, as well as a state that could be highly productive for the philosopher. Cioran long struggled with insomnia, which began in his youth although, as we shall see, he did not exclusively view it as a curse. We can also think of Cioran as the insomniac philosopher. His prose is often reminiscent of the other great philosophical aphorists, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (the latter being a major influence on Cioran). He is an essayist and aphorist, best known for his unrelenting pessimism, lyrical prose, and acerbic wit. His early work was written in Romanian, but when he moved to Paris in adulthood, he switched to writing in French. Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995) was a Romanian philosopher born in the Transylvanian village of Rasinari.
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