Word: skepticisms
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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First published in France in 1964, the "fragments" of The Fall into Time are described by their author as "rather like sermons." The chapter headings are suggestive: "The Tree of Life," "Is the Devil a Skeptic?" "On Sickness," "The Dangers of Wisdom." If Cioran, against his will, can be taken as a spokesman for our times, it is because he so excruciatingly expresses the dilemma of the man born too late to be a Christian and too early to be anything else...
Obviously there is a Nietzschean streak in Cioran. A chapter called "Skeptic & Barbarian" dubs the skeptic -himself, of course-"that living dead man." With bitter sentimentality he half praises the barbarian, the man in touch with his instincts and out of touch with cursed self-awareness. "He who has never envied the vegetable," he writes, "has missed the human drama...
Karmel's Restif, splendid fellow, is not only a gossipist and eavesdropper but an aging whoremonger, moralist, printer and pamphleteer, skeptic, citizen, sentimentalist and night-prowling philosopher. He catches perfectly the queerness of the scene when he does reach the Bastille: "The fortress is being looted. From the high towers precious documents float down into the moat." He records the rainy grayness of Paris and the strange periods of calm when the Revolution catches its breath ("Most people lost interest . . . The price of bread continued to rise"). He sees the city's whores applaud a lynching "with their...
...great potential in the urban studies program," he insists. "But when we begin to take those new ideas out into the cities and try to put them into action," he worries that Rutgers-"Big Father across the river"-will block student projects that become too radical. Says another black skeptic: "If Livingston takes the revolutionaries off the streets, who's going to be left out there running the business?" But he adds: "You got to have college to survive...
Less than 35 per cent thought that discipline of the demonstrators was too lenient. One skeptic commented, "What was the discipline? Three nights without television...