CIORAN Emil M. (1911-1995). Lot n° 32

AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIPT, De l'inconvénient d'être né; 210 folios in 3 spiral notebooks in-4 (27 x 21 cm), numbered I to III. Manuscript of elaboration and work for his great book De l'inconvénient d'être né (Gallimard, 1973). On three spiral notebooks from the Librairie-papeterie Joseph Gibert, the first one blue and the two others yellow, Cioran wrote his work with a blue ballpoint pen on the front of the sheets, paginated from 1 to 210; he has, ten times, made additions on the back. On the cover of the first booklet he wrote in red pen the title: De l'inconvénient d'être né. The edition is divided into twelve sections. The manuscript opens with the section II (the number is written at the top of the first page), and corresponds more or less to the sections II to VIII, which are not numbered in this manuscript; but many aphorisms or developments will be moved to take place in the other sections, or even in other books, such as an anecdote (p. 125) that will be found with variants in Écartèlement: a visit from an exalted young man, who advances towards Cioran as if to assassinate him. The manuscript shows Cioran at work, correcting and reworking his text to reach the perfect form. Thus, the first aphorism is entirely corrected and rewritten; the first version, which can be deciphered under the erasures ("If the feeling of the nullity of everything alone could confer sanctity, I really wouldn't be able to avoid canonization"), becomes the definitive text: "If the disgust of the world alone conferred sanctity, I don't see how I could avoid canonization". Others are corrected in red or green pen; sometimes, Cioran pasted a new version of the text on the original one. Some aphorisms are marked in the margin by red crosses, or by series of three question marks. But the manuscript reveals a quantity of unpublished texts, deleted, crossed out in blue or red pen. Thus, on the first page, after the first two aphorisms, three others have been crossed out by Cioran. "Being sterile - with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words". "After a sleepless night, passers-by seem like automatons: none of them seem to live, to breathe, to walk. Each one seems to be moved by a spring; nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, gesticulations of spectres. A specter yourself, how would you see in others beings in flesh and blood?" "Dostoyevsky said that Russia was 'vacant'. It hasn't been for a long time... History would be tolerable only if nations accepted their vacancy and refused to leave it. But then history would cease precisely, - for the greater good of all, of those who undergo it, as well as of those who make it. We will find further on other texts that have not been deleted, and that Cioran did not include in his book. We can estimate that about half of this manuscript has remained unpublished.