Emil Cioran—a Romanian philosopher— is sometimes considered to be the best aphorist since Friedrich Nietzsche. This episode is about Cioran's position on suicide—something he believed one always elects to do too late. His ultimate position is that it is a tragedy for mankind to have come into existence at all, what with all the suffering, pain, and doom that lurks behind every moment in life. This position is oftentimes compared to the anti-natalist position—the belief that it is morally and ethically wrong for human beings to continue producing other human beings.

Though much of his writing consists in bleak rhetoric about life, consciousness, and death, he expresses what many of us have thought at one point or another in our lives. Life is difficult—and sometimes it just doesn't get better. Cioran would suggest that we might as well continue, in spite of life itself.

You can purchase Emil Cioran's "The Trouble With Being Born" here: https://amzn.to/3cm1vE3

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Stephen Graham Jones' book Mapping the Interior is one of those special books one wishes they would have found earlier. It is a book both about the elusive nature of truth and the potential illusion of memory—and how one young boy attempts to commune with his dead father's ghost amid a fractured reality.

Jones has been compared to David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity movement—a literary methodology that attempts to bind the postmodern tropes of cynicism and irony with that of unalloyed sentimentalism. It turns out that horror is oftentimes one of the best genres through which to tell a love story.

You can purchase Stephen Graham Jones' "Mapping the Interior" here: https://amzn.to/3rDYyoP

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Most of us have asked, at one point or another, what the meaning of life is, and by extension, how to proceed through life once one realizes that it could be meaningless. This was a huge topic of reflection for the French-Algerian journalist and thinker, Albert Camus, throughout the first half of the 20th century. In this episode of The Last Sisyphus Podcast, I discuss how Camus' philosophical idea of "the Absurd" manifests in his first published piece of fiction, "The Stranger," and how we, in the 21st century, can realize and apply the Absurd in our own lives.

You can purchase Camus' "The Stranger" here: https://amzn.to/38vupQU

Don't forget to check out The Last Sisyphus' social media, Patreon, and Substack by clicking HERE!

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