As Diogenes lived in a tub, Cioran lived on the intellectual margins of the modern world. He never lectured or held an academic position. Like his friends Beckett and Ionesco, he stood apart from all the official trappings of his chosen medium, philosophy. There is a kind of manic humor in these howls of pain, a vestige of tears in these derisions: not since Nietzsche has a thinker revealed himself so drastically; not since Heraclitus has the necessity of fragments been so embraced. All Gall Is Divided is a pillow book in reverse, a breviary of estrangement, which nonetheless ends by rejoicing in die contradictions and confusions of human fate. As his Pulitzer Prize-winning translator Richard Howard remarks, "You fraternize with Emil Cioran at your peril, but it is the kind of danger that keeps you alive".
