Young Cioran skiing in the Carpathian mountains[/caption]“We like to imagine that poets die poetic deaths. One thinks of Shelley, who, after having reportedly seen his doppelganger, drowned off the coast of Tuscany while sailing out to sea in his boat, the Don Juan. Or Nietzsche, the “mad” philosopher and iconoclast who suddenly collapses in Turin while witnessing the flogging of a horse, his tear-leaden arms thrown around the animal’s neck. In the 1990s, an emaciated, elderly man with sharp eyes and wavy hair is found sitting on the side of the street somewhere in Paris’s Latin Quarter. He is lost. He can recall neither the way back home nor even his address. He is taken home. Eventually he stops eating. After an accidental fall, he is brought to a hospital. He drifts in and out of lucidity, rarely recognizing those closest to him. He stops speaking entirely. After slipping into a coma, Emil Cioran dies, on June 20, 1995.”
— Eugene Thacker, in the foreword to “Anathemas and Admirations” (1986) by Emil M. Cioran, translated from the French by Richard Howard
[ Cioran suffered and died of Alzheimer disease ]
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