Ah, let not the wind of confusion lead our minds astray. For that matter, let’s shed some light on the matter, shall we ?
Cicero was a Roman who played a significant role in the literary, as well as the politics area of the late Roman Repulica. He was quite the universal man for his time, and is credited as a very prolific author, above Seneca and even Augustine of Hippo. He wrote letters, some fifty something speeches and, towards the twilight of his life, philosophy. He was a good man.
Seneca is a different story. I have a friend who calls himself Seneca. Seneca the Great, he says.
Some two thousand years later, in the Carpatho-Danubiano-Ponthic area, today’s Romania, the descendants of the same people amongst which Cicero emerged gave birth to Emil Cioran, modern writer, philosopher and essayist, dubbed ‘doctor in death matters’. He lived in a penthouse in Paris for most of his life and ate at the students’ canteen. He rode a bike. He gives account that once he rode his bike along the alleys of a cemetery, until stopping besides a funerary stone to smoke a cigar and have a rest. Later he told that that was the most active period of his life. As a matter of fact, the ‘doctor in death matters’ was something that he had come up with, in his twenties or something. By all means, he was no optimist. Actually, he was quite the opposite: he was an insomniac. Meaning he slept less, and naturally, had more time to read and write. In fact, here are some of his aphorisms, which I have carefully picked out with my own delicate fingers and translated with my piercing intellect:
[i]‘To be alive’ - suddenly, I am smitten by the oddness of this expression, as if it didn’t apply to anyone in particular.
When refusing your own lyrism, the blotting of a page becomes a challenge: what good is it to write exactly what you had in mind ?..
What a disappointment that the wiseman that I am mostly in need of right now, Epicurus, wrote more than three hundred treaties ! Oh, and what a relief that they’re lost.
Religion, as any of the other ideologies that have inherited its viciousness, is nothing but a crusade against humor.
It’s easier to follow Jupiter than Lao Tzu.
Asking man to love anoher man is absurd. It’s like asking a virus to love another virus.[/i]
Ok, that’s enough said, you get the idea. The essence - if there is such a thing - is that Cicero was a philosophy canner, while Cioran was a caviller, albeit a very talented one.