Romanians entertain a unique relationship to failure

From The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair by Costica Bradatan, The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 28, 2016

But when Cioran went to college in Bucharest, the country’s southern capital, he stepped into a whole new cultural universe. Here the winning skills were different: the art of doing nothing, sophistry (from slightly playful to plainly cynical) trumping intellectual soundness, procrastination as métier, wasting one’s life as vocation. As an undergraduate philosophy student, Cioran came in touch with some of Bucharest’s best performers in this respect. The mix of intellectual brilliance and a striking sense of personal failure that some of them exhibited gained his unconditional, perpetual admiration:

In Bucharest I met lots of people, many interesting people, especially losers, who would show up at the cafe, talking endlessly and doing nothing. I have to say that, for me, these were the most interesting people there. People who did nothing all their lives, but who otherwise were brilliant.

For the rest of his life Cioran would remain secretly indebted to that land of failure that was his country. And he was right to do so. For Romanians entertain a unique relationship to failure; just as the Eskimos have countless words for snow, the Romanian language seems to have just as many associated with failure. One of the verbal constructions most often used in Romanian, which Cioran cherished, is n-a fost să fie (literally, “it wasn’t to be,” but with strong predestination undertones). The country is truly a goldmine.

Cioran was famously a misanthrope, but if there was one human type for which he had understanding and compassion, it was le raté, the failure. In 1941, already in Paris, he confesses to a Romanian friend: “I would like to write a Philosophy of Failure, with the subtitle For the Exclusive Use of the Romanian People, but I don’t think I will be able to do it.” Whenever Cioran looked back to his youth, he would always remember, with a mix of fascination, tenderness, and admiration, the great losers and the endless spectacle of failure he encountered in Bucharest. As an emerging writer, the country’s literary scene surely attracted him, but not nearly as much as its failure scene: “My best friends in Romania were not at all writers, but failures.”

Failures still exist of course and Bucharest is still full of them, but the world is now so dominated by the idea of a career and a steady income, even in Romania. And unlike Cioran people read so little these days, unless as part of a course. Even successful literary men or actors or artists require more courage than in the 1930s. The haute bourgeois, with their grand houses and servants and sometimes some culture, were destroyed by the Communists and will not be replaced for many decades, but the graduate petite bourgeoisie are everywhere, churned out by public and private universities.

Failure does not matter in Bucharest. R.G. Waldeck was a Jewish American journalist who was in Bucharest until Romania and the USA went to war.  She wrote about the city in a good book called 'Athene Palace' (1943), in which she said this.

The Romanians possess to the highest degree the capacity of receiving the blows of fate while relaxed. They fall artfully, soft and loose in every joint and muscle as only those trained in falling can be. The secret of the art of falling is, of course, not to be afraid of falling and the Romanians are not afraid, as Western people are. Long experience has taught them that each fall may result in unforeseen opportunities and that somehow they always get on their feet again.