Amurgul Gîndurilor

Emil Mihai Cioran wrote Amurgul gîndurilor (The Twilight of Thoughts) in Paris in the 1930s as one of his last works, along with Îndreptar patimaş (The Passionate Handbook), in his native Romanian before switching to French (Amurgul gîndurilor, Sibiu: Dacia Traiana, 1940). This may have been not so much for the supposed greater analytic clarity of French prose as an escape from the mindset of an unreflected-on native language with its inevitable conceptual constraints. These final Romanian texts are rightly seen as harbingers of what was to come in his work written in French.