When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: ‘Go for twenty minutes in a cemetery and you’ll see that, though your worry won’t disappear, you’ll almost forget about it and you’ll feel better.’ Just a few days ago I told a young woman who was suffering fearfully from an unhappy love, 'Since you don’t live far from Montparnasse, take a walk through the cemetery, just half an hour, and you will see that your misery will appear bearable.’ In such a situation, it is much better to do that than to go to a doctor; there is no medicine that can help. To visit a cemetery in such a situation is a lesson, a lesson in wisdom! I have always practiced such methods, or recommended them, although it may not seem altogether serious, but it has been effective in every case. What can one say that is meaningful to someone in despair? Absolutely nothing, or almost nothing. My advice shows immediate result.

Emil Cioran, Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E.M. Cioran The last time I was in Paris was in December 2016. I remember that it was cold and grey and that much of the time I spent on my own was spent in bookstores or at Montparnasse Cemetery. I visited Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s graves (next to each other for all eternity, and littered with ticket stubs from the metro), then I wandered over to Baudelaire’s (covered in flowers and worn lipstick), and then I managed to find Cioran’s (farther from all the rest, with a letterbox labeled “Lettres pour Emil Cioran”). Cioran was absolutely right about the comfort we can find in cemeteries. Not because our suffering pales in comparison to that of the dead but because, for those who suffer existentially, the aisles of dead are, above all, familiar to us. In a poem I wrote afterward, reflecting on this visit, I called Montparnasse a “garden of foreigners calling us home,” and I still believe that is the best explanation I can give for the comfort Cioran (and I) saw in it.

