Stephen King's "Dr. Sleep", much ado about nothing

I'm happy to be one of the millions of Stephen King fans, one of his Constant Readers. I had looked forward to reading Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, but I found the novel disappointing. Don't get me wrong, I totally enjoyed reading it, it was just not one of my favorites. Even worse. I mean The Dead Zone wasn't one of my favorites either, but it was an awesome book. The same with 11/22/63. But Dr. Sleep is nowhere near The Dead Zone or 11/22/63. 

Dr. Sleep reads like a collage of previous Stephen King novels. It reminded me how much I loved the Stand, and Dreamcatcher, and Insomnia. But when you peel off the stuff King borrows from his earlier works, there's not much left for Dr. Sleep to be, except a small puff of steam dissipating in darkness.

Let's just say that Dr. Sleep is much better than a Dean Koontz novel, and not as boring as Bag of Bones.

But it's not a good Stephen King novel. 

Dr. Sleep is about Dan Torrance. The kid from The Shining is now a grown man fighting alcoholism and a bad temper. While he tries to stay sober, he decides to redeem his sins by using his shining in a positive way. That is, working in a hospice, he helps sick people die peacefully. After being coached by Dan, a.k.a. Dr. Sleep, old people manage to give their last breath — "the gasp" — and there is a red steam rising out of their mouths, nose and eyes. The mist hovers around their body and then fades mysteriously. 

Now, Dan gets in touch with another prodigy who has the shining, Abra Stone. Her paranormal powers are even greater than Dan's. But that's what makes her a perfect prey for a group of psychic vampires called the True Knot. These vampires don't look like Dracula, no fangs or capes, but they appear as boring RV people traveling around. Their leader, Rose the Hat, deposits their victims' steam or psychic gas in canisters she keeps hidden in her Earth Cruiser. She feeds her crew from time to time, when they get hungry and there's a shortage of "steamheads". Now, their supply is running low and they go after Abra, "the mother of all steamheads". The girl's shining, especially if extracted by severe torture, will keep them going for a few hundred years at least. 

Predictably, Dan joins forces with Abra and defeats The True Knot forever and ever. 

Two aspects of the novel stand out as original: the characterization of the True Knot, and the psychic wars between Abra and Dan on the one hand, and the circle of the True Knot, on the other. King moves away from the image of evil beings roaming the earth under the guise of a traveling carnival; an idea going back at least to Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. King keeps the idea that satanic groups are nomadic, but instead of equating them to the roaring Hell's Angels, he portrays them as the Mild Angels, the placid RV people. They get away with their crimes because they blend perfectly in the environment, nobody pays attention to them: 

"You hardly see them, right? Why would you? They’re just the RV People, elderly retirees and a few younger compatriots living their rootless lives on the turnpikes and blue highways, staying at campgrounds where they sit around in their Walmart lawnchairs and cook on their hibachis while they talk about investments and fishing tournaments and hotpot recipes and God knows what. They’re the ones who always stop at fleamarkets and yardsales, parking their damn dinosaurs nose-to-tail half on the shoulder and half on the road, so you have to slow to a crawl in order to creep by. They are the opposite of the motorcycle clubs you sometimes see on those same turnpikes and blue highways; the Mild Angels instead of the wild ones."

The only difference between this group of vampires and the normal RV people is that vampires don't have dogs. 

"They don’t like dogs, and dogs don’t like them. You might say dogs see through them. To the sharp and watchful eyes behind the cut-rate sunglasses. To the strong and long-muscled hunters’ legs beneath the polyester slacks from Walmart. To the sharp teeth beneath the dentures, waiting to come out. They don’t like dogs, but they like certain children. Oh yes, they like certain children very much."

That is, tasty children who have the shining, like Abra Stone. 

King is very inventive in his account of the parapsychological war between Abra Stone and Rose the Hat. Abra is able to jump bodies and see through other people's eyes, while others see through her eyes. This is what she and Dan call turning the wheel. Using this trick, Abra is able to fool Rose the Hat, not once, but twice, by giving her the wrong location. That is, in one instance, Abra jumps into Dan's body and gives Rose the impression she is where Dan is, that is on her way to Colorado, when in fact she's at home in New Hampshire. These mind games are reminiscent of the ones between Jonesy and Mr. Grey in Dreamcatcher.

 

While these aspects of the novel are original and entertaining, the story doesn't have enough emotional depth to make the reader care for the characters. I never cared for Dan Torrence as much as I did for Ralph Roberts in Insomnia, for instance. The depiction of Dan's struggle with alcoholism and with the demons of his dad and the Overlook Hotel is powerful and gripping. But then, we don't know enough about his gift of helping people die peacefully. How did Dan stumble upon this gift and how does it work exactly? Also, how can it go wrong? What if someone doesn't die peacefully? What's so terrible about that? Is the dull red mist that raises from the dead man's head, their soul? Is it going to go to Hell or Purgatory? Or keep roaming the earth aimlessly? If the novel explored this part of the story more, it would have been much better. 

Similarly, the author doesn't tell us much about the True Knot. And there must be a lot to tell, since they've been around for centuries. They are empty devils, concerned only with staying alive and finding new recruits and having lots of sex. But their characters, including their leader, Rose the Hat, are not really fleshed out. What's it like living such long lives? What keeps them going? What do they believe in? Do they feel loneliness, anxiety, fear? When they die there's no mist hovering above them. Their bodies just disappear. Does that mean they have no souls? King is silent on that point. 

All in all, one gets the impression that King wanted to fit too much in a book which ended up being about nothing. One reason why the novel doesn't work is that Dan's mysterious ability to help people die peacefully doesn't fit with his helping Abra against the True Knot. The only moment his strange power comes into play in the battle against the Knot is when he manages to trap Abra's great-great-mother cancerous steam in his mind and then release it against the members of the True Knot. But that's just a clever artifice. There's nothing substantial drawing these two essential strands of the book together. Maybe this book should have been two books? Or three books? Either way, on its own, it fails. But it can serve as a reminder of how good other Stephen King books are.

Review of Matthew Lett's He Who Walks the Corridors

Teddy Roosevelt is a middle-aged black man from Oklahoma, named after the 26th president of the United States. One day Teddy decides to help his friend Derek rob a convenience store. Bad idea! The Japanese owner has a shotgun ready for uninvited guests and shoots Derek. Startled, Derek has time to fire a wild shot, a shot which kills the only customer in the convenience store: Teddy's mom. 

Charged with armed robbery and manslaughter, Teddy goes to jail. Things go from bad to worse when, in a gesture worthy of Camus' Meursault, Teddy spits in the face of Father O'Brannigan, the prison's spiritual counselor. In retribution, he is thrown in Detention Block X. According to Teddy, "X block is the worst — the worst of the worst; the place where the prison condemns you to stay when even the other inmates can't stand the sight of you. 'Special cases", you might say." 

Besides Teddy, there are five other 'special cases' in Detention Block X: Jo-Jo, a murderer, Trevor Harding a.k.a. Hard-On, a pastor child molester, Sammy, an arsonist, Rodney, a robber and murderer, and Frank, a grandma rapist and killer. But there's someone else in Block X, someone who walks the corridors at night and terrorizes the inmates. Sammy is its first victim. Sammy burned down an elementary school while classes were in session. Now he screams at the ghosts of his victims, telling them that he didn't mean it. Next stop for Sammy: the loony bin. Rodney is the next victim of the mysterious visitor. As opposed to Sammy, Rodney gets butchered and leaves his cell in a body bag. The remaining inmates are more and more horrified by the midnight visitor. Hard-On, the pastor with a taste for kids, claims that "it's the wrath of God. [..] A dark angel; both beautiful and terrible to behold, who wields a fiery sword forged by the sins of man. Its edge is bitter and sharp in righteousness; its thirst for vengeance and judgment an unshakable torment to the wicked." Hard-on says that repentance is the only way to salvation. When he feels it's time to face the Dark Angel's judgment, Teddy reconsiders his crime and his relationship with his mother and prays for her forgiveness. 

He Who Walks the Corridors is a very emotional, gripping story. Matthew's Lett's portrayal of prison life is reminiscent of Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. The story is written in the first person, and reads like a confession. After the absurd killing of his mother, Teddy tries to lose himself in the strict routine of the prison, and keep the dark thoughts of suicide at bay:

I’m not that bad off yet, but time has a way of standing still in prison. It’s like someone hitting the Pause button on a DVD player showing the movie of your life and then forgetting to press Play. There you are, living life; working on the weekdays and partying on the weekends, making love to your girl, playing with your kids, hanging out with your buddies at the house, paying the bills and hoping that someday things will get a little bit better.

Then, BAM! Like a lightning strike on a hot summer’s day, life stops. It all stops, and you’re left with nothing but your thoughts and good intentions to keep you company on nights that seem to draw out into an eternity of misery. I wouldn’t wish this on any man (except for maybe Hard-On), not even on the guards here at the penitentiary because I know they’re just making a living and feeding their families, and can only tell you that dealing with this amount of solitude must be like dealing with a retarded child that you call your son or your daughter; the frustration, loneliness, hurt, and fear of the unknown, where all a person can do is pray and hope that one day the sun will start shining on your face.

Extreme loneliness amplifies the horror of the Dark Angel's nocturnal visits. Like the other inmates in Block X, Teddy has nowhere to run and hide. He needs to face the Angel's ruthless judgment with no external help. The outside world doesn't care about him and to the prison guards and administration he's nothing more than a number. Teddy has no one to turn to, no spiritual counselor, no therapist, no family. The sight of the Dark Angel punishing Trevor Harding, a.k.a. Hard-On, the only one left in Block X besides him, drives Teddy to the brink of madness. 

Too afraid to move, but more afraid not to, I stood there with my arm through the bars holding the mirror, watching as the cloud began to swirl and take shape, stretching itself into a vague human form. Despite the chill and dampness of my cell, I was sweating; droplets of terror streaming down my cheeks and stinging my eyes. My mouth had gone drier than the Sahara, and I remember thinking that it was all a dream, that like the death of my mother, it was happening to someone else and not me, that things like this didn’t have a place in the rational world, especially where Teddy Roosevelt was involved. But it was happening now as a dark figure stood in front of Harding’s cell. The shape was unusually tall, near seven feet and thin as a cat’s whisker. What it was wearing I couldn’t tell in the shifting gloom, but it did have a hooded cloak blacker than pitch wrapped about its shoulders. The figure seemed to be studying Harding. A withered, pale hand stole out of that cloak, stroking at an invisible chin. It chuckled then, a heartless empty sound that chilled my heart.

The Angel is not moved by Trevor's pleas and the pastor's claim that he repents. His punishment must fit his crime.  

A fresh chill swept over the corridor, my skin tightening against its icy bite until I thought the flesh would rip off my bones, watching as the Angel released its ‘children’; small puffs of wraith-like smoke pouring from within the specter’s outstretched cloak and into Harding’s cell. Girls with long hair and pony-tails and bows tied in their braids came tumbling out, each of them ghostly in appearance, but still brilliant in the lost light of their youth. And the boys who followed after were no different, exuberant and full of spice and vinegar , pushing and shoving one another in their eagerness to pay Hard-On a visit. They were laughing and giggling and rough-housing like kids are apt to do, and with a sickening realization I knew in my heart that these children were some of the unlucky ones. Children that hadn’t survived Harding’s brutal sexual attacks behind closed doors, and that the authorities had never known about. These were the unknown children, the lost, children who had never been given the chance to look life straight in the face and say, “I’m young and I want to live, love, and enjoy life,” and the Angel was simply their vindicator.

The children kill Trevor and slurp his meat, leaving behind a pile of skin and bones. His body is "missing all of its internal organs: brains, heart, lung, liver, etc. Emptied, and then discarded like an old laundry bag."

While Lett does a good job of building the tension toward Teddy's facing the judgement of the Angel of Death, the use of the first-person narrative takes away some of the suspense. The reader knows that Teddy survives to tell the story. So the meeting with the Dark Angel neither kills him nor drives him crazy (since he's able to form a coherent narrative). One interesting way of getting around this problem would have been to have Teddy write a journal and have the climatic scene narrated from a different perspective. Maybe from the Dark Angel's perspective? 

Which brings me to another point. Lett portrays the Dark Angel as a supernatural, fantastical creature, shrouded in mystery. And the fact that we don't know much about him contributes to the suspense of the story. However, the reader is bound to be puzzled by a few things the Dark Angel says and does, which could have been clarified and developed further by the author. For instance, after killing Trevor, the Dark Angel answers Teddy's terrified question regarding his identity. 

“I come from beyond the sun, the moon and the stars,” he told me in a dry, pitiless voice. “A place where no man dwells and no one enters unless summoned by me. It is neither a happy place nor a place full of sorrow, but constructed by man all the same. Like your friend here…” 

The Angel reached inside his cloak and removed a shining orb, roughly the size of a bowling ball. Blue fire flickered inside it, bouncing off its smooth dome with sparks of electricity. It gave off a soft humming sound, like the drone of a beehive. “This is Trevor Harding,” the Angel informed me, holding up the sphere. “The rest of him—” He motioned toward Trevor’s cell. “— lies on the floor, useless, an empty carcass fit for the rats and dogs and vultures if they’ll have him.”

Now, the Angel's claim that he comes from a place constructed by man, a place that is neither happy nor full of sorrow, is quite strange, since according to Christian metaphysics, an Angel can come from either Heaven or Hell, either a place of happiness or a place full of sorrow. And neither of those places is created by man. The Angel also traps Hard-On's soul in a crystal ball, but it is not clear that he's taking it to Hell, as expected. My point is not that the author should have subscribed to a Christian ideology, but that the metaphysics he relies on is not sufficiently fleshed out. Compare, for instance, with the evil shop-owner in Stephen King's Needful Things or The Illustrated Man in Bradbury's Something Wicked This Ways Comes. In both these works, the fantastic elements come with a story which allows the reader to grasp their logic. But this again goes back to the author's choice to tell the story from the first-person perspective. And Teddy, he's more interested in saving his soul than in bothering the Dark Angel with metaphysical questions. 

Terrified by the next imminent encounter with the Angel of Death, Teddy goes through a period of deep introspection and soul-searching, trying to find his mother's forgiveness: "The forgiveness that a loved one will bestow upon a person and the willingness of the receiver to accept it." This inner quest for his mom's forgiveness forces Teddy to recollect and relive the most important moments in his relationship with his mother: her sadness and disappointment at his becoming a drug dealer, her joy at him getting his college diploma and starting a family and so on. Teddy realizes that his struggle with poverty and his inability to end the toxic relationship with his friend Derek led to his fall from grace. These parts of the story are very powerful and touching. Lett shows that only such deep reflection on our lives and the ways our actions affect our loved ones can lead to our salvation. Each individual's salvation is a matter to be settled between him and God, and God is all-knowing, so nothing can be hidden from him. 

All in all, Matthew Lett's He Who Walks the Corridors is a very powerful and entertaining story, a story that can both scare you and move you to tears. It is an authentic record of a man's terrifying journey from the darkness of fear and alienation to the inner light of received forgiveness.  



Matthew Lett's novella is available through Wolf on Water Publishing. 

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My top 10 Richard Laymon novels

My small Richard Laymon Collection.

I'm a big Richard Laymon fan. I've read more than half of his novels and I look forward to devouring the rest. Here's my top 10 list so far. Warning: book impressions contain spoilers.

1. "The Traveling Vampire Show"

The book follows three 16-year olds on an idle summer day. Dwight, Slim and Rusty find fliers for an exotic vampire show coming to their town. The show features Valeria, the world's only living captured vampire. Slim, a feisty tomboy, is attracted to Dwight. Rusty, overweight and perverse, is tired of screwing his younger sister and dreams of nailing Valeria. Will he succeed? The book is a beautiful blend of Bradbury`s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Twain`s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It also echoes Stephen King`s It. However, the final product bears the mark of its author, the master of the grotesque, the supreme perv, the world`s sickest writer, Richard Laymon.

2. "Savage" 


Trevor Bentley, a courageous lad from London, chases Jack the Ripper from Whitechapel to the Wild West. The notorious murdered decides to go to America in order to learn torture techniques from the natives. Following the killer's blood trail, Trevor meets Jesse, a wild tomboy. The love-story is very romantic, as romantic as you can find in a champion of splatterpunk. But will Jesse end up getting raped and carved up by Jack the Ripper? Or will he just scalp her, cut off her tits and let her go? 

3. "Funland" 


This novel has so many things going for it. It`s about teenagers torturing hobos. It`s about mutants and circus freaks. Tanya`s not a happy camper. He got raped by three hobos, some of the many crawling around the Funland Amusement Park. As if that humiliation wasn`t enough, the rapists also cut her up and pissed on her. Now, Tanya is the leader of a group of youngsters who fight the trolls. They torture and kill hobos under the cover of night. But her quest for revenge takes beautiful Tanya and her crew into Jasper Dunn`s lair. The old perv owns Funhouse and Jasper`s Oddities -- a place crowded with freaks of nature like two-headed people and gigantic spiders and such. Is Tanya going to survive or will she get stung again? Will Jasper Dunn manage to eat her up?

4. "Resurrection Dreams" 


A masterpiece with an unforgettable character, Melvin Dodds. Melvin was the biggest creep in Ellsworth High. For a science project, he dug up a girl's fresh body and attempted to bring it back to life with the aid of a battery car. The experiment failed, but his obsession didn't stop. Back from the loony bin, Melvin gives black magic a shot. And it works. The nurse he recently killed is brought back to life. She becomes his sex slave. The only downside is that she is too ferocious in bed; she bites real hard. She's also very needy and annoying. Melvin considers getting rid of her and of other zombies he animated for his own selfish and twisted purposes. But how can you kill what is already dead?

5. "Blood Games"


Five young women, best friends since college, meet every year in search of fun and thrills. This year is Helen`s turn to choose a location for their reunion. Slightly sick and twisted, Helen chooses the Totem Pole Lodge, a deserted resort deep in the woods. Years ago, many people had died there under bizarre circumstances. Something to do with a tribe of cannibals. Needless to say, Helen`s choice proves disastrous.

6. "Come out, tonight" 


Another legendary character, Toby Bones. Toby has the hots for his English teacher, Sherry Gates. But he doesn't stop at masturbating over her, like a normal teen would. Oh, no! That's not how Toby does things! No way! What he does is he kill and eats parts of Sherry`s boyfriend, poor Duane, and then rapes, beats and bites Sherry savagely, leaving her for dead in the wilds. But you know what? Even that doesn`t satisfy Toby`s primal needs. Next, he decides to go after Sherry`s younger sister, Brenda, who is closer to his age and probably tighter. Hopefully a virgin. 

 7. "Body Rides" 


In exchange for (temporarily) saving a woman's life, Neal receives a special bracelet. A bracelet which enables its owner to leave his body and travel inside other people's minds. This opens a world of possibilities for Neal. Having sex with someone while you are in their mind. Letting someone else ride your body. Visiting random people just to see what's it like to be them. You know, kinda like that movie Being John Malkovich. 
There are some problems though: what if your host dies while you are inside? Will you get trapped into their dead body like in a cage for all eternity? Or what if someone kills you while you're away on a body ride? Can you came back? Or will you just wonder around aimlessly? Or what if someone wants to kill you but you don't remember where you put your fucking bracelet?

8. "Darkness, Tell Us"


Angela isn't a happy camper. Growing up, she was repeatedly raped and tortured by her step-dad and step-brothers.The men used to live in a van, driving around in search of new sexual extreme adventures. You know, just living the American Dream. Now, having escaped her tormentors, Angela needs to sell her body to get through college. Since tuition and housing are not cheap, she basically sells herself into slavery. Her landlord, a foul-mouthed, hunchbacked, stinky old men, likes to tie her up naked in the closet and whip her now and again, when tired of screwing her on the dirty mattress in her, otherwise empty, room. To her surprise, Angela's dead mother gets in contact with her and some of her college friends, through a Ouija board. By promising them access to a lost treasure, the ghost facilitates Angela's revenge.  

                                 

 

 9. "Flesh"


 A slimy, slithering ....thing arrived in town, probably from outer space. It has dull eyes and a hideous mouth. It likes to burrow into your brain and turn you into a beast, a killer, a rapist, a new Ted Bundy. 'Nuff Said! 

10. "Cuts" 

Albert Prince doesn`t know how to fuck a woman. What he does is he cuts her belly with a knife, and sticks himself in the wound. Then he pumps the bloody hole till he's done. Will Albert find out how sex really works? And how many women will get mangled in the process?

Emil Cioran's Criticism of Work (stage setting)

Is work intrinsically bad? Are certain jobs dehumanizing? What type of work are we supposed to do if we are to stay true to ourselves and our human nature?  

In the section "Degradation Through Work" (reproduced below) of his book On the Heights of Despair, Romanian existentialist philosopher Emil Cioran makes the point that work is essentially degrading because it engages man in the external reality and trumps the spiritual impulses pertaining to his genuine interiority. 

In the following I take some preliminary steps toward placing Cioran's remarks in the broader context of philosophical thinking about work, human nature and society.

Picture by Lewis Hine

Karl Marx famously argued that the capitalist economic system leads to alienated or estranged labor. The worker losses his humanity and becomes increasingly contaminated by the mechanical or bureaucratic features of the production system he is part of. To illustrate, consider a Filipino worker preparing sandwiches in her sleep, her eyes moving frantically under her eyelids, her lips repeating the menu. Or the Chinese workers manufacturing shoes for Nike while weighing the pros and cons of suicide. (For those who enjoy horror fiction, I recommend reading Marx's description of alienated labor. It's more terrifying than most zombie novels out there! In fact, most horror fiction nowadays is horrific in precisely this sense: it exemplifies the zombification of the artist's imagination in a capitalist economy.) Following Aristotle and Hegel, Marx conceives of man as a social and rational animal who is naturally inclined toward participating in communal, coordinated work in support of the public good. However, Marx argues, the capitalist system distorts that natural tendency and turns man himself into a commodity. 

In contrast to Marx, Emil Cioran's criticism of work is much broader. Cioran rejects the thesis that man is a rational animal and considers man essentially as a spiritual being, an insomniac animal capable of understanding and reflecting in his consciousness the deep mystery of the world, the inner tensions and contradictions of the universe. Man is capable of transcending time into eternity and transfiguring himself into God — be it a dead God, an undead God, or a bored God tired of its own lucidity and prone to bouts of sadomasochism. Since work, on Cioran's view, signifies an engagement with external reality as opposed to a spiritual exercise, it follows that work leads to the repression of man's essential nature. But, as opposed to Marx, this is true for both capitalism and communism and each and every social and economic system which doesn't appreciate man's spiritual destiny. 

But, someone might object, not all work is concerned with the external world. For instance, writing a novel is work, but it also has the spiritual aspect Cioran talks about. I think there is something to this objection and the scope of Cioran's criticism must be clarified. We need to distinguish between different types of work, the complex ways they are connected to the external world, and what kind of objects they produce. However, in Cioran's defense, it's important to emphasize that the commercialization of fiction and art in general turns interiority itself into a commodity. So, then, in a deep sense, interiority itself becomes external. Based on this insight, it's interesting and worthwhile to work out clearly the way contemporary western culture distorts the notion of soul or inner-self. I think one important criterion to be used in discerning authentic interiority is the artist's own expression of the intention animating their work. For instance, a horror writer might say that he just wants to scare people. In his case, his interiority is filtered through an external grid. A different artist might say that his work is a record of his conversations with God. Or, someone might use art as a way of working through obsessions which haunt them. In this latter cases, interiority appears to be genuine, uncorrupted by the external world. Of course, there is always the problem of self-deception; artists who aim for commercial success but immediately repress this desire into the tunnels of their unconscious. 

This issue aside, a different objection to Cioran is that a society in which everyone is focused on their spiritual life will lead to self-destruction because no one will actually do anything. Who will then produce food, build houses or make cars? After all, man needs to adapt to the world if he is to survive. Given his megalomanic nihilism, Cioran will probably observe humanity's self-destruction with delight and even admiration for its romantic heroism. But, for those of us concerned about the future of our species this is an important objection. However, I think that especially in the western culture people are confused about their needs. And this confusion is a product of capitalism, which works best when it manipulates peoples' desires by creating false needs. We think we need a bunch of stuff in order to survive, but we don't. And the belief that acquiring a lot of stuff  leads to better lives is a product of capitalist indoctrination. 

Moreover, a focus on interiority may give rise to a renewed concern for the world, for our community values and traditions. This is one of the important points Heidegger makes in Being and Time and is further developed by Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity. Simply put, an individual's spiritual development may naturally give rise to a concern in the spiritual development of others. So coordinated communal efforts which lead to meeting the community's members basic needs for food and shelter in order to create the conditions of possibility for their spiritual journeys, are not excluded by Cioran's ideas, but, on some interpretations, naturally flow from them. 

This being said, let's read carefully through young Cioran's short and striking remarks about work. As indicated, this section appears in his first book On the Heights of Despair, a book he published at the tender age of 22, when he was already an 'expert in the problem of death.'

Degradation Through Work

"Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.

Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one."

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, University of Chicago Press, 1992.