I type this out for my future meditation and medication. This is a transcript of an interview of E.M.Cioran.

Q: Since when did you stop wanting to have a destiny?

A: A destiny, this... Since I'm here, because I have lived here in the neighborhood the whole time as a student. I can really tell you that until 1950 I was enrolled at the Sorbonne and I was living like a student. I really lived like a student. In 1950 I was summoned and told, here is the situation... you're 40 years old it's over. You can no longer have a meal in the student cafeteria. I have to say that this was the biggest blow for me. I lived like a university parasite although I had nothing in common with the university. This thing is very important to me because it was a terrible blow, materially speaking. They told me at the time that the age to access the canteen was lowered to 27. If it could go on. My life plan had been stopped. I would have liked to live as a student until I die with all the material advantages that result from it.

Q: In 1937, when you arrived in France, have you tried to meet characters you looked up to?

A: Absolutely not. I must say that I met writers in Paris, only when I published my first book. Before that I met people but I never thought of meeting a writer, a philosopher, an intellect... I have always stayed away from it.

Q: However, thanks to your book, you've made the transition.

A: Yes I must say that. I tried to recover somehow. For several years I led a life... not necessarily mundane but a cocktail party lifetime from 1950 to 53' 54'. I met a lot of people. I used to go out a lot. In the end I got tired of it. In fact, I have always lived on the fringes of society. Besides...a marginal...which matches well my vision.

Q: Why did you decide to write a book in 1949?

A: In a way it is an entry into society. No, look what happened is, in 1947 I was in the Dieppe area, to spend my holidays in Florenville, where I had fun translating Mallarme into Romanian. Suddenly I said to myself: what I'm doing is absurd because I'm not going back to Romania. Translating Mallarme into a foreign language is a waste of time, isn't it? I threw everything away and started writing in French. That's how I started writing my first book, "Short History of Decay" which appeared two years later. But I didn't do it to enter a circle but to explode, in the end it is complicated to explain. I don't know why I wrote it. I can say everything I wrote, I wrote in moments of... Let's call them moments of depression. A kind of therapy. Not in order to publish a book. My books are not even books.

Q: Paul Valery, when asked "why do you write" He answered "out of weakness." Is this also your case?

A: It is more than a weakness it is an inner despair. A decadence if you will. So something more than a weakness. Out of necessity. In order to avoid shouting or screaming. In any case, not in order to write a book. The book comes as... it's an accident.

Q: Maybe you also wrote the book to meet people.

A: No I don't think so. To discover anonymous witnesses. No, no. When we write an article, yes. When a text is ordered then by default you have a target to reach. But when you write something for yourself, in times of crisis, let's say, you don't think about others. Moreover, I want to say that for me the act of writing, is a kind of dialogue.

Q: with yourself.

A: Not with me, I would say with God. However, I am not a believer. I'm not a believer but I can't say I'm an unbeliever either. For me, the encounter with God happens, perhaps, in the act of writing. That is, a solitude that meets another solitude. A solitude in front of another solitude. God being lonelier than our personal selves. So, you see, the act of writing that I theoretically took... practically, I consider it in fact, I place it a little high, as you see.

Q: People say you're a nihilist. Is it true or is it false?

A: What is nihilism? I'm not a nihilist I am nothing. It's hard to explain... I believe... I have patches of nihilism you see, it's hard to explain. Can we say of the Buddha that he is nihilistic? We can't say. It's complicated. I don't know how I could honestly answer that question. I am definitely a denier. But even the denial... This is not an abstract denial, as an exercise. It's a visceral denial. Which after all is a statement. An explosion. Is a slap a negation? Slapping someone. It's a statement. It's a statement... But what I do are denials that are slaps. So they are statements. But I don't back down. I am not afraid of nihilism or pessimism or anything else. I don't care about that. It's not about that, I don't think it's important.

Q: Why is Cioran a rebel?

A: I'm not a rebel.