It's when you discover that life is without substance, that it's nothing at all, illusion ...

Jason Weiss - And you remained in that village until what age?

Cioran: Until I was ten. And there we had a garden next to the cemetery, which also played a role in my life because I was a friend of the grave-
digger. I was always around the cemetery, all the time I was seeing the disinterred, the skeletons, the cadavers. For me death was something so
obvious that it was truly a part of my daily life. I didn't start acting like Hamlet, but it is true that after that I began to be obsessed with skeletons
and even the phenomenon of death. And that had an effect on my insomnia. Which means that for someone to have an obsession with death, one
already has a sense of the unreality of life. It's there, the process. It's not the obsession with death that makes you discover that life is unreal, it's
when you discover that life is without substance, that it's nothing at all, illusion, that the obsession with death settles in.

I'll tell you an anecdote that played a role in my life. I was about twenty-two and one day I was in a terrible state. We were living in Sibiu, a city in
the provinces where I spent my whole youth, and where my father was the priest of the city. That day only my mother and I were home, and-when
I remember things, I remember them very precisely, I even remember the hour, it's very strange-I think it was around two in the afternoon, everyone else had gone out. All of a sudden, I had a fantastic fit of despair, threw myself on the sofa and said, "I can't take it anymore." And my mother said this: "If I had known, I would have had an abortion." That made an extraordinary impression on me. It didn't hurt me, not at all. But later I said, "That was very important. I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?" Because, in effect, it's all without substance.