May 13, 1992. It's must better if don't ask specific questions about his past. He seems suspicious of anything that requires precise answers. He likes to talk on general themes. Today I mentioned exile. His interest revived, he talked at great length. Exile has been a lifelong obsession of his. His goal in life, to become a stranger. He talked at length about the 'voluptuousness of exile', the exquisite pain of being from nowhere, a main theme in his work.

He expressed his great passion for Dostoevsky. Not only for his books, but especially for his personality and his life.

April 17, 1993. Today I called Simone from Bloomington. Cioran is very ill in the hospital. He fell, broke his hip, and they had to operate. He seems to have lost the will to live. He hangs his head and looks at Simone ith a dull expression. Refuses to eat, is in a great state of anxiety, twists himself in the chair, lashes out at the nurses and orderlies, was tied to his bed for being too violent. Premonition of madness, he quotes to her from Mihai Eminescu's 'Second Letter': 'the instruments are broken and the maestro's mad'.

May 12, 1993. Simone says that for many years now Cioran has stopped reading and writing, just sits in his room and rummages through his papers while she tried to keep up appearances in a lost battle. He had been aware of his condition and was infuriated by it. Once, after having begged him to take a bath, which he repeatedly refused, she went away crying. He came after her, embraced her and said, 'I'm a sick man, forgive me'. They had planned to commit suicide together, like the Koestlers, but then Cioran fell ill, and now it's too late.

May 13, 1993. Sixty years ago, in On the Heights of Despair, he described his condition with incredible prescience: it is not madness but the moments of lucidity in madness that are to be feared.

He ate a big dinner and seemed to be in a good mood, once in a while desperately trying to formulate one of his bon mots. What an irony: this sparkling conversationalist, who used to dine out on his verve, now deprived of words. His eyes start to twinkle, he opens his mouth to say something, starts up with a word or two and then stops, face darkening, closing up and collapsing into humself and his despair.

from Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's Searching for Cioran