Flying Against the Arrow: An Intellectual in Ceausescu's Romania 9789633865187

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FLYING AGAINST T H E ARROW

FLYING AGAINST THE ARROW An Intellectual in Ceau§escu's Romania

by Horia-Roman Patapievici

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Central European University Press Budapest N e w York

English translation © by Mirela Adâscâlitei 2003 First published in Romanian as Zbor in bätaia stâge pi. Eseu asupra formärii by HUMANITAS, Bucharest, 1996 English edition published in 2003 by Central European University Press

An imprint of the Central European University Share Company Nâdor utca 11, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 Fax: +36-1-327-3183 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com 400 West 59th Street, New York NY 10019, USA Tel: +1-212-547-6932 Fax-. +1-212-548-4607 E-mail. mgrecnwald(«i sorosny.org Translated by Mirela Adâscâlitei ISBN 963 9116 57 2 Cloth ISSN 1586-6335 Central European Library of Ideas

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Patapievici, H.-R., 1957[Zbor in bataia sagcpi. English] Flying against the arrow : an intellectual in Ceau§escu's Romania / Horia-Roman Patapievici. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1. Patapievici, H.-R., 1957-2. Philosophers—Romania—Biography. I. Title. B4825.P364 A3 2003 949.803'1'092—dc21 2002015201 Printed in Hungary by Akademiai Nyomda, Martonvasar

WHAT IS T H E ISSUE? I do not know how others kept their integrity under communism, but I was saved through my friends. From as far back as I can tell I have been surrounded by the kind of people whom I might, somewhat pompously perhaps, call "friends of ideas". In this way, my intellectual life before 1989 had nothing whatsoever to do with school, faculty, or the public arena, but was carried on entirely within my circle of friends. There were, first of all, the libraries, on which we would feast together voraciously. Then there were the unending debates which, voluptuously in love as we were, we organised at regular intervals. Everything was spontaneous and perfectly informal. We gathered together; we listened to music (which covered the whole spectrum from Gregorian chant to Genesis, Sting and Jethro Tull); we ate, drank and debated. Frequently, almost ecstatically, we watched films on video, invariably following these with passionate exchanges of ideas. There were also the books—newly published or the xeroxed copies which one of us had come by—and these too were discussed, "pencil in hand", as one might say. To dismiss these discussions simply as aimless, extravagant babble would be quite unfair: the accuracy and breadth of their knowledge, the fineness of their intelligence, the genuine quality of their cultural flair—coupled with the truly enjoyable nature of their conversation—these qualities elevated my friends to an intellectual stature which was quite remarkable and which excelled that of many established writers. The passion which we shared was the life of ideas as well as their substance. Deprived of public expression as we were (none of us had published books or had the slightest intention of doing so, at least under those circumstances), restlessness, which in intellectuals is likely to gravitate towards the printing press, was a matter of constant excitement for us. We personified a lively counterculture, razor-sharp and tenacious of life. Some issues which we considered vital may appear odd to the present-day reader— such as, for instance, our belief in the imminent transformation of the

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self. What we understood by this was an immediate leap forward—one which simply happened instantaneously—from the process of simply acquiring culture to the spiritual perfection of the whole being. We saw in culture an alchemy, and the most arduous philosophy (that of Hegel, for instance) was understood by us as an initiation into a human model closer to perfection—and we craved for such perfection both pathetically and enthusiastically, like the novices which we were. For us everything held some immediate spiritual and "initiatory" meaning, and any one of us would have been offended at the notion that the purpose of culture was simply to publish books for one's bibliography. We wanted to know everything, and knowledge was vital for us to carry out that inner transformation which would eventually make us into gods (in that somewhat intellectual sense which the Greeks had given to the term). I should add that the manner in which we debated the books which we read was much more serious and committed than the manner in which people at the many scientific symposia I have attended would discuss the papers delivered in the various sections. Passionate, sincere and uncompromising as we were, no faintheartedness would ever penetrate our essential authenticity and leave behind an intellectual sclerosis or impair it in any way. Removed as we were from institutions and from masters, our education was effected through books and in conversation, in the exalted and blessed atmosphere of what we might term "enamoured friendship". From 1986, Drago? Marinescu, Dan Waniek, Dima Bicleanu (a latecomer), and myself organised monthly seminars at my home in Mo§ilor Road, with themes which we had agreed in advance; these seminars lasted for two and a half years and, from our point of view, were the absolute pinnacle of learned, professional work which it was possible to carry out under communism in any specific area. One of the debates was devoted to the idea of destiny. I myself spoke about the enigmatic but precise amphibology of personal destiny. On September 18th, 1987, I received a postcard from Dan Waniek (relocated to Bra§ov by a compulsory state appointment); it contained the following invitation: "What if you tried, by October 2nd, to complete a draft of your essay on the self, although de nobis ipse tacemus. It might give the mystery which you were talking about some greater significance." Our next meeting was scheduled to take place on October 2nd, and the mystery to which Dan was alluding in his letter was my feeling that, just as in an apologue, my life as a whole was simply constructing the arguments for some didactic fable. In this introduction to Dan Waniek's appeal

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appeared, as they well might, the words of that modest disclaimer (de nobis ipsis silemus) of Francis Bacon—Prefatio to De augmentis scientarium. I met Dan's challenge and in the space of three months wrote the book in question. This book is typical of the atmosphere in which part of my generation educated itself. Our quest for "the original" and the feeling that we were living among "copies", the belief in that imminent historical turn which would trigger the transformation of human nature, our rejection of the public arena and contempt for official politics, our inflation of the religious notion of a meaningful life, the pre-eminent role which we accorded to culture—all of these certainly admit of a more artificial construction: we had indeed endowed culture with all the hopes which people in healthier societies place, next to culture, in religion, economics and politics. Nonetheless, Flight against the Arrow is also, essentially, an answer, part of a dialogue which was passionate and enraptured and of which only a trace remains in the hands of today's reader. I wrote this book because I was hungry for intelligence, knowledge and life, and because I loved my friends. Without this love, several of my books, which were not written in order to be published, would never have been written at all. Certainly, the physical effort involved in writing it was considerable. I was working at that time in the laboratory of a factory located in Bucharest's chemical belt (the village of Catelu). Work began at 6.30 and it took me a whole hour to reach the place by means of two awkward changes of bus. The work at the office was thoroughly taxing and I could think of what I was going to write at home only on the bus on the way home: during that hour I would sketch out the work plan for that evening on the pages of a pocket book. Back home, I would eat something quickly and then sit down, my coffee beside me and cigarettes close to hand, in front of the typewriter, and I would sink into my writing as though in a trance, and without a break, until around 10 p.m., at which point I would collapse, felled by the day's exertions. The next day was exactly the same, and on I went in this way for three whole months. I do not mean to say that I was unhappy. If I rule out the social constraints which were the natural consequence of my status as a salaried slave, which I shared with every other citizen, I always did what I liked and what I felt like doing. My freedom, within the circle of those friends whom I had, was complete and, certainly, this was my true life, the one to which I shall confess on Judgement Day, and the one which forms my debt of gratitude to all who have loved me.

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The paradox of the education which we gave ourselves under communism, seen in retrospect, is that the miserable social coercion which we suffered, plus the constant, ubiquitous police surveillance were miraculously interwoven, within those small circles uninfected by informers, with an extraordinary degree of personal freedom. I owe my soul's sanity today in a very real way to that same, small circle of friends, too few of whom are mentioned in these pages. To them I offer all my thanks. As for the book, I dedicate it to them in token of a way of life which found a way to be fertile and rich in spite of being condemned to see the light and exist in the foetid atmosphere of the catacomb. April, 1995

EPIGRAPH It is just as if a man had been wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends, companions and relatives would bring a surgeon to him but the man would say, "I won't have this arrow removed from my body until I know whether the man who wounded me was a Kshatriya, a Brahmin, a merchant, or a worker." He would say, "I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name and clan name of the man who wounded me...until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short...until I know whether he was dark, brown, or fair-skinned...until I know his home village, town, or city...until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow...until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was of thread, bamboo fibre, sinew, hemp, or bark...until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated...until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were from a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or some other bird...until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey." He would say, "I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft which wounded me was that of an ordinary arrow, or of a curved, barbed, calf-toothed or oleander arrow." Naturally, the man would die and those things would remain unknown to him. Majjhimanikaya I, 426

This essay is dedicated to him who has wanted it with his whole heart and who has never stopped believing, ever since 1971, when we met for the first time, that my sign overarched a symbol much greater than myself: to DAN WANIEK

1 . H o w can any initiation be triumphal? T h e d o m i n a n t m e m o r y of my adolescence is one of overwhelming deprivation: I never had what I wanted. T h e strategy which I inherited from my childhood was that, whenever I really wanted something, I pretended to myself the exact opposite. T h e r e was the thought which I would not p u t into words and which lived in my mind: the hidden, secret life of the image; and there was the thought which I did put into words, a lie f r o m the outset, constructed per a contrario from the rich humus which had nourished it and which meant, by means of a somewhat devious prayer, to make a timid prophecy come to life. T h e excess in which I indulged was that faltering consciousness of desire which psychologists term timidity and which is a kind of anxiety of the will. To have no courage is not so m u c h a question of morality as one of thinking. Physical courage is, in all probability, the expression of perfection in one's character when accompanied by awareness. You cannot be wise without the courage to face physical annihilation. In my case the question of cowardice had not yet arisen. Yet the naked truth was that in me things simply did not last. In a notebook dating from 1974 (when I was seventeen years old) I noted that true nature was an existential rapport. In the Devotions of Isis and Osiris the goddess proclaims, "I have conquered destiny, and destiny yields to me." Instead, my relations with nature and the natural have always been precarious and insincere. I have read somewhere that, whilst old age was slowly playing havoc with him, General de Gaulle felt himself to be closer and closer to nature. T h e same is happening to me, now. T h e haziness of thought transmutes into the uncertainty of life, and both seem stranded in the unredeemed state of what the initiate would call "destiny conquered". However, have I truly mastered it? I learned and forgot. I loved and lost. Again and again. W h e n did I first desert the thing I loved? T h e r e is a victory in being cruel, also, and the

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harm which you do in order to strengthen yourself is a harm which you will not be called to answer for at the end. Sin lies in what you can remember, with no limits, having committed against anyone, and in the cancelling out of your own, seldom fortunate, self-remembering. What I could not achieve was due to a flaw in faith. I knew how to dissemble what I wanted in order to coerce my fate into reality. What I did not know, however, was how to preserve what my stratagems managed to produce at times. Can I truly say even now that I have fed on the sound of the drums, drunk in the sounds of the cymbal, and borne the "kernos"? Have I ever "slipped under the baldaquin?" The truth is that I have read more than I have lived. Feasting is joy, and if you have never known how to recognise it, your feast day will never come and you will never be acclaimed for becoming—that is, of course, if you should so become—an immortal god among men. Joy is the first thing and the second is eternity: what endures of what was constructed. In any exertion there is a purpose. You ignore the whole and the most astonishing thing is that the whole does not ignore you. You are being driven, even if you know nothing about it—and you flounder in the dark. The image of the man who sees the sun at midnight must be a convention, or, perhaps, a truth from an age beyond us. At this time, all that I can say for myself is that I did not stop myself from contemplating the gods of the underworld and that to the heavenly gods, because I did not know who they were, I begrudged even my basic debt of reverence. When you start taking backward steps the light reaches even into the darkest corners of the past. In time, I became a practised faintheart. I was born in the interval between entering the reed in the story and the bringing of the tree, which, after the seven days had elapsed, was a pine felled from the forest. After the day of blood there comes an outburst of joy, as unwholesome as the night which preceded it, one of funereal dirges and voluntary mutilations. It has been called Hilaria— and my vernacular mind was only too quick to assign "hilarious" undertones to this venerable name. March is not a month of tranquillity, nor is it, in all likelihood, one of hope. The circle of the zodiac closes with this amphibology which lacks resolution. In hoc signo vinces, so did the Fates whisper to me. Which sign? No sooner had I opened my eyes than their shadows faded away. This promise, however, lingered in my ears. There is a sign which I have to search for, and this sign is needed so that the god residing in me can be revealed. Each step in an initiation is triumphal provided that you have the end in view. For the present, life is an unfinished apologue. I remember Nietzsche debating the

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disturbing thing about the search: that whoever tries to return to his origins, finds those origins changed... 2 . What is appropriate to a life which is not yet over is that it cannot be regarded as destiny without presumptions. Once dead, however, the full spectrum of your life appears. The problem always lies in being alive. Being alive amounts to being conditioned, unredeemed, stammering, uncertain, and faltering. Seen in retrospect, a birth is never natural. There is no single age at which you should begin everything: beginning is an interminable condition. Besides, I am convinced that any intelligible part of my past life is identical, to the point of expression, with my future. That everything has already happened is a matter for apprehension. In 1 9 7 4 , 1 was affected by a dictum of Nietzsche after reading his Antichrist: any man of character experiences a certain quintessential event which is endlessly repeated during his lifetime. T h e will which sustains you when you come into the world is not the will to survive, but rather the will to assert the world through your own particular personality. In the assertion of no matter what object from the physical world there lives a personal exaltation. Asserting the world (Weltbehauplung, as Nietzsche puts it) precedes and determines our knowing it. We experience the world by living through our successive incarnations. It is a somewhat frustrating problem that we cannot be everything at the same time. Still, what is especially disappointing is that we live our lives as a succession of discontinuous allegiances. 3 . A picture of me at six shows me intently reading an open book, quarto-size. I am standing, forehead inclined, with an implausibly neat haircut, and have assumed a serious expression: I am a judge, totally absorbed and likewise pedantic. Which of my parents had shown such a lack of taste as to stage this? I do not need to explain that the young man in this abstruse pose was indulging in histrionics, or else, was a vmoKpitii^; when I was six I simply could not read, and yet here I was, only too willing to act out this deception in an attitude which, I clearly intuited, would become familiar to me one day. I bore a grotesque resemblance to my father, a man of German sternness. Even so, and for all that it was an act, the marionette had been correctly set up: in the picture so posed, il avait du vrai. T h e fact that the oldest memories which I have are smells must have some bearing on this. Nietzsche once claimed that he had his genius in his nostrils. Even at that age I had some points of contact with the crucial teacher of my adolescence: the senses of the

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child were directed to a quite extraordinary extent towards smell, and my power of discrimination was extreme. T h e smell which constitutes my oldest memory of all is that of printer's ink and the habit of smelling books has stayed with me to this day. It is one way of recapturing the old sensorial relationship with print which I had in those days of old when the meaning of letters was still trapped in my confusion. This first " m o d e " of my personality is a neatly directed deception. 4 . T h e n there was my passion for telling tales. I well recall the following scene: it is winter, it is very hot in the room and my mother is sitting in an armchair by the radiator whilst I straddle a giant pillow (I am very small). It is a red pillow and I am bouncing on it in make-believe riding, or perhaps I am sailing over raging billows, and I talk and talk incessantly and passionately. M o t h e r wants to know what I am doing but I do not say " I ' m doing this" or " I ' m doing that", but " I ' m talking about my adventures." My early memories are thin, which is probably why I find the survival of this particular one significant. On a different occasion, when children from the neighbourhood are at my home, invited for my birthday, I behave in the same way: totally oblivious to the din which they are making, I sit on the carpet and r u n my new present, a toy ship, around me, all the while pouring out a stream of images of my deeds. Of nakedness and the like I knew nothing. Like many children of my generation, I would get into fits of excitement over the cartoons in Pif magazine. Becoming a h u m a n being in contact with this particular kind of a "mediated" world involves three things: 1) any act is a succession of images; 2) any image is commented upon through a succession of words; 3) any succession of acts is complete, which m e a n s that it reaches its conclusion in a finite n u m b e r of issues. For m e , life was supposed to have some sense, the sense of a story. What could not be recounted could have no meaning. Meaning was given by words and by the fact that images always had an end. Yet the words had no sense in themselves, because I could not read and because, in any case, I had no notion of French. T h e only sense which they had was from the whole and came f r o m the summaries which my father would m a k e for me. Words, in the last instance, m e a n t the images which succeeded one another. That I could not read them by myself was a frustration, and, to compensate, I unrestrainedly accompanied each " f r a m e d " action with its verbal reflection. Conversely, whatever I was unable to make full

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sense of in words I represented in sequences of stories, which I acted out. In short, I liked to imagine because I liked even better to tell stories. 5 . What I recounted were non-happenings, of course. Where was I taking them from? An instinct for falsification is welded into one's personality. I did not have the reputation of a child who told lies, but yet I know that I thought nothing of mystifying my parents. I was adept at imagining possible worlds because I was familiar with images different from the world in which I lived. And yet the words, where did they come from? T h e inability to understand the written word produced in me an effort to substitute anything at all for it, anything which might be spoken. When you look at life with your eyes, you can see no boundaries, any more than you can see endings. Words, however, cleave and forge natural closures. Any sentence brings something to a conclusion and so, in truth, any word passes judgement on what it denotes. Unlike the act of seeing, words end so that they may continue. T h e image of me reading, at six, is only on the face of it untruthful. I was born into a world which, by some miracle, allowed itself to be shaped, tailored into stories. After that, however, things become jumbled in a whirl of confusion and I cannot remember anything more until around the age of twelve. 6 . Pif magazine has a special meaning for my intellectual destiny. I owe to it the fact that I learned French both quickly and early. T h e first literary exercise which I can remember was an indirect one, like most of my experiences, occasioned by a character in that magazine, GaiLuron. This cheerful drunk had a physiognomy always equal to itself, a watery, placid look and a bulldog's gnarled mouth but was, by way of compensation, enlivened by great verbal dexterity and intelligence. He was clever with puns and subtleties, wittily philosophical in the face of adversity, and his professed astuteness would now and again create an effect from the realm of the absurd. The intelligence which exuded from some of those joyful fables induced me to write a verse complement to them, in rhyming couplets. Had my talent been greater, I would, in principle, have become a writer of fables at that particular time, inhabited as I was by a feeling for the fable which inclined towards absurd or surreal humour. I cannot now evaluate the quality of those productions, since they are all lost. However, there are still two qualities which I retain: 1) that inclination towards the fable which already existed in me; 2) the

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drive towards emulation which stemmed from my unrestrained admiration for intelligence. I find it instructive to remember that my predilection for such "sapiential" literature is the twin reflection of my one-time inclination towards Gai-Luron (or for Le concombre masque, with its pungent witticisms, either graphic or verbal; destiny works out its selective processes even from the cradle: why was I not attracted to Arthur the Ghost or by Placid et Muzo?). Is not also a fondness for the intelligent cartoon joke basically the same as a passionate interest in the prose of Voltaire—what I find fascinating about him is indeed the ruthless charm of his "instrument" which, at the outset, is intelligence, only to become, by dint of excess, something other than this by the end. 7 . Origins are hard to condone. Embarrassingly, I acquired the taste for intelligence from second-hand productions. T h e taste is no less pure and imperative in me today since at first it was somewhat awry. I once heard Noica 1 say that a good book was written with a cheap pen. W h a t is true in any event is that a life of achievement is led with modest intentions. Furthermore, we all begin with what we have at hand. N o matter what a certain G e r m a n educational system of strict observance might believe, the original sources are never at hand. T h e feel for the original you come by only when you are in a state of full awareness, which means that this follows only after you have acquired an idea which can open you to very basic self-realisation. In 1860, you would pick up E m p e d o cles through Hölderlin, and in 1900 through Nietzsche. It could not have been otherwise. As for contemporaries, it will be presumptuous of anyone to claim that one can have good access to the pre-Socratics without becoming acquainted with them through Heidegger first, irrespective of what your position may be towards the latter. It is a truism that we discover the classics through the moderns, and never the other way round. T h e authors of antiquity are discovered in translation and are, or at least some of them, later studied in the original. Kant himself was initiated into the writing of philosophy via Wolff, whilst Augustine knew Plato in translation only. Without the music of Wagner, Nietzsche's Greek-ness, for all his philology, would have remained m u c h more incomplete. T h e proper place of ideas is in the quest which d r u m s t h e m up and they live wherever you are able to discover them. 1 C o n s t a n t i n N o i c a ( 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 8 7 ) , R o m a n i a n p h i l o s o p h e r , h i s t o r i a n of p h i l o s o p h y , t r a n s l a t o r of P l a t o a n d D e s c a r t e s , w h o w r o t e s t u d i e s of t h e p h i l o s o p h y of l a n g u a g e f r o m t h e p e r s p e c tive of t h e p h i l o s o p h y of c u l t u r e , a n d a n i m p o r t a n t treatise o n o n t o l o g y (translator's

note).

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8 . F o r that reason, the claim of originality raised about a discourse involves arguments which are deceptive. An unqualified answer is seldom, if ever, adequate. T h e first impulses come from copies. T h e justification which Plato gives to beauty, as being that which produces an unquenchable thirst for a spiritual ascent, seems to me well grounded. Any experience which has a meaning, if only a "debased" one, will betray the anagoge, the mystical interpretation. T h e copy may not become a model, but yet it substitutes for it. T h a t the idea is diffused without dividing itself is a fact which cannot be denied. T h e reason for this appears to lie in the pre-eminence of form over content. Everything in our life is organised by certain structures with immanent action. Moreover, no matter what we might do, we are integrated in some patterns "from above". When I opted for the witticisms of The Masked Cucumber I seemed to be acting out a purely personal inclination. T h e form of this choice, however, subsumed for future use the attachment to humorous intelligence such as is found in Paludes, the fascination for the tortuous reasoning of the assertive character in Malraux's IJHomme précaire et la littérature, and the enthusiastic acceptance of the style of Voltaire's irony. This series, of course, does not contain these terms only, it is, however, important that their addition is made according to a structure evident a posteriori, but difficult to define a priori. Our life builds up a structure which seemingly comes to us ready made. Everything arranges itself as if predestined. However, no matter how many terms of a series we may possess, no prediction can be made as to what the following term might be, although, when it does appear, it has been determined by those which have preceded it. Life is predestined only if it is fulfilled. I would like to say at this point that meaning is conveyed only by perfection, and not by any discontinuous scraps of such perfection. In a mysterious way, we are always aware of a meaning which is given to our lives, imprecise but bright. Being aware means being able to wind up one of the circles within whose circumference our acts arrange themselves. Any life contains an appreciable number of such circles, which are those of destiny. In their turn, those circles are profusely encircled by still larger circles, which are those of the cycles of destiny. Some of them close during one's lifetime, and, roughly speaking, they represent the accomplishments of an existence, the peaks where the quantity of experience is integrally assimilated by the quality of a particular type of awareness. This integral assimilation transmutes individual consciousness into a different form, capable of positioning the self-perception of our existence onto a more complete circle, which will embrace a higher

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number of already encompassing circles. The all-encompassing circle grows with life itself, and seems not to close when life does. For, if it is true that death transforms life into destiny, it is equally true that we depart from life leaving behind some residue, from which the whole equivocation of meanings together with our presumption of eternity actually stems. Truth is not an indifferent adequation to an existent; instead, it is whatever increases most in what endures owing to it. I know that there is truth judging by the richness which what I call truth is capable of generating. If this is how things stand, then a life's truth does not lie in the circles which have closed, but in that residue that throws the perspective of non-fulfilment back ad infinitum. Where am I, if I am not in what I have lived? Like ideas, the concrete life of any of us is not in the world, nor is it in the personal self: it is where you can find it, or else, where you have been found worthy of it finding you. 9. It is discouraging to think that at any particular moment of your life you would have thought yourself to be dans le vrai, and that you have not been; when a higher circle was closed, you were able to see where you had been—in some passageway. In a sense, it is salutary to be blind, when light itself is blinding, most often. Indeed, the world of which Plato speaks in The Republic, in the story of Er, is, for those who are attentive, an everyday experience. That light is good which we can bear, and this light belongs to the circle which we can bring to our awareness. Light is understanding, it is the revelation that meaning has permeated us, and that it transcends us. Authentic meaning you yourself can never create; you are a part of it, the unfinished you, it, also, endlessly. The weft which, in a pattern, is interwoven in the warp harnessed by the Parcae goes through my hands, and yet just as easily it slips out of them in a way which thwarts my every attempt to control it. So, rather than setting it myself, I merely follow it carefully and with amazement; it is a changing, developing warp which contains me in a miraculously perfect way. The knowledge that you are no more than a shoddy, cracked brick, suitable only for crushing into rough foundation material, makes no-one bitter, least of all you, yourself. I have often confronted myself with the irremediable and destructive feeling of the mediocrity of my life. Going through such a feeling may be to some extent inevitable, and yet it stems from a falsely posited problem. Life is not a contest of high stakes. Leaving aside the fact that each of us, every last one of us, is integrally solvable, what I discovered at long last is that man's pursuit is

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not alongside or against another man's, but is, like the notion of truth in Greek, a divine pursuit. It is not loneliness which increases, but selfassurance, the kind which springs not from the illusory profusion of one's talents, but from the modesty of the god's diffuse presence in the vicinity. In the divine pursuit, man is the man without qualities. In his unmediated essence, man is not only alone (in a completely non-hysterical sense, of course), but also true. Thus, as I was later to learn from Doru Kay tar, there is no failure. Where should I begin? By sight alone you can climb the mountain in an instant, since sight alone can embrace spatial contradictions at the same time; physical motion, on the other hand, can only proceed differentially. Yet, speaking of the physical process, the mountain can only be climbed one step at a time. Steps should be taken cautiously, one after the other, no leaps are allowed, and you must always be on your guard for crumbling footholds. You learn only by assuming something which you have already learned. At every moment you only know what you have known already—nothing more—so that each moment has its glory and feeds upon its glorious foundation. Besides, this mountain has ridges, and each ridge is a circle which you have closed. The coincidemia opposiiorum of space is achieved through sight. Yet what you must know is that the mountain is only climbed on foot, which is to say, in time. Coincidentia oppositorum in time is not achieved through sight but through a faculty which is not a normal sense and which presupposes an ambiguous, mediated engendering. What it presupposes is that we assume our historicity through an awareness of our special nature. 1 0 . Intelligence is a tonic, an exercise such as moving freely in the fresh air, in an open field. It is the natural equivalent of spatiality, thanks to that particular kind of freedom which it develops. Intelligence is the freedom of habeas corpus. The light of intelligence is clear and precise, distinct and smooth: or else, it is visible. The eye is easily assimilable to intellectual brilliance. What you can see is the intelligible essence, and only that is visible which can be understood. It is, of course, a truism that we only see what, speaking in terms of the image, we can organise as intelligible. The anecdote of the primitives and the chicken running across the screen is well known. Assimilating intelligence with the eye and sight with its spatial contradictions unified prompts the concluding thought that intelligence is the faculty which engenders coincidentia oppositorum in space.

10

Flying Against the Arrow

1 1 . The inequalities which arise from the distribution of intelligence are a painful reality. Nevertheless, each human being has been provided with an adequate supply—a "survival kit"—for his salvation. The language of biography is honest in that it makes it possible to formulate a particular point of view on questions which are general. I once noted in To Love that origins are preserved in the brilliance of their outcome. In my case this is true: culturally speaking, my origins have nearly always been determinable. 1 2 . The objects to which we moor the stages of a life are generally not openings, but events. To yvd)9v oeauxbv I must be opposing yi-yvaxjice icaipdv; to substantial knowledge of the self I prefer the circumstantial knowledge of the propitious moment. It was not Gai-Luron who started in me the vast process of "valorising" intelligence even if, judging by what I have been able to recall, this was its first incarnation. Instead, an archetype of happiness has always dwelt in me, allied to the faculty of being intelligent; it has preceded any manifestation and gives meaning to it. Piaget has spoken of the formation of operator structures and of the child's intelligence of contact. I, for one, have always had the feeling that I am predestined. To what, in particular, I am indifferent, but this feeling of elation has never left me for a moment, even at those times when I was at my lowest ebb. What pre-exists in us awakens at the time of contact with life's happier occasions. The "nodes" of a personality are relatively few, but still they never fail to show themselves and are, if not depleted, perhaps, at least fully grown by the time that our life is taken from us. As a witness to the endless agony suffered by my father, I was obsessed with the fact that the struggle I was watching meant the forced exhaustion of the potential for life which his urge to live still possessed and which death rushed to dissipate. Nobody dies unfulfilled, although the complete achievement, in its ultimate expression, of what we are is seldom afforded. With the limitation introduced by the theory of the closing circles these nodes can be named. This is the meaning which I give to the autobiography which I am writing. Firstly, it will be a "fanning out" of the dominant themes, as in a game of cards, when you fan out and evaluate the hand which has been dealt to you. Secondly, it will be a form of reflection with an action or effect similar to that of perfume, aimed at anything which might be lured and seduced. By the grace of chance, it will find ways to precipitate into awareness the structure seemingly laid out in the complete "survival kit" which I received at the outset.

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11

1 3 . It is difficult to point out how and exactly when it is that we come to "possess" our personal themes. The training for what we are to be, the rehearsal, begins before we are born. When pregnant with me my mother feared that I should be born dumb and cretinous; the result, however, was a total contrast; I am intelligent and I know how to talk. My mother used to write poetry, my father practised sculpture. Who in my family had that horror of mediocrity which I inherited? It is interesting to note that by the time that I arrived at my central theme I had made some efforts in each of the inherited talents. The theme which I am talking about had not once been within my conscious grasp before January 13th, 1984, when I had the revelation which gave it to me. There are things which cannot be true if they come too early. 1 4 . When Pif changed its format and started to appear under the new title Pif Gadget, the editors decided upon a succession of strange stories created by Hugo Pratt to fill the section set aside for twelve-page serials: the central hero was a sailor, Corto Maltese. I am wholly ignorant as to what the genesis of this character might have been. My only knowledge of him is in the somewhat cloudy outlines of recollections stretching back to those days. Two worlds he opened to my senses. The adventures of Corto Maltese were set in the days of the First World War and in the first few years which followed the conflagration. Firstly, there was the exotic fascination of South America: the coast of Brazil, the Portuguese names with their guttural and muffled pronunciation, the enigmatic female figures who seemed to be in charge of everything since, with their bizarre composure, they always had an explanation for everything. Secondly, there was the mystery of the ancient submerged continent of MU. Although virtually forgotten by everyone, this continent endured in the night and was in fact continuously weaving the warp and weft of contemporary history. Many of Corto Maltese's adventures happened in connection with the First World War. However, his adventures were not those of combatants. Politics could explain apparent causes, and yet politics, Hugo Pratt suggested, resembled a pair of reversed binoculars. Close to our deeper motives lay the sunken continent of MU, much closer than contemporary Europe. Significantly, Hugo Pratt would cloak this "mysteryosophy" in data sent to the lost treasury of pre-Columbian esoteric wisdom, which he allusively and elusively linked to the existence of the Egyptians and of the Cushites. The information which he used was based on what he had presumably discovered in James Churchward, the colonel who in 1880 had pro-

12

Flying Against the Arrow

claimed the existence of 2,600 tablets coming from the sunken continent of MU—their existence after that being "confirmed" only by an unverifiable Dr. Morlay, in 1924. Pratt's drawings were simple, sedate, and suggestive. T h e enigma derived both from the unaffected simplicity of the design and from the texts which always referred to an unnamed store of knowledge, of which I did not have the faintest notion at that time. The succession of movement in the drawings was itself quite artfully conveyed. Anyone who has seen these cartoons knows what I am referring to. The role of the boy who was in Maltese's care was, to the very end, unclear. Mysterious messages led him all the way to Venice, where the Austrian conflict was in full progress. The role of Venexiana Stevenson is no longer present in my memory with any degree of clarity. There were, however, allusions to the existence of a secret association with roots in Ireland— probably of the type of which W. B. Yeats had been leader. It had, among other things, an interest in pre-Columbian remains; it claimed its origin in the ancient continent of MU; it had a bridgehead in the land of Cush, a watching eye within the Mediterranean world, and yet another fountainhead, particularly active, in Europe, in the Celtic world. This, very likely, accounts for Ireland, which indeed is not far from ancient Thule. 1 5 . Firstly there was, as I said, the memory of the esoteric continent of M U ; then there was the mysterious Celtic world, for whose resuscitation Corto Maltese lived a fascinating adventure, with fairies provoking a delicate and morbid Eros and Merlin leading his life fettered but still menacing, the power of his spells still unrestricted. Pratt's stories were not fairy tales but full-fledged adventures, or else they were quests. Maltese was an upright and nostalgic knight, lured by illusions of the great power of the supersensual world. He was not a master of this world and yet it seemed well-disposed towards him, thanks to the intercession of those enigmatic women from St Bantam, who saw in him, if not the initiate par excellence (which would hardly accord with a Westerner, a man of action), then at least the inward purity and disinterestedness which made Percival the one called to ask a second time the question which was to redeem the (sinful) Fisher King. Except for his Thulestyle side, Maltese belonged to the family of generous heroes among whom Humphrey Bogart should be ranked as a true exemplar, and him I was going to love later. I remember that, torn by the nostalgic beauty of Venice, Corto Maltese exclaimed, Venise sera ma fin. Despite

Flying Against the Arrow

13

my early age, I owe to this hero an early acquaintance with the unwholesome richness of the death thought. The beginnings were auspicious: I knew. After all, my childhood was a happy one. Yet, it is the end which is always worth one's desire, to the fullest. Passing away is the beauty I have dwelt in to this very moment. 1 6 . Hugo Pratt had rendered me familiar with a kind of reverie which turned not so much to the fabulous as to the magic which lies behind the commonplace. This distinction is important and I shall presently point out why. The early reading of fascicles from the collection of Submarine Dox had left my father with the habit of surrendering himself to the fascination of the exotic. Warm countries, the jungle, faraway lushness, strange fauna, unknown tribes, exploring virgin territory, the geography of the unknown, all of these were irrepressible attractions for my father. He lived a passion lacking any consequences other than the exploitation of the imagination and he did his best to try to pass this on to me. Consequently, my first books were books on nature's freaks and oddities and on geographical curiosities. Travel narratives were definitely not something to be missed: Thor Heyerdahl, Archie Carr, André Davy, Adrian Cowell and Robert Scott are authors whose books I have in my library to this day. Many more of those books were lost without a trace, although my father cherished them and I myself was not overeager to destroy them by heavy use, since I scarcely ever laid my hands on them. I felt unconquerable boredom at all those details of luxuriant geographies. The satisfaction of discovering new lands appeared incomprehensible to me. As a child, wading through the account of Magellan's voyage round the world written by Gh. I. Georgescu had been a real pain. T h e figure of Nobile held no interest for me and Scott impressed me little: children only like winners, because infants are like gods, with no decency and lacking all sense of honour. To trudge into a cave to discover cave dwellers seemed to me the feat of a madman. Even the journeys of Nemo and of the German professor towards the centre of the Earth only awoke a mediocre and fleeting interest in me. My father would also take pains to kindle in me the mirage of faraway lands visually. At that time, the Timpuri Noi cinema house (down the boulevard) used to play full-length documentary films with subjects from the exotic world. They would dwell on the anaconda water snake, on the huge ferocious monitor lizards, on the wonders of the Galapagos, on the tribal customs of various black peoples, on different varieties of crocodile, which filled me with horror, on monkeys, flying squirrels, pandas, hum-

14

Flying Against the Arrow

ming birds, carnivorous insects, giant trees, and who knows how many more besides, which my puny memory cannot even name today. My father watched with abandon all those wonders which for me were mortal tedium. I felt a hand tickling me inside my stomach, again and again, inhibiting any concentration on my part. When the "uplifting" documentary was over, I was a bag of nerves from the strain of waiting. T h e fact that a whole evening would follow where I could wander through the streets with youths of my own age came as some small compensation for the hours that I had endured. My father never knew about the stifled aversion which this regular playing out of his passions stirred in me, an aversion which, no doubt, they did not deserve. 17. Maltese himself followed his call to adventure in exotic realms and yet he did not bore me. The exoticism which fascinated my father lacked the dignity of storytelling, its exotic quality was not enlightened by the quest—it was just a universe which man described but in which man had nothing to find, because all that he was looking for was distant. And, well, that same distance could be found in the zoo, which also held no attraction for me. What could be the meaning of those lives? What story could be wrapped around them? My father's documentaries were cold, even inane like a certain kind of science which my father swore by. A documentary and doxological science which sought to find its genealogy among the grass worms, partial and intolerant like any undelivered belief on the already dead side of the world. Nothing comes into being without becoming narrative. What cannot be arranged in the form of a scenario and told in the form of an epic does not really deserve to exist, becausc, in a higher sense, it is not intelligible. My father's exoticism did nothing to enrich me, because it did not lead me to an outlet, it left me where it had found me. Maltese lived in a world which could be known through reverie and which forced itself forth into life simply by demanding that we look upon it as a mystery. In the exoticism of Maltese, I was lured by the reality supposed to exist behind the world which my young senses took in. The street and play filled me with the living presence of the world, just as it did to anybody else; the reverie occasioned by Maltese promised to give it an existential structure which would reveal the hidden realm of things which are not to be seen, and yet which are felt disturbingly in the dark. 1 8 . I loved flying. The first anguish which I can remember was brought about by the loss of a plane which I had built myself. I was very small:

Flying Against the Arrow

15

when I told the grown-ups about the pain which was devastating me, nobody believed what I had said about my building the plane. Laughing quietly to themselves, they put up a show of helping me look for it, as you do when you humour somebody whom you know to be irrational, but want to keep him quiet, whatever the cost. I used to have a dream at night in which I hovered at a great height and, at a given moment, I fell. The fall was not unbearable, and yet I was startled, in the way one is startled when one's heart sinks without reason, no more. In one of my father's documentaries I had seen a black man subjected to a test which I was later to think of as initiatory: thrown from the top of a very tall tree, tied only by a liana on one of the ankles, his ordeal consisted of surviving. It may appear incredible, yet most youths came through this test safe and sound. The unendurable void of a fall, then I came to know what it was, as I watched the raw inertia of those falls. From that moment on, I suspect, I stopped being indifferent towards black people: they disturb me. 1 9 . Black was the lack of colour in darkness, and I would always become breathless in the dark. When I was not yet nine I had two experiences which, though only now and in retrospect, proved invaluable: I discovered first the labyrinth and then, through its various entrances, the underworld. Until I was about six I used to tell myself the story of what I was doing at the very moment when I was doing it. Why did I replicate the actual happening with a concurrent narrative? Memory had no part to play in this game which, by repetition, was becoming a ritual. My stories evoked nothing, for the simple reason that they were one with what was actually being lived out. What was their role? They excluded the interlocutor since they conveyed nothing to anyone but myself, and to me it was nothing that I did not already know, since I was living through the experience at that very moment. It might, of course, be said that the story did not actually duplicate the happening and that it was itself the happening, but this would be a mistake. I did not inhabit a universe of words but one which abandoned itself to the results of my actions: I rode the huge red pillow, I slid the boat along the floor, etc. The actions were symbolical, true: yet so is imagination at an age when action is keenly desired yet not so easily checked by rational dialogue. I was the only witness to feats which I had drummed up there and then, as I would not suffer them to be postponed by any luxurious promise of speech. My stories did not evoke what had happened to me, they were recount-

16

Flying Against the Arrow

ing what was just happening, what was happening, that is, to the second person of the indicative present. My words were witnesses to the happening, which, save for themselves, was solitary. T h e words, that is to say, were confessors. In the act of telling I did not experience evocation b u t rather that exigent tension inherent in confession. For the same reason, years later, I was to find it beyond my means to write a kind of literature where the narrator was neither a witness nor a confessor. 2 0 . Certainly, the truth of life never speaks the language of evidence. T h i s is what makes the charm of living after all—the fact that things need a meaning and not just an explanation. 2 1 . As the summer of 1965 was drawing to a close Bucharest was terror-stricken by a r u m o u r that children were being stolen for the blood trade. Parents began to stop their children from walking in the streets, and those living in my street were ordered to come straight h o m e as soon as dusk set in. This was totally revolting: games such as Hide-andSeek, Cops-and-Robbers and Leap-Frog with imitation trips draw their whole attraction from the complicity of darkness. One Sunday morning, Dan Clemer came running to us out of breath and started stammering in terror that in his cellar were traces of a m u r der. N o n e of us thought of laughing, we were so starved for adventure. Instead, some of us stole matches from home, others gas and, with the scraps of wood that we could find in the street, we made up torches with a head made of stiff rags at the top (which we had picked up from the rubbish lying in the gutters). So equipped, and quite frightened also, we forced ourselves to go down the narrow, very steep staircase which led to the basement of Dan's house, which was an old building f r o m the 19th century. T h e descent seemed endless. T h e torches were smouldering, we were choking on the smoke, and the jagged flames roused quivering shadows with menacing bodies on the dark and dirty walls. T h e i r dampness exuded a ghastly smell. At a certain m o m e n t , f r o m ahead of us, from the darkness, there came first a few rapid rustling noises, and then the sound of metal being cautiously struck, after which silence fell, which terrified us more than anything else. We were waiting to be attacked. Half dead with fright, we m a d e a dash for the steps, almost falling over each other, until we reached the light. For the rest of that day we could not s u m m o n up the courage to go down again. We did so later, however, cautiously and in stages, organised as look-out teams and armed with hammers and home-made clubs.

Flying Against the Arrow

17

T h e first successful descensio ad infernos meant one storey below streetlevel, as far as the iron gate of the cellar, which we did not dare to open for many days. Still, what we had been looking for we found: on it were seen the clear prints of two blood-stained hands. We had hit upon the undeniable proof that here the murderer had wiped the blood off his hands after spilling it in the realm of terror that began behind the door. 2 2 . T h e explanation for what we did might lie in the r u m o u r about the kidnapped children. Its meaning, however, is not in the excitement which the rumour itself had spread. Each criminal, certainly, justifies his crime in a way which is his own. Still, any quest for a murderer stems from a scenario where the crime is secondary. We were, of course, looking for traces of a m u r d e r and maybe even dreaming of catching a murderer. Yet what we discovered was something other than a murder, we discovered the exemplary steps of a descensio ad infernos. Each of us knew that children were killed where we were descending, and that we were children. In spite of our young ages we were ready to accept death or deliverance at the end of the flight of steps which we were descending. 2 3 . T h e fever stirred up by the m u r d e r later died away and yet we persisted in our exploration of dark cellars until we became thoroughly acquainted with all the cellars in the neighbourhood. T h e owners would curse us and suspect that we were up to some thievery. We, however, simply climbed down into those squalid rooms like speleologists charting caves. In principle we guessed that none of the basements could hide more than the one just searched the day before. Yet our interest was total, since the attraction lay in the descent itself, in the mystery which had to be violated, and not in the disappointment which will follow the violation. Childhood, as no other age, knows the pure act, cut off from its motives and from their chance purpose. It is the deed withdrawn from deed which I was to read about later in the Bhagavad-gita, phalatrsnavairagya. 2 4 . On those days when we did not investigate cellars we climbed to search attics. Whilst the cellar was the experience of darkness and the abyss, the attic led us into the experience of the labyrinth. Indeed, the summer of '65 was the summer of all renovations. T h e ICRAL 2 decided 2 T h e state t r u s t w h i c h u s e d to a d m i n i s t e r t h e collective h o u s i n g f u n d in t h e c o m m u n i s t age {translator's

note).

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to c h a n g e every f a ç a d e d u r i n g one s u m m e r . T h i s was a m a r v e l l o u s o p p o r t u n i t y for us to p u t into practice the stunts which we h a d learnt f r o m Johnny Weissmuller w h o m we had seen in Tarzan of the Apes. As soon as the pulley was fixed the rope conveying the buckets to the top floor b e c a m e the liana which we clutched to carry ourselves f r o m one post to another. T h e n we learned to make use of the pulley itself, with a n a d e q u a t e weight at the other end. In this way we would, with the void u n d e r our feet, climb all five floors with such ease that onlookers s t o o d aghast. W h e n we reached the top floor we climbed u p the roof very easily. F r o m there we could go down through one of the small windows into the labyrinth of r o o m s which make u p the attic area of old houses with their liberally distributed annexes. O u r age and excitement m a d e orientation a real pain. We repeatedly lost ourselves in the rooms, although, seen with an adult's eye, their plan was certainly very simple. S o m e of the rooms were locked: we went past these with a shudder. We never tried to force a d o o r which was forbidden to us. As for the thread which we trailed behind us to mark the rooms, we did not wait to read a b o u t Ariadne's thread in order to use it. Ingenuity is never at work in p u r e innovation but in the reproduction of situations which b e l o n g to an archetype. We only invented "along the grain" of myth, that is to say, n o t at all. N o n e t h e l e s s , sadness emerges f r o m the real glory of y o u r c h i l d h o o d . W h e n you live authentically, to the full, you do n o t know. W h e n you know, the authenticity of living is gone. For this reason the h a p p y are recruited f r o m the ranks of imbeciles, or f r o m a m o n g those who have been granted grace. 2 5 . F r o m my childhood I only r e m e m b e r the games which we played in the street and my fellow prowlers. My parents are an extremely vague presence, a n d my sisters only exist to the extent to which they would forbid m e o n e thing or another. W h a t I can r e m e m b e r is a feeling of unlimited a n d delightful f r e e d o m . W h a t is extraordinary is that m e m o ries r e s p o n d rather to one's desire, or perhaps to an obscure prophecy, t h a n to reality, as seen through the eye of the outsider. T h e o t h e r day I asked Bobi, m y older sister by nine years, how she r e m e m b e r e d my passing my time when I was a child. T h e answer came immediately, with hardly a t h o u g h t : "You were reading and reading: you were a n absolute bookworm." T h i s reaction amazed me, since all that I can m a n a g e to recall is the f r e e d o m in w h i c h I indulged in the street. It may b e that I t h e n r e a d Constantin Chiriçà's Cireçarii (The Children on Cherry-tree Street), a book

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which enjoyed an incredible number of re-readings on my part. However, I could not possibly have been reading Cire§arii all the time, even if my horizon was extremely narrow. What I did read must indeed remain to me like a mystery play which even at this late date is being spun by a certain consensus of the personality contour resulting from the adventure of remembering. 2 6 . T h e three thousand books which I have accumulated, almost entirely from gifts of money, over a span of fifteen years, speak of a past which I have polished with the intention of consolidating a certain type of personality. T h e first fundamental "caesura" in my life happened between the ages of fourteen and fifteen. From that time on I have lived fifteen years of diurnal life, which is to say, a life led in the light of awareness. The effort spent in this prolonged exertion of being aware reached, around the age of thirty, its end. To the god Terminus I devote these precarious years, probably ad litteram final. The deadlock in which I have by slow degrees become immersed since the age of twenty-eight, and which has come to its maturity and to its desolation in the very present in which I now live, has two possible resolutions: 1) If God allows me no more days to live, it will mean that I have lived to write LISTENING TO DEATH, the poem which I am left without the strength to complete but which will survive its non-completion. I have obliquely conspired with sin and deserve, at any time and without remorse, to be put to death. 2) If God does allow me more days, it will mean that my profession as a poet has been secondary and that I live in order to produce my essay on the philosophy of history which will deal with the role played by the advent of consciousness in the imminent change of the subject. I shall do whatever comes hardest for me and shall undoubtedly deserve every disaster. From now on there can be no question, as far as I am concerned, of organising an apocalypse: a half-vision of its hope is all that I can produce. Like Eugenio d'Ors in the twilight of his days in Caseron del Sacramento, I can say in my turn, with a modesty which has already traded desperation for powerlessness, "yet you know, my dear, I do believe in hope...". This "my dear" is not an idle appellation, it has something in common with that "my dear Marc" which Marguerite Yourcenar found at the head of a manuscript, and which, having forgotten about it, she took to be a letter from the past. T h e simplest and most sense-striking formula of love is not proclaiming " / love you", but accepting the fatality of "you are necessary to me: yet survive I can, without you".

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It is the same with destiny. It is made with us, when it loves us; and is made with equal justice without us, loving us just the same. 2 7 . Whilst my first "caesura" could be said to institute the conscious being; the second unquestionably "destitutes" its predecessor to some extent, although I cannot say whether this is strictly so. There is something of the day which lingers at night-time. Besides, as far as the soul is concerned, I do not know whether darkness truly succeeds the light. Since German medievalists could indulge in the eccentricity of believing that the great German culture admits of a periodicity of six hundred years, I shall say in my turn that I lose and recover my breath with a periodicity of fifteen years. For fifteen years, I have collected books and immersed myself in them. Shall I now spend another fifteen weaning myself away from them, scattering them about and being nurtured by another type of culture? Pascal's belief that everything can equally well be nature, true nature being lost anyway, is indeed an objection brought to the altering of nature. Truth shrouds origins, because origins are no longer within one's reach. What did my first age consist of? 2 8 . There am I doing all that reading, but not remembering it. Then there is my sixteen-year-old self selling all the Pif-s in his possession at the second-hand bookshop (there were over 200 copies, systematically collected). With the money so gained he bought himself Plutarch, Diogenes Laertios, Descartes, and Pascal. On top of all, that sixteen-year-old self burnt all the papers which he had written up to the age of fifteen, judging them ignorant (just as they were, in fact). Incomplete ages are like upstarts: they repress their origins in order to deny their recessiveness. Still, any upstart is less than a man reflected in the looking glass; he is a serf doomed to imitate. He is an onanist plagued by the awareness of his deviation or else a fake who knows his own fakery. For him, to live means to destroy. Adolescence is, in spite of its genius, an impure age in many ways. The fact that its coming near to the upstart type is only temporary neither saves nor justifies it. In being killed there is more justice than in killing. The crime against the preceding age would be perfect if grandchildren would not, loosely speaking, circumvent their parents and take after their grandparents. Now the second great watershed in my life re-challenges the legitimacy of adolescence to have perpetrated oblivion against my childhood and commands the interrogation which revives what the age preceding me decided that it should forget.

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2 9 . I had forgotten that my childhood was spent not only on a child's pursuits, but also in passionate reading. Forever forgotten is all that I wrote until the age of fifteen, which is the side-effect of a passion condemned. You only condemn a passion if you have left it behind, in other words, if you are ashamed of it. The reason why this happens is that a passion is suffering, both in the offering and the receiving, and as such it is a scandal to lucidity, whose principle is pleasure. The object of the passion was most certainly akin to the subject of my reading: I read whatever incarnated my passion. Just as the pain for the departed is rekindled by objects where memories lurk, worn as they might be, and life is blown from them on to him who is now gone, so are the marks of my own passage found in the books which I read and annotated. I know that I love a woman if I desire her to read the works which I myself love, because any library is merely one's unconscious being, recklessly put on display. In the love for certain books lies hidden the desire to possess a person. Who was the person towards whom my childhood desires urged me? 3 0 . The paradise of childhood means precisely that the child has few needs and does not compare himself with others. This lack of need limits one's weakness, and the absence of that timorous and servile conscience which stems from the nightmare of comparisons confers on the child the poise of a god. The only intelligible value of such innocence is life itself, the fact of being alive. To be is immediately "valorised" in to be considered: not by others, but by the world which recognises in the child's flimsy make-up another mode for itself to exist in. As a child, you are like the sky: beautiful or nasty, but always a sky. To lose paradise means, as Paler 3 put it, not to be able to get over the disappointments of age. To be disappointed is to pass from existence into value. What is value? Immediacy becomes like the troubled mirror of waters in that legend of ancient China where the waters announce the rebellion of the creatures doomed to look like us. To be homologated is to be already compared: value is always born from a levelling process whose lack of meaning is the rationale which postulates equality in the name of difference. Conceptually speaking, to be a child is to have the inner experiences of an Edgar Allan Poe but not be able to express them other than in a "tuppenny" language. Value says: "this" thing is immature, yet what are we talking about, being or saying? 3 Octavian Paler, Romanian writer, author of Subjective

Mythologies

(1975).

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3 1 . T h e act of saying is of no interest regarding one's childhood. T h e act of being, also, comes in fragments enmeshed in the very fine netting of illusion and forgetting. I did not love my childhood as long as I believed in becoming rather than in being: and the reason why I did not was that I had forgotten it. Let me not deceive myself, however: forgetting stems from the will to ignore and not from the attention growing weary. W h a t wearies the adult about being a child is the impossibility of implanting living into value. Are children intelligent? It is precisely here that the legend of child prodigies comes to life, typified by young Borges, who wrote plays in English at nine. There is some mystery here, which results from a skilfully masked preterition: Borges is the writer who could also write when he was nine years old; hence, Borges being a writer of u n d o u b t e d value now, there had to be, also, necessarily, a certain mature value in writing plays in English at nine. Nobody has read those plays, and Borges exercised his talent mostly as a short-story writer and as a metaphysician of apologues. T h e child's experience of life cannot in itself be homologised, for its expression is evanescent: it represents nothing of it. As far as childhood is concerned, essence and phenomenon are coincident—hence the impossibility of conferring value, as value can be accorded later—on estrangement. It is futile to think of the Requiem as a consequence of the child Mozart's dexterity at the clavichord. Expression does not belong to childhood, but to the banishment from earthly paradise, or else, to the desperate attempt to re-appropriate it. 3 2 . When I decided that I was to become something, I settled myself into this first caesura, which then effaced my childhood. I was fourteen. W h e n I understood that I was too closely confined within the essence of my haecceity to become anything any longer, I was, against my will, settled into the second caesura, which revived my childhood. I was then twenty-nine. 3 3 . Living in a wholly manifestable essence means relating to life in a way in which the perception of a form is immediately felt as comprehension of content. This way of living is intelligible because it does not have to translate into expression in order to be mastered. Intelligible here is the fact that the one who lives is the same as the one who is lived. T h e content of living is its very form and thus, as an obvious consequence, for the child the meaning of life derives from living exactly that kind of a life in which the problem of life's meaning is not raised.

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T h e fact that things happen in such immediacy has an important consequence. Since childhood does not belong within any species evincing value, it also eludes the bonds of expression. If one's childhood is not expression, it follows that it does not yet consist in the externalisation of manipulable content. Still, as contents alone are intelligible, the intelligibility of childhood lies in perceiving the content of oneself as well as of others as an unmediated form of living: in other words, the child experiences the contents of life as a form of life itself. Being a child, therefore, amounts to a non-chronological period—time does not exist here—going through the essential inventory of forms of which life itself is capable. T h i s inventory is finite, since going through it is so, also. F o r m s march through one's childhood in the guise of life's more banal events. W h e n you are a child to look means to experience the form of sight unadulterated. And down the list you go, ending with the stock gestures, such as those of receiving or giving a kiss from or to the ones you love, or merely desire, one thing that no child acquires, but invents. Childhood is a treasury of essential forms, which is a way of saying that it brings to light those clusters of forms which will, later, make up the themes on which the adult personality will base its confusions or its illumination, quite often against the early grain. Everything is perfect in one's childhood, because any content is directly a form of life. Childhood rehearses not only what we are to become, but also everything which potentially constitutes the universe which we are capable of. That already, in a sense, when you leave your childhood behind you are fully made up, has been put into words beyond all compromise by Charles Péguy: à douze ans, la partie est déjà jouée... 3 4 . T h e kindergarten badger, prying and mischievous like a weasel. T h e street Robinson, daring and domineering, nimble, fearless, wild and unpredictable. This existence alternated with that of a model pupil: separate and irreconcilable lives... I would neigh through the schoolyard, in Chinese trainers, like an unruly colt. Later on, little by little, the wild thing began to don the colours of a more imaginative soul, who translated the craving for mysterious adventures from life onto the pages of books. T h i s is the age, between nine and twelve years old, when grandfather would catch me again and again poring over his books in the library. He would praise me for this, to the great annoyance of my grandmother who saw in me nothing but a body in which vehement, destructive and conflicting passions were at odds: such seclusion among books alternated with the laming of storks with arrows which I had made

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out of card needles, with setting the garret on fire, slaughtering chickens d u r i n g "safaris" or breaking windows with a sling specially contrived to look like the one seen in a T h i e r r y la F r o n d e T V series. N e x t c o m e two years of violent feuding with my mother, w h e n , by slow degrees, the adolescent, still a child, denied the universe of childh o o d and changed into a hippie hallucinated by a vague but obstinate ideology of rebellion. This is the period when I dressed in shabby clothes, took u p smoking and got d r u n k for the first time deliberately at fourteen. I acquired the habit of listening to the noisy and imperative m u s i c of Jimi H e n d r i x , Janis Joplin, L e d Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, D e e p Purple, Cactus, etc. T h i s age of the hippie revolt contrived almost completely to d o away with my passion for reading, to the point that I even forgot all a b o u t how it h a d once felt. In a souvenir album m a d e up by girls in my class, I answered a questionnaire on favourite writers, filling in "La F o n t a i n e " (the 7th form), without any genuine exercise of choice and for n o other reason than that it had b e e n the only rather exotic n a m e that I was able to recall. T h i s void signifies one thing only: I h a d ceased to read books, so that the notion of favourite writer had become improper for me; I had none. A classmate, Caranica Cornel, had written " B a u d e laire", of w h o m I only knew at that time that he had to be F r e n c h , judging by the spelling (as I was quite proficient in F r e n c h even t h e n ) . At the end of my already adolescent childhood I fell in love. I was rejected. T h e n I failed the admission examination for the Lazar High School. I was thrown into dereliction and disorder, and was h a u n t e d by suicidal thoughts. In the s u m m e r following this failure all my schoolmates and friends deserted me, all save Manuela Antoniu, whom I hardly knew then to be my friend at all. She gave m e strength and saw m e t h r o u g h the impasse of relegation, gently and unobtrusively; she was able to help m e and, what is m o r e , protect me without humiliating me. She did all that had to be d o n e in perfect devotion: generosity knows n o reward. With the cruel innocence of children, I forgot M a n u e l a as soon as I n o longer n e e d e d her: for fourteen years she stayed forgotten, until, at twenty-nine, I wrote To Love, a text that re-evaluates the beginnings of my first caesura and resettles it. M a n u e l a ' s deed, in fact, p r e c e d e d the onset of the first caesura, just as the evaluation of its significance against the experience of failure—symmetrical b e t w e e n the age of f o u r t e e n and that of twenty-nine—has m a d e the light of awareness descend on my passage towards the second caesura. H e who had started as a prying badger closed the initiatory adventure of childhood in the f r a m e of a retractile and unsure teenager, in-

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wardly d r a w n above all m e a s u r e , empty, virgin a n d h a u n t e d by a fertile forgetfulness. I stepped into the conscious age of my adolescence with a m e m o r y intact and void: I had forgotten everything that h a d p r e c e d e d me. H e w h o declared himself to be "I" in full declension was a new m a n . 3 5 . I shall speak a little later of t h e b o o k s in w h i c h the p a s s i o n s of my c h i l d h o o d — u t t e r l y f o r g o t t e n for fifteen y e a r s — h a d f o u n d flesh a n d b l o o d . Firstly, let m e say in passing that this forgetting is p s y c h o - a n a lysable, a n d I shall uncover the motives for it later. Suffice it to say for n o w that, in the s u m m e r which followed m y failed high school a d m i s sion e x a m i n a t i o n , I studied superficially, b u t r e a d e n o r m o u s l y a n d for t h e first t i m e I did it consciously also, w o r k i n g to a p l a n a n d b e i n g wholly c o m m i t t e d to it, day in, day out. M y p a r e n t s believed that I was studying: I was instead, by stealth, living o u t t h e last a d v e n t u r e of the b o o k which was of the same essence as c h i l d h o o d . It so h a p p e n e d that, a m o n g s t everything else, my family's library was liberally supplied with the "historical" works of D u m a s père. In chronological order, seized by a h e a d s t r o n g passion, I read t h e m all in two m o n t h s . I r o u n d e d it off with the sensational philosophical study entitled Catherine de Médicis, written by Balzac. T h e historical F r a n c e which h a d awaken D u m a s ' interest a n d which he h a d d r a p e d in his shallow, yet wholly respectable, attire, gave shape to the last a d v e n t u r e of my c h i l d h o o d . O b s e s s e d as I a m with reading signs of destiny in every gesture, I d o n o t k n o w if, putting my age of "innocence" to sleep, I did it en beauté. Still, no fissure was t h e r e which could have d a r k e n e d this farewell. Values still lay elsewhere a n d the intolerance of authoritative taste h a d not yet invaded me. I h a d to r e a d m o r e books. B u t which? 3 6 . W h e n I moved my books f r o m C a i m a t e i Street to Moçilor R o a d three years ago, tucked away at the back of the bookcase, o u t of sight a n d covered in d u s t , I discovered a shelf of b o o k s which startled m e . T h e y were b o o k s f r o m the " T r i a n g l e " collection, p u b l i s h e d b y the Tineretului Publishing H o u s e , a n d issues f r o m the S F collection w h i c h sold for o n e a n d a half lei. I leafed t h r o u g h t h e m a n d t h o u g h t of r e t u r n i n g t h e m to m y f a t h e r , w h o s e I believed they were. Yet e a c h of t h e m b o r e m y juvenile signature, still u n f o r m e d , a n d w r i t t e n large o n t h e f r o n t page. T h e discovery t h a t I was t h e o w n e r of t h o s e b o o k s overw h e l m e d m e . W h a t was m o s t astonishing a b o u t it, in fact, was this total e r a s u r e f r o m my m e m o r y , a l t h o u g h the scant respect which this kind of literature enjoys in my eyes m u s t also have c o m e as a p a i n of s o m e

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sort. T h e outer part of the bookshelf which had hidden those productions was packed full of essays and history books. T h e casual, physical juxtaposition of two species of print, improbably dissimilar, the one covering the other, is not without meaning: the books belonging to my zone of awareness obliterated unawares (i.e. accidentally) those of my zone of non-awareness. This was a few years after I had lost the intolerant habit of classifying such things, and so I carried those surprising books to Mo§ilor Road, meaning to search through them later. 3 7 . All had been read—quite probably several times over, judging by their state of wear. Most had come out between 1968 and 1969, and a few as late as 1970. As, even today, such books go out of stock almost instantaneously, I assume that the year of print was also the year of purchase and, as likely as not, the year of reading. In between the ages of eleven and thirteen, my reading was essentially SF! I leafed through them with a disbelieving eye. At first the pages remained opaque in front of me: they were just as bad as I had thought t h e m to be. T h e n the shadow of forgetfulness was dispelled by a few flashes, both intense and utterly dismaying. I was about to discover a submerged realm. You will r e m e m b e r the passion which I had consistently devoted to C o r t o Maltese's peregrinations and the emotional effect which his enigmatic metaphysics, sprung from the sunken contin e n t of M U , had had over me. T h e same thing was resurrected now, once more, as I chanced u p o n the pages where Aelita relates to Los how the earth was a b a n d o n e d by those who became the forebears of the inhabitants of Mars. Before m e were the shards of a mythology which had fascinated my childhood and of which I knew nothing any more. Like Atlantis, lying in ruins deep under the sea, my childhood was waiting for its archaeologist. I reread The Splendid Boat and the light increased. I found the same obsession for the paradisiacal in The Nebula of Andromeda, with its allusion to the southern continent of G o n d w a n a , in connection with that longed-for revelation of the world on Epsilon-Tucan. Finally, the same enthusiasm was rekindled by Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, with their fantasy entitled A from Andromeda. T h e rest of the books which had filled the shelf I did not trouble to take up again; time had m a d e them illegible, erasing f r o m the pages what time in his passage also strips from lives: the passion which pardons errors and the meaning which purifies, out of all deceit, what is untrue.

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3 8 . W h a t spoke to me in those stories was the portent of an unverifiable paradise. I cannot tell what meaning I used to find, as a child, in my passion for myths of sunken continents: a sense of plain living, for sure. However, as truth lies in the consequence—or in the fruit which the flower is able to yield—I must contend that the meaning of a passion lies in its surviving and also that it is that meaning which has driven it to see the light at last. It is both pretentious and, quite likely, inaccurate to say of a child that he is obsessed with memories of paradise. However, from the devastation of my childhood I am left with one thing only: the vivid emotion which accompanies memories of paradise. Later in life, as I read in the Puranas about the ages of the cosmos and about M a r kandeya's exploits, I was struck by a certain constant in my reactions: that the feeling was the same as when reading the stories of Aelita or when fantasising an improbable initiation into the enigmas of M U , the vanished continent. What was roused then in me was not, in fact, identical, but the place where the soul received these images. T h a t place simply had to come into existence, unless it had been living in me from the beginning, which is to say, ab initio. If it had come into existence, its birth must have occurred in my very early childhood, that period of initiatory experiences. If it had been lying within my inborn memories, then I must have singled out this particular nostalgia from among the deceptive shadows of the bardo state, before my thirst for existence pushed me to enter my mother's uterus—making both choices in one move, voraciously. 3 9 . T h e soul which received the messages of initiation was a soul well versed in mystery. T h r o u g h o u t my childhood, I was wholly taken u p with adventure and risk. Any adventure, however, is only a form of searching. W h a t I was searching for was, without question, the quest itself; or else, the pathos which emerges from the act of searching. Restlessness in play and adventure, the fact that, more often than not, I was above these things, and the circumstance that I was the one who led the game—which m a d e me not so m u c h a mystes, an initiate, as a mystagogo—all these engendered in me the lasting structure of an impenitent. T h e r e is a revelation, I live it, but what is its cipher? O n e may safely assume that, sickened by its insolubility, losing contact with original bliss, my childhood determined on drowning itself in a morass: this is how I knew my adolescence, pushed into it from behind and an exile. An adolescence which spelt out perdition—at first, one which forswore childhood and consequently denied the very aus-

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pices which had spawned it: it was damned, and it willed itself into organised life, it was disenchanted, and it proclaimed itself constructivist, etc. I emerged from my childhood an exile, like the first couple banished from the earthly paradise. Still, I had already lost paradise two years before, and I knew that the stakes on which the state of happiness depended were false. What tragedy lies behind a childhood which denies itself in the consumption of alcohol? Unliberated and self-restrained I have not always been, but I became so. I was coming into a world in which all my acquaintances were not simply unknown to me, they were, more drastically, irremediably foreign. T h e sensation of "foreignness" was not experienced as a conscious distance, I was not "different": my deep self intimately knew the apprehensiveness which comes from speaking a language which is not the one heard. Shame, bewilderment, revolt, all these were there. What was I to do, once admitted into high school, into a foreign world? I would not have been surprised if, quite suddenly, I had begun to speak a language which I did not recognise as my mother tongue. 4 0 . To say that disappointment exiled me from paradise could be true for a conscious age—conscious, that is, of its disappointments, but not for one in which essence and phenomenon do not converse with one another through the act of awareness. As a child, disappointment had meant desiring to be a child no longer, and so paradise was shattered to the core. Something in me decided to forget the, as yet uncomprehended, significance of this disappointment and to build a different kind of man, starting from a forgotten being and from a principle of volition: I am not what I hide, I am, rather, what I become by means of my will. 4 1 . Already in the winter of my fifteenth year (my first year at high school), the model of personality which the first caesura had destined me for was reaching its completion—which means that all of those weaknesses which define the presence of character in the soul were already active. It has been said that it is better not to be a fish to be able to understand an aquarium. In a school notebook dating from 1973 I wrote that "existence transforms essence, debasing it". Any Christian connotation is probably absent. What is left is the conviction, phrased almost fatalistically, that an "essence" is not that blithe spirit described by Josephus Flavius as joyously rising towards heaven. T h e aquarium is

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n o t made of glass and is, in all likelihood, not provisional. Besides, you are c o n d e m n e d to be a fish to the very end, unless you are fortunate enough to have the chance of transcendence, to tear you away from the conditioning process. However, what does it mean to be conditioned? In the 9th grade, I discovered that the world was void of all significance. Significant would have m e a n t that I was integrated into the world and yet, in the petty world of popular education nothing demanded anything, in its true essence, of anyone. I was required to learn, but "swotting" was something I never wasted time on. I am now making an effort to remember whether I did any studying at all in high school, in any of the subjects. My memories are precise on this point: I never studied at home and sometimes I skimmed through the textbook before some lesson or during a break. With this system of mine, faced with inordinately strict marking (the highest grade, 10, was rarely obtained, and the most frequent, even for very good answers, was 9 or even 8), I still managed to come first in my class and to establish a reputation, not for unusual intelligence, but for being a model pupil! As I said before, my spare time was unlimited. My revulsion against the disorder which I had gone through in my "hippie" phase (not permanently, it seems, since I met it again on occasion) underwent a decisive "channelling" one October afternoon in 1972, and the sense of the "caesura" was made quite clear. 4 2 . In one—I do not remember which—book of Kantian philosophy, popularised (or twisted, rather), in the inevitable Marxist-oriented style of the epoch, I once chanced across such enigmatic terms as pure reason, a priorism, categories, etc. What exactly pure reason meant was the one thing which particularly excited my interest. Evidently, die enr hic~, yet sometimes our destiny, more than our will, exerts a peculiar fascination on us, not unlike that of the moon on moths: blindingly, and with the intensity of perdition. My father was sitting in an armchair, reading. The question perplexed him. He wanted to know how I had come upon the words. When satisfied about that, however, he remained in a tense, discontented silence. Finally, he conveyed to me that, whatever one did, one ought to do well, otherwise it was all in vain, and that two different things could not be done well at the same time. That, if one had consecrated oneself to a scientific career (I had apparently done so!), there would be no room for literature and philosophy, and that knowing a few things well was preferable to knowing many superficially. Therefore, it

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was a sign of superficiality on my part to want to know what pure reason meant for no reason other than simply knowing, in general. And he refused to answer my question. This refusal was cardinal, since it irritated me beyond all measure and spurred me on. T h e outcome was not brilliant: I procured The Critique of Pure Reason from a friend and began to pore over it with a minuteness which I had lavished on no other activity before. Against his own will, and in a way which he had not asked for, my father had been right: Kant irrevocably tore me away from all high-school activities, which appeared to me from that time on as not merely uninteresting but as downright puerile. The rigour in that work and my ambition to adopt it in totality, in its fullest sense, these were things which sealed my destiny. I would ask the reader to observe the nuance: it was the rigour rather than the profundity which achieved this—the latter, I am convinced to this day, eluded me completely. This is how my first contact with a serious author was merely a sip from a ceremonial glass. However, for the first time I had acquired a form of culture, and it was auspicious: it had the outlines of a cathedral. 4 3 . One thing is certain: I have only the memory of my consciousness. Contextual memories, netted together and making up a continuum which I can at any time recognise and say, "such has been the thread of my life". These I have only from the age of twelve—which, in my case, is to say from the age which knew "the first intoxication of lucidity". The cause for this lies in the fact that I can only remember how I thought that I was, and not the circumstance itself. You will not think this in the least strange if you consider that the memory on which our conscious destiny is based is an extension not of the verb "to feel", but of "to be felt". This amounts to saying that memory is generated by the mirror, or, to be more exact, from the rippling of its surface which makes a perfect image impossible. I have been conscious only from perhaps the age of thirteen, and this is also the time from which I begin to have continuous memories. The memory upon which I construct my childhood is of a wholly different nature: it does not make up a complete destiny, but more of a geological mosaic. The framework for reviving those images of fortune are chance objects from the age which we have obliterated. I did not remember having read in my childhood: but I discovered the books, and squeezed them out of my memory, and I know now what I used to read. I had no memory of Corto Maltese until a couple of years ago

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when a friend who has a passion for Hugo Pratt laid before my eyes a complete collection of the Corto Maltese cartoons. Seeing them again, absentmindedly at first, was a revelation in the full sense of the word: flesh and image were given back their life-restoring light, and they were resurrected totally non-judgementally. It was the same with all of the other "objects". Had they not been witnesses to my childhood, my childhood would never have been resurrected. Memory alone was powerless here: with no destiny to assume and none to rationalise as the privileged past of the present, it knew how to relate to the past only in the form of a chance occurrence of the remembered image. Photographs, however, will not come together into an album for the eye of a stranger unless there is a unifying consciousness of tradition, and unless it speaks out in a voice which is its own. A stranger to the world in my adolescence, I was a stranger to my own childhood also until the seeds of a different future chose to settle on my forgotten past—in the humus of an existence which now had to be resurrected. At last, a consequence was born for those years which had had none. 4 4 . There is no memory outside destiny; however you look at it, memory will dissipate itself into mere reminiscences, into disparate images. (In Spanish disparates means follies.) Archaeology mutates into a neutral geology. Images from the past are many, a sea: destinies not so many. This is the reason why we can only possess the memory of epochs in which we have lived in full awareness, for we do not remember the essence of being, but its awareness. As for the epochs when we were not conscious (and I am obviously referring to paradise) their memory is possible only where a destiny emerges in the present being, forcing the forgotten past back into life. This would, in some sense, be an invented past if it were not for the few vestiges entombed in the chance objects which have avoided being obliterated by time. In the final analysis, what I am saying is banal: it is nothing more than the methodology of history applied to personal memory. In the grand course of historic time there are the deeds and there are their signs. Only the latter survive, and they are the consciousness of deeds. Then everything is forgotten—everything which did not possess such a sign. Sometimes, however, there comes a present which, in need of some justification for itself, leans on a past which ought to have been there. Necessity makes it real, and then we only truly notice a sign if it addresses us—that is, if we are capable of appreciating it as being tua res agitur. T h e flints borne by floods were a familiar sight to Kikuyu

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warriors—not as palaeolithic silexes, but as stones of the spirit of thunder. Leakey needed a past to motivate his expectation, and he knew what those stones were about only when, driven on by his aspiration, he was able to think of them as survivors of the epoch for which he was searching. Initially, every reality is only a desire inadequately applied. Later the desire becomes consummated; later still it evolves into a thought desire, the desire for a desire, and, after that, into nothing at all. In other words, it ends up as a memorial to a reality, its empty tomb, its cenotaph: reality f r o m which being real has withdrawn and has left behind, shredded and scattered, the object alone—and, even of this, merely its materiality. Signs make reality, but after its naming reality fades away. Such is the oblique law of paradise. Who survives with a complete set of m e m ories? Lazarus did not speak of his descent into death, nor did Enoch come back from that space where, still in this world in which we dwell —not giving him his death, that is—God called him to Himself. I cannot imagine Adam arriving here with his memory of Paradise and yet I know well that the first moments of his nakedness would often come to his mind. Towards the past of our happiness signs do exist: but most often they are like the angel who brandishes a flaming sword, set to guard the gates of Paradise. F r o m the place of banishment no return can return to it, because the very form in which the act of "spinning anew"—which is another way of saying re-turning—occurs does not admit of a two-way spinning 4 : the spinning wheel does not reverse its own turning. This is the same thing as the underlying meaning of the word "nostalgia", the anguish of returning: it is not origins which are found, but their consequences alone. We know only too well what this means: the Prince does not find his long-lost parents, he finds instead the only place where his death can still seek him: his origin 5 . It is this sense which we discover in being alive: if only we could not return, we would find our infinitude and live it. Death can only reach us f r o m the source, since only the source can be dried up; who, in their right mind 4 I n R o m a n i a n t h e a c t of r e t u r n i n g , iniors, is r e a d h e r e as " i n - t o r s " , in-, or i n n e r - , s p i n n i n g , (of w h a t h a s a l r e a d y b e e n s p u n , as d e s t i n y ) (translator's note). 5 I n t h e tale a l l u d e d to, o n e of t h e m o s t o r i g i n a l in R o m a n i a n f o l k l o r e , t h e P r i n c e g o e s in s e a r c h of " Y o u t h w h i c h k n o w s n o A g e a n d L i f e w h i c h k n o w s n o D e a t h " , w h i c h a w a i t h i m in a m a g i c r e a l m at t h e e n d of a n i n i t i a t o r y q u e s t ; i n a d v e r t e n t l y , whilst h e is o u t h u n t i n g , h e s t e p s i n t o t h e Valley of R e m e m b r a n c e a n d is p o s s e s s e d b y t h e u r g e to r e t u r n h o m e . T h e r e h e d i s c o v e r s t h a t c e n t u r i e s h a v e p a s s e d in w h a t t o h i m w e r e h o u r s a n d d a y s , a n d his d e a t h a l o n e h a s l i n g e r e d b e h i n d t o w e l c o m e h i m at his e r s t w h i l e c r a d l e (iranslawr's

nole).

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would attempt to drain a full-blown, rock-bedded river? Yet everything returns and what I am doing now, as I know full well, is merely a rehearsal for my death. T h e closer I am to my past and to my fountainhead, the more powerful and vivid are the signs of death. I do this, however, for you. 4 5 . T h e favourite topic of conversation for my schoolmates in the first year (and later) was how to lose one's virginity most quickly and most lecherously. Sex troubled them like a dim presentiment of future defencelessness and fascinated them like a promise at once promiscuous and blissful but much too slow to come true. How could I tolerate them? Frankly, I neither could nor did. From an early age my main way of interacting with my fellow creatures had been the sneer. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the fact that, at that time at least, and to very m u c h the same degree, there was insecurity also. I scorned for safety's sake. T h e thought of mingling nauseated me. T h a t rudiment of culture which I had dismissed from my mind, together with the innate ease with which I could be intelligent and speak well, these were the two decisive factors which set me apart. Since I learned well and fantastically quickly, I remained a leader, but a leader who would turn his back on leading. In high school, social hierarchies are puerile: you are either a prize-winner or something of a rogue, "one of the boys". I was a prize-winner, and yet I managed to wear this tag lightly, overshadowed by another, let us call it "elevation". My intelligence outreached that of many of my schoolmates but certainly not of everyone. However, the factor which was instrumental in my leaving them all far behind was the height, the level, at which I thought it appropriate to place myself. I still believe today that the value of one's intelligence is given not only by the capacity to solve problems but also by the level of importance which one deems it right to accord them. At first it was simple: I was as great as my reading had been. However, as one never truly possesses what one has, there was a slight inherent deception in this: it was not only the quantity of reading which set me apart, but also the quality. T h e way in which I chose my books was nevertheless a question of grace: they chose me. T h e merit lies only in the effort one is capable of, starting from the quest for what you have found: this was clear to me, I believe, even at that time. What I read, therefore, was utterly different from what my schoolmates read. In such does simplicity reside, in that the level was not my own, it was that of my reading. In time the reading was followed by meditation and meditation by the need to construct some-

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thing. This is how my notebooks came into being—their n u m b e r today comes close to sixty—and at the outset they were no more than clumsy attempts at a diary. T h e need to note down what happened to me was authentic, since being a writer I wanted to be a m a n who knew. And, even before I wished to acquire or possess culture, the instinct which drove me to write during my first age of awareness was the ecumenical vocation of confession. 4 6 . Certainly any young person who has had some contact with the great things of the world is b o u n d to be affected by vulgar conceit, and I, myself, was, equally certainly, one to stress the "I" rather than the application of the self. Jumbled expressions, inane exclamations, affectation of phrase, all poured out of this immature, upstart creature. On the other hand, of course, there is hardly any beginning which does not posture to some degree. M y way of doing this was daring, since I had opened my eyes in a house almost void of books. Sheer wilfulness had made me read Kant. T h e pundit may very well see only presumptuousness here but my own memories recall a heroic young being, modest and full of humility, and there is a m o m e n t in this age which arouses my admiration. After all, I could have kept on frequenting tea parties; I was respected, was I not (for my performance in studying), and I was courted (for the striking fact that I was not a swot). Still, just like an industrious novice in a medieval scriptorium, this teenager devoted several months on end to a line-by-line reading of Kant. In his own particular way he was totally the scholar. Most of the words, however, eluded him, since, whilst he may have understood the letter, the spirit escaped him. Phrasal construction in Bagdasar's translation was heavy and word order tortuous. I would come across words far removed from general use and these I would memorise aloud, jotting them down on scraps of paper which are, unfortunately, lost today. Late in the evening, before going to bed, I would repeat them from memory, and then I would test myself, notes in front of me, to check my accuracy. In short, I learned in the way which children use in the first form to master the alphabet and, later, the multiplication tables. I did not learn in order to astonish, b u t to understand, since my father's refusal had mortified me. In some obscure way, I wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to do two diametrically opposed things both well and at the same time. It is interesting that I cannot remember ever dreaming that I could, in my turn, write such a book as that which I was labouring over. In this sense, my offering was pure, without thought of reward, a chaste offering, fash-

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ioned f r o m the m e a g r e resources of a h e r m i t . Perhaps that was the time w h e n I b e c a m e a t t u n e d to the attractions of m o n a s t i c life, a n d w h e n I was first d r a w n to that b e n i g n h u m b l i n g of the intellect which f l o u r ished in the medieval scriptorium. Whatever the t r u t h , disciplined work a n d self-exertion were the p a t h s which b r o u g h t real b o o k s within my grasp. 4 7 . In f r o n t of my fellow creatures, I seemed like a winner since everyt h i n g w o r k e d for m e a n d since everything I t u r n e d my h a n d to showed success f r o m the very first. However, I knew inwardly that all I did was serve. T h e feeling of being o n a mission was always, I suspect, in m e in c o n j u n c t i o n with a p r o p e n s i t y for b e i n g a good soldier. W h a t was the mission? It m u s t have b e e n d u r i n g the 10th class, or t h e r e a b o u t s , that I b e c a m e intent o n f a s h i o n i n g myself as an erudite. W h a t I u n d e r s t o o d by e r u d i t i o n was n o t so m u c h the accuracy of q u o t a t i o n s as their variety, or else a flexibility which would allow m e to c o m b i n e in a single t h o u g h t very different experiences of culture, D a n t e , the Bhagavad-gita a n d N i e t z s c h e , f o r i n s t a n c e , or E g y p t a n d scholasticism. T h e r e is a g o o d deal of arbitrariness in this, b u t let us n o t forget that an u p r i g h t b e a r i n g is achieved either by being naturaliter an aristocrat, or by exercising dignity. N e v e r t h e l e s s , in respect of dignity in culture, its motive a n d its destination, n o b o d y was there w h o could tell m e w h a t they were. C u l t u r e was an asset i n a s m u c h as, w h e n o n e p u r s u e d it, it tore o n e away f r o m the mediocrity of life and f r o m the d o m i n i o n of your everyday r a n k - a n d filer. I n the ignorant habitat of o u r society, to practise culture w o u l d be the equivalent of a religious conversion, and quite likely the very s a m e r e s o u r c e s were set in m o t i o n . T h e wish to cultivate oneself a p p e a r e d to t h e a p t e r o u s just as a b e r r a n t as the h e a l t h f u l t h o u g h t of retiring to a m o n a s t e r y . It m a y well h a p p e n that in twenty years' t i m e p e o p l e will find it h a r d to u n d e r s t a n d the soteriological f u n c t i o n which initiation into c u l t u r e has h a d for o u r g e n e r a t i o n . H o w e v e r , if you p o s s e s s e d a certain i n n a t e dignity a n d an intelligence which could n o t b e satiated w i t h s i m u l a c r a , c u l t u r e a p p e a r e d as t h e only t e r r i t o r y for a r e s t o r e d h u m a n i t y . T h e h e a r t which n o u r i s h e s it was certainly far f r o m m a n i fest to m e at that time: nevertheless we k n o w very well h o w it works: w h e n religion has b e e n lost, the ritual alone lingers o n to p e r p e t u a t e it, until a n e w soul proclaims again the rite and t r a n s m u t e s the n o w e m p t y f o r m to a religious life which could n o t have b e e n b o r n w i t h o u t that ritualistic interim. T h e flaming h e a r t of culture I ignored. I n s t e a d , dili-

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gently, I pored over its forms. It is interesting that brushes with this heart of hearts I have always had, but I know it only now when this heart half looms in front of me—I knew nothing of it when it was all an exercise in self-cultivation. As is self-evident, the sense of culture does not lie in becoming cultivated. 4 8 . T h e feeling that I went about my various pursuits waiting for a revelation was something which I never had at the beginning. T h e solidity of a Tudor Vianu 6 I found wholly satisfying and I read him diligently between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. T h e allure of talent and the soundness of reference were everything to me. Also at that time I was satisfied with the mere play of intelligence. It is a truth not without significance that adolescence, the most intransigent of ages, can be satisfied with mere fireworks. Beauty itself is a spiritual food which cannot be tainted. I was so enraptured by the inexhaustible reality of culture that I hardly paused to notice that each reading inspirited and that the spiritual life unearthed from all of the authors whom I managed to read in their entirety and from passion, combined to shape a new man, who was at first simply annexed but who then, by degrees, was substituted for the personality which had accepted such nourishment. Whilst I believed that I was mastering what I read, I was actually transformed by it and in a way which I ignored. T h e benevolent god of destiny was at work in me silently, in my perfect ignorance of him. What had happened to me before, in my childhood, was happening once more: form proved itself stronger than content. Content was itself a lure and it spurred me on in quest of new forms, and yet it was form which transformed me. Very slowly a new sense grew in me. I was able to translate forms in terms of content. I discovered two levels of understanding: the first was the message expressed and the second the medium which transmitted the message. T h e discovery that the medium is the message was something which I made independent of McLuhan: I made it as an experience of assimilating reading. A kind of music arises from here which requires a particular sense for music (and a particular kind of musical ear): beyond the words which expressed him, an author came to mean for me a certain rhythm of interiority and a specific frame of the

6 T u d o r V i a n u ( 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 6 4 ) , R o m a n i a n a e s t h e t i c i a n , literary h i s t o r i a n , axiologist a n d p h i l o s o p h e r of c u l t u r e . H e m a d e c o n s i d e r a b l e c o n t r i b u t i o n s in e a c h of t h e s e fields, w h i c h w e r e b a s e d o n a h u m a n i s t p e r s p e c t i v e , a n d w a s a n a d v o c a t e of r a t i o n a l i s m a n d h i s t o r i c i s m . H i s p h i l o s o p h i c b a c k g r o u n d w a s n e o - K a n t i a n a n d p h e n o m e n o l o g i c a l (translator's

note).

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soul. As I began to recognise the timbre of a voice by the form of what was communicated, it was easy for me to grasp the idea that the spirit guides itself by forms and that what is said is somewhat like matter, like marble to a sculptor. T h e true message of a work is never expressed in discourse, but is an effect of configuration. To think, as Kant rightly avers, certainly means to unify, but the union is that of content within form. 4 9 . For the time being I kept discovering authors, just as late 15thcentury navigators kept discovering continents. I read more than one author at the same time to force my spirit to be alert and to be able to shift points of view. Journal IV (p. 64 et seqq.) lists the books which I read between June 15 and August 2, 1974: Huysmans: A rebours-, André Gide: Paludes, Prometheus Ill-Bound, Theseus, Autumn Leaves, Prétextes; Max Frisch: Homo faber; Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, A Diamond as Big as the Ritz, May Day, Pierre Labracherie: La vie quotidienne de la bohème littéraire au XIXe siècle', Kafka: The Judgement', Camus: Exile and the Kindgom', Radu Lupan: Hemingway, Victor Kernbach: Short Stories', Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal', Li tai-pe: Poems', Dr. C. Vlad: Psychoanalysis', Camil Baciu: The Garden of the Gods', Camus: La Chute', D'Annunzio: The Triumph of Death', G. Câlinescu: The Universe of Poetry, The Song of Solomon', Ecclesiastes, Studies of World Literature. By the end of August, I had embarked upon the following: H. Schwartz: Freud and God', André Gide: The School for Wives, Robert', Fragments from Marcel Proust presented by Irina Eliade (collection Multum in parvo)', Bergson: Deux sources de la morale et de la religion-, Benedetto Croce: Aesthetics—Science of Expression and General Linguistics', G. Câlinescu: Principles of Aesthetics', Ion Biberi, Essays; I.A. Richards: Principles of Literary Criticism', Elena Tacciu: Romantic Mythology. That same summer, I can see that, until the time when classes began, I read La Condition humaine (Malraux), a French translation of The Man without Qualities (Robert Musil), the works of Kafka which had by then been translated into Romanian, a short story by Ingeborg Bachmann, The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (Oscar Wilde), Tête d'or, L'échange, Le Partage de Midi (Claudel), In Medeleni (Ionel Teodoreanu) and Poems (Labiç). One evening, I noted with pathos that I had reread Procrustes ' Bed (Camil Petrescu). T h e n , in the first term, instead of doing my homework, I read Anti-Diihring (Fr. Engels), I became familiar with the prosody of the Italian sonnet, I wrote reflec-

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tions on arbitrary truth and, very emphatically and thinking extremely highly of myself, I sketched a philosophical system on individuality and the social, in which I disputed Marx's point of view whilst doing service to it. Leafing through the one h u n d r e d and two pages of this diary, I notice that the names quoted there are: Marx, Dreiser, Petru Popescu, Russell, Pavese, Monet, Lautrec, Darwin, Kant, Sven Hassel, St. Exupery, Hegel, Sartre, Democritus, Schelling, Nietzsche, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Blaga, Eminescu, Baudelaire, Calinescu, Rilke, Kafka, Malraux, C a m u s , and Kirkegaard. W h a t does all this variegated mosaic signify? One single thing, and a modest one: that my thirst for culture was just like the greed for air of people who have been underwater too long: both lacking judgement and essential to life. 5 0 . F r o m the point of view of values, I did my best to resemble those whom I loved. Looking back, this is all which remains valid of me: what I loved. As for the rest, there are not many things to be said of an adolescent who takes such pains. Shortcomings, hesitations, blunders are his natural lot, like the colour of the eyes or a certain way of walking, with which one is born. T h a t insecure age which is one's adolescence has value only through the generosity it knew how to bestow on things and so it ought to be judged mainly by what its desires were, because the means were lacking (or they play tricks on it)—which does not make its failure any less fruitful. 5 1 . At sixteen, in 1973, I was desperate after a love which I had lost and was determined to plunge into it, retroactively (a sign of debility) and so I kept on writing transparent, vapid stories. Something of them can be found in the volume To Love, which is a transcription, with comments, of the first Journal (January-February, 1973). This was the same period in which I read Kant and began to work out my initiation in Vianu. Kant's formative effect would be slow and lasting. As for Vianu's influence, it might well be said to have given me a backbone. Lucidity is one thing which I acquired from him, another is the style in which ideas are chained in succession, remarkably apt to purge one's idiom of false profundities resulting from obscurities and prolixity (a typical example of this false profundity could be Johannes Volkelt in his considerations on the tragic as evinced during the First World War). All youths have the propensity to be verbose and here, too, Vianu brought about a salutary toning down. His intellectual hygiene and uprightness served me as a model for the inwardness of my thinking consigned to

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the social. His absorption was a slow one (as his is a vast work), but my rapture over him was swift to set in. My first attempts at essay writing (on a pedantic theme, " T h e Problem of Reasoning" dated 1975, which must have been under Husserl's influence as well) indelibly retain the mark of his aulic style, and his phrasing, too, in that "step by step" progression. Except for that, however, nothing: since they were not recorded anywhere, what I read at sixteen was lost to memory; even by name. N o t only did the rose fade away; not even its name remained. 5 2 . T h e year 1974 is far more richly represented in my notes. I was seventeen years old, and my cultural instruction was acquiring some method. Before the physics Olympiad 7 ,1 discover that I wrote a fantastic short story (Notebook I), made comments on my poems (in Journal IV) and debated with myself the problem of suicide, planning to write a "Treatise on Suicide". In November, I wrote a short story where my parents were cast as protagonists (XVIII. Book II); there I made experiments with the multi-stratified sentence structure of Proust. In Notebook II I discoursed " O n justness in the formulation of the answer", I entered a note on "Limits", and wrote an "Intimate Essay"; then, in the wake of the Rubàiyàt, I composed over fifty quatrains (bad ones). These quatrains were written in a state of excitation, either sexual or alcoholic. F r o m September to the end of the year I kept a diary (Journal V) and sketched out the essay on individuality and the social which I have mentioned already. Finally, 1974 is the year of my first book of reading notes, where I filed and produced commentaries (Book I). T h e names I filed were: C. I. Gulian, The Problem of Man and Contemporary Existentialism', Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus', Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist', Dumitru Ghi§e, The French Existentialism and the Problems of Ethics; Saqikhya-karika (translation and presentation by Sergiu Al. George); D. D. Ro§ca, Philosophical Studies and Essays', Plato, The Republic, Eugen Schileru, Critical Preludes', Blaise Pascal, Pensées; Samuel Becket Waiting for Godot', Tudor Vianu, The Classical Ideal of Maw, André Malraux, La tentation de l'Occident, Radu Enescu, Franz Kafka', José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Don Quixote', Mallarmé and Rilke with poems; Plato, Symposium', G. Càlinescu, Aesthetics', Tudor Vianu, Studies of Analysis and Methodology, Benedetto Croce, Aesthetics 7 National competition held at high-school level for each subject of study from the fields of Sciences, Humanities and Arts (translator's note).

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in a Nutshell, T u d o r Vianu, Style and Destiny, The Paradox of Poetry, Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Reintegration. At the Central State Library, I p u r p o s e d to search for the following: Sigmund Freud, Cinq leçons sur la psychanalyse; Mallarmé, Divagations and Poems', Valéry, Degas, Dance, Drawing and An Introduction to Leonardo da Vinci's Method', Swedenborg; and Nicholas of Cusa. I was conscientiously making notes on Goethe's Mothers and I shall mention, just to show my sedulous innocence at its best, that on page 82 I resolved to find out who the Parcae were... 5 3 . T h e year when I turned eighteen (1975) begins with two studies, one on M o n e t and the other on ethics (Book II), followed by a more ambitious essay, which remained unfinished, with the title "Possible Man". "Possible M a n " was the continuation of "Treatise on Suicide", in terms which went round the question of suicide and transmuted the theme of vanity into one of failure. I was, no doubt, intoxicated with the ethical and the French variety of existentialism, of which I had, at first, partaken from bastard sources; still, the theme of failure, and that of limitation, too, were personal themes, derived from weaknesses which I had experienced, alas, all too often. I must add that the theme of failure was to come to a neat resolution only later, in the army, when D o r u Kaytar presented m e with this idea which challenged my thinking: " T h e r e is no such thing as failure." I ruminated on this affirmation for three years before I could assimilate it in its premise: it is true, I was able to say at twenty-five, there is no such thing as failure. T h e third unfinished study was dedicated to Cesare Pavese; Pavese is probably the first author whom I have read in his entirety. T h e study continued with an apologia for suicide which, building on my scraps of lame experience, was doing its best to conceal the fact that fear of failure m a d e one plunge into grandiloquent and empty gestures. T h e pages covered with my notes are jammed with Camus, Dostoevsky and their characters, whom I quote in line with their authors, as if they were h u m a n beings in their own right. In the same period I searched the Central Library for Berdyaev, Spengler, Sorokin and Shestov. A reading plan on page 74 announces, u n a c c o m p a n i e d by any works, the following names: Mircea Eliade, Nietzsche, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas (with Summa contra gentile), Saint Teresa de Avila (The Way of Perfection), San Juan de la Cruz, Sartre, U n a m u n o , Ortega y Gasset, Ludwig Klages, Savonarola, Machiavelli, F r e u d , Jung, Swedenborg, the Bible, the Gospels, Gabriel Marcel,

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Shestov, Schopenhauer, Saint-Exupéry, Marquis de Sade, Parmenides, Malraux, Karl Jaspers, Beckett, Saint Augustine, Nichifor Crainic (a study on V. Voiculescu), Aron Cotruç, Pythagoras, Emil Cioran, Lucian Blaga, Tertullian, Jakob Boehme. Towards the end of the year, for Ioana, I wrote an "Introduction into Egotism" (Notebook III), which once again, but in a calmer light this time, re-argued my old obsession with the presence of vice and its pose as a positive value. My conscience was becoming more composed, and now and again it would come across some fundamental to which I submit even today: "Any regret is a guilty conscience"; "Memory alone can make beauty anew" (Book II, p. 1 lOr). And there are others like them. 5 4 . Until the age of eighteen, my personality had drawn what I might call its "actuality" from two distinct veins: one came from the two years of dereliction which had ended my childhood (damnation, vice, abuse, stimulants, failure, suicide), the other from the new creature which had discovered culture. It is true that, leaving aside the erudition which I strove for, the re-born being applied itself to the turmoil inherited from the former. My new experience, however, no longer included any of the problems of excess, that hooligan vitality which had threatened to be my ruin at fourteen Besides, the love which I bore Ioana gave me an emotional stability which my studious self m a d e the best of. In it I resolved my Dionysian urges, shaking t h e m off, some of them, or, perhaps, forgetting others. Still others survived, in camouflage, waiting to burst out again whenever the time was ripe for them. T h e hooligan is permanently dormant in me, it is true, and my equivocal sympathies for this kind of personality I have never disowned. M y life was now made up of study and meditation, nothing more. M y only urgency was culture, which was not an urgence du pire. T h e fervour in which I lived now was that of "acquiring value" I had not forgotten C a m u s ' note, in his Notebooks, where he wondered whether the p r o b l e m of a universal meaning of life was not merely the surreptitious expression of the question, " D o I or do I not have value as a writer?" As I bracketed away failure issued f r o m existentiality, I was now tormented by the failure which emerged from being or not being a bearer of value, an axiophoros. As I went deeper into solving physics problems in preparation for admission to the faculty, I also applied myself to rehearsing the profession of a writer. Ego scriptor was the natural response to the problem of culture, which, in truth, also spelt out its limits. A solution to life in the terms of life itself was foreign to me,

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because derivatives—by which I am referring to values—made m e lose sight of living. Until after my graduation f r o m high school, I kept to my staunch belief both in the autonomy of values and in their de facto existence. It was only natural that my sole horizon should be the ideal of achieving excellence as a writer and as a m a n of knowledge. T h a t ideal was going to be dramatically called into question by the experience of the army, an experience, in many ways, of the limit, and also by the encounter with D o r u Kaytar. W h a t is intriguing is that, despite the fact that my horizon was inescapably lay and historicist (without my having the slightest idea of what history was, or of whether it existed realiter), references to religion are frequent and full of interest (my interest for them). For instance, the following note was entered as an epigraph to Notebook III: "Tabor, mountain situated to the SE of Nazareth. T h e Light of Tabor (Tavor?). T h e Transfiguration." It is well to keep in mind that this was not a mere annotation, it was an epigraph. Its significance, as an argument relating to the whole book, eludes me. Did I have it at that time? 5 5 . M y interest in Dostoevsky was clear; but it was not on the religious side, but on the existential. I saw in him a reservoir of acts which exemplified the authenticity of "limit states" in the existentialist sense of the term. In the wake of Camus, I took Kirilov or Ivan Karamazov to be the most significant characters. Today, whilst I would retain Kirilov, I tend to lean towards Stavrogin and Zosima, or to Dostoevsky himself with his Diary of a Writer and his entire life, with the equivocation resulting from N. Strahov's inconsiderate affirmations, at his death. I r e m e m ber that in my summer holiday I took up Crime and Punishment, The Demons, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, wishing to extract f r o m them the quotations which might evidence a Dostoevskian philosophy. I soon desisted, taken aback at the discovery that, unlike C a m u s (for instance), his theoretical pronouncements did not allow themselves to be torn out of the context of the novel unmutilated. At the time I interpreted this as a defect; it is, in reality, a supreme eulogy and signifies the distance between an authentic work of fiction (Dostoevsky), and one of apologue (Camus). Dostoevsky opens the second book of notes f r o m 1975. 5 6 . W h a t seems to me of greater consequence is the fact that now, at eighteen, I made the discovery of historical cultures. My readings had all been contemporary and the depth of my historical reach did n o t go

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further than the 19th century. Besides, my reading had been devoid of any historical sense. By this I mean that my only interest was the present, or else strictly my problem. I used to clip bare quotations just as Renaissance people costumed the Virgin Mary in clothes which were c o n t e m p o r a r y to them, believing that by this they were placing H e r in the "historical" frame of Bethlehem. Context told me all too little, unable as I was to evaluate mentality: I could, at most, esteem a value. Peculiarities escaped me, because I ignored difference. I had not as yet had the experience of a totaliter aliter. Gide, Pavese, Malraux, Proust, Musil were, in the last instance, one; Kant, Hegel or, to a rather lesser extent, Nietzsche, exhibited a homogeneous and monolithic style of speculation, which did not allow for any fissure in mentality to be seen—a fissure I could have grasped through Kirkegaard, through U n a m u n o (or even through Ortega), if only I had known how to read them correctly. Instead, I saw everything as belonging to me by right. To appropriate a rather stale metaphor, these great classics were all my contemporaries. 5 7 . T h e author to whom I owe a debt for having revealed to me the existence of historical civilisations, and also the one who first compelled my intellectual horizons to take in the idea of difference (not that of historicity, as yet), was Lucian Blaga 8 . T h e first speculative concept of mentality, with examples which fell perhaps slightly short of the mark, I received from him. I also owe him—an author who, judging by a remark of Eliade's, had invariably resorted to second-rate documents— the urge to consult original authors, those who are the fount of a culture. It is true that, in Blaga, I had merely found an invitation to consult authors who were typical of a given stylistic field. This was a beneficial initial limitation. I perceived historicism as the typical quality of certain styles of difference. I studied his trilogies pencil in hand. T h e widening of my horizon was incalculable, no matter what one might say of the way Blaga did his research. You may reproach Blaga anything only if you decide to tarry with him. Whoever "lodges" with Blaga for viaticum, travel victuals, will be grateful, and never leave empty-handed for the Customs. T h e first division of history into periods which I knew is essentially Blaga's. About historical religions I first learned f r o m The Trilogy of 8 L u c i a n Blaga ( 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 6 1 ) , R o m a n i a n poet, philosopher, and playwright. H i s f u n d a m e n t a l theoretical work is to b e f o u n d in the three trilogies: The Trilogy of Knowledge The Trilogy of Culture

(1931-1934),

( 1 9 3 5 - 1 9 3 7 ) and The Trilogy of Values ( 1 9 3 9 - 1 9 4 2 ) (translator's note).

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Values. Key notions about philosophers' different styles of thinking I found at the same source. For the first time I found myself situating a mode of thinking within a typical cultural context, configuring the style, a habit which was later to develop in me as the grasp of mentality. In Book III, at page 23, the first chronology of a civilisation is entered: Rome. Since that moment, the need to think of any phenomenon within its specific geographic span and temporal depth has never left me. I acquired from Blaga a certain visual mode of perceiving civilisations in their outgrowths: when Europe, for instance, is under discussion, I see the map, as if from a satellite, and from it, stratified in space, its chronology, like a succession of alluvial strata. Blaga then kindled in me an interest for the studies of Mircea Eliade: in 1975 at the Central Library, I took systematic notes from In a Monastery in the Himalayas and from "Secret Languages". Next, I studied historical cultures from primary sources: Egypt from the chrestomathy annotated by Constantin Daniel, and The Fragments of the PreSocratics from C. Noica's anthology (translated after Diels) (Book VIIB). At the same time I made notes from Ecclesiastes and The Song of Solomon, trying to identify a symbolic key and I started to read the poets of the Pleiad from the three beautiful volumes edited by Alexandru Rally. I was as industrious as always, humble and unassuming. I rehearsed chronologies as part of a memorising process with the same technique which I had used to study Kant. The notebooks are full of lists of unknown words whose meaning I always noted down with care from the dictionary. I wrote down such words as "rebarbative", "fiduciary", "enclave", "Mahan", "kutiar" "Naga", "sadhu" etc. The first etymologies also emerged: 'heresy' derived from airesis (learning, school, sect), "inference" from the Latin inferre (to bring, to introduce), and so on. When it came to Islam I noted down, schoolboy-like, whole lists of proper nouns, together with the years in which the respective personalities had flourished (floruit); I mentioned that "revelations" are, in Arabic, Corane, and embarked upon a polemic with the notion of panlogism, etc. As I look at my Books I can see clearly that my true school was at home, after classes, with teachers whose voices I never heard. When a history of education in Romania covering this period is written it will be seen that the main instruction was done not in school, but through those books which, by happy chance made our generation the reaper of a propitious destiny, the answer which culture knew how to give to a disabling period in history.

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5 8 . I began the year 1975 by reading from the Russian classics. From Turgenev I made files on Virgin Soil, Smoke and On the Eve, which I summarised thoroughly, writing comments on the somewhat distraught ideas in the text, Nejdanov & comp. I continued with Rudin and Fathers and Sons. In parallel, I read poetry by Francis Jammes, Claudel, Mallarmé and Valéry and within two days I devoured Maitrey and Wedding in Heaven 9. I made a note on the meaning of the words "apologue" and "aporia", and calculated that I was reading about a hundred pages a day, which was too little (Book X, p. 5). I made a detour with Mauriac (Un adolescent d'autrefois; Maltaverne) and then took up the Russians again, with Uncle Vanya (Chekhov) and with Tolstoy: Resurrection, The Living

Corpse,

War and Peace, Anna Karenina.

I a d d : " a n d w h a t e v e r else

I can find". Also at this time I re-read II mestiere di vivere, and I noted down the meaning of the words "theology" and "soteriology". For school I read The Life of Mihail Emmescu and the two compact volumes of The Works of Mihail Eminescu (Càlinescu). In F e b r u a r y I moved on to the

French moralists in translation and continued with Chekhov, Sketches and Stories. On February 20th I was re-reading La Condition humaine (p. 1 Ov) for the third time and also going through a book on Rodin by Bernard Champigneulle. Two days later I was reading poems by Vasile Voiculescu and began A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (J. Joyce). At the school library I made notes on Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, by Hegel, whilst from the childrens' section of the State Library I stole, out of love, Hòlderlin's poems translated by Nemoianu and Doina§ (in the collection "The Most Beautiful Poems"). Man's Hope (Malraux) I finished on February 26th with reverent wordless passion. From March until May my reading is noted down minutely and I even went as far as to note, on May 8th, that I had read 126 pages and, on the 12th, with some satisfaction, 290 pages. In this way before my eyes march The Idiot ( D o s t o e v s k y ) , Literary Profiles (R. M u n t e a n u ) , The Stranger ( C a m u s ) , Plays ( I b s e n ) , European Cardinal Points (Al. A . P h i l i p p i d e ) ,

the six volumes of People, Years, Life (Ilya E h r e m b u r g ) , Phaidon (unfinished), The Royal Way (André Malraux), Dialogues with Leucò (Pavese), The Possessed ( D o s t o e v s k y ) , The Art of Romanian Fiction Writers ( V i a n u ) , Aesthetic Thinking in 18th-Century France ( E r n e s t S t e r e ) , Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosophy and Ethics ( F l o r i c a N e a g o e ) , Gargantua ( R a b e l a i s ) , Wretched Dionis ( E m i n e s c u ) , The Plague ( C a m u s ) , The Genius and the

Goddess (Huxley), The Brothers Karamazov 9 B o t h b y Mircea Eliade (translator's note).

(Dostoevsky). I m a d e a

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note of the fact that I was unable to read A Man Finished (Papini), and I stumbled in Mimesis (Auerbach), which I left unfinished. On May 16th, I also embarked on reading the complete works of Rebreanu, for school, perhaps, and I alternated this with The Tide of Fortune (St. Zweig) and with Otilia's Enigma (Câlinescu). Vianu's Modern Fragments moved me to exuberance, and, without stopping to study it, I skimmed through volume 2 of Lukàcs's Aesthetics. I ended my month with Aristotle, On the Soul, w i t h The Influence of Hegel in Romanian

Culture ( T u d o r V i a n u )

and with Thibaudet's study on Baudelaire, whose number of pages (78) I noted down pedantically. When there was also homework to be done I only read 130 pages a day. During these months of frenzy I went through spells when I loathed everything which I did, and moments when obsession with death paralysed my will. Nevertheless, the prevailing inspiration of those days seems to have been the one which dictated to me these serene lines: "And death? No thoughts. I am working. Eternity" (p. 15). 5 9 . The year which I had begun under those auspices ended in what I might call a different tonality. I proceeded to find out who Teresa de Avila and Ignatius of Loyola had been and set as themes for meditation for the week of December 8th-15 th the following: The New Testament, the mysticism of Islam, Hindi, Christian, Assyro-Babylonian and Egyptian cosmogony. I also planned readings from Orpheus, Musaeus, Ferekides, Pythagoras and Thaïes. For the week of December 16th -23rd, I planned to study the philosophers: Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer and Hegel (with his Phenomenology). By doing all these things I thought to gather material for a text on Eminescu's metaphysics, which I intended to write and present in my Romanian class, with my teacher's complicity. Next, spread over many pages, come notes taken after Leibniz (Opere—Works, volume I, which came out in 1974) and Schopenhauer. I ended the year en beauté, alternating The Gospel according to St Luke with Monadology. 6 0 . Like so many of my essays, that on Eminescu's metaphysics also remained in fragments and sketches. What is typical of the year 1975 is the convergence of pursuits: once isolate, my reading became global. Now, for the first time, I read authors and strove to embrace literatures, if not exhaustively, at least in design: for weeks and months on end I would read only authors who belonged to a certain literature such as the Russian, or I would rivet myself on the pre-Socratics—a pursuit

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which in the coming year was to take on greater proportions. Unity prevailed over the fragment. This kind of reading is yet another influence descending from Blaga to me. I smile encouragingly at the young man struggling in those pages: unlike me, he did not yet know what the purpose of his exertion was. What astonishes me in him is the sureness of his choices. No hesitation in the selection of authors, few minor ones and only rarely a mediocre one. The risks faced by the one who strays ahead of the rest are well-known. A kinder god, however, granted to the young man that his labours would not ebb away into "quaintness" or into vanity. Although he knew nothing of any plan of perspective, what he read seems to be following a clear lead. Meaning almost pours out of his choices. Sometimes I ask myself whether he truly ignored where he was heading, such amazing limpidity beams towards the place where he was led, even as seen today. But no, the young man felt free; he did as he wished, whatever came most easily to hand. I can say this now, watching him with admiration and approbation: may peace be given you by Him who has looked upon you from the beginning. May you remain safely in the keeping of that foreign will which you seem, forever unaware, to be depending on. How many times would you have said, in your undecided years, "Thy will be done?" Not once, I believe. 6 1 . Nevertheless, the feeling that my non-existence was overflowing eventually penetrated me. The purpose once achieved, your solidarity with what it was which made you useful simply vanishes. What is left of what you have lived? The days which permanently seal a man as what he is are more numerous than the pages which explain him. Was my frenzy enough to mute my sadness? When it faded, the passion, by now flawed, could not increase this sadness, which means that it had owed the passion nothing for its coming into being, and nothing for its ceasing to be. Forever disquieted, forever despairing at the inner darkening which successes only made the more bitter. Inconsequence did not flow from failure, but from perpetual victory, victory over those who doubt you, victory, in your misfortune, over those who have loved you. What is there which deludes us in this dialogue of the deaf? The love of human for human and of human for the flicker of success? The significance of illusions is not unreality, but, on the contrary, an excess of reality. Se sentir dans le vrai always involves a degree of falsehood about what is lived. However, what is more true than the shiver with which you possess what inhabits you? When possessing, it seems as if the indifference of the world transmutes into your plenitude. The target lined

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up and the bull's-eye hit. Another comes in its turn. Possession proscribes me from possessing, as m a n is never one with his targets. Why is it that after night comes morning, and, after success, the hunger for a new one? I know the inconsistency of time by its indiscernible flow. Failure lies at the root of "being-in-time", in what is reversible just as in what is non-repeatable. This happens because the reversibility of time will lead into the same irremissible obverse. Obverse, reverse, things can never be forced into equivalence with one another: we are creatures like the coins with only one face. In T h e Gospel of T h o m a s there is the appeal: "Be fleeting." Indeed so, and not simply with one's illusions. T h e r e is relief in the thought that what you love most is both unique a n d fleeting to the same degree as are you yourself. Love wagers its eternity in the transient moment. How hard could it be for us to understand that any verbal tense relating to the present is in reality imperfect? T h e perfect is, simply put, the corpse discharged into the present. T h e t o r m e n t of return, or nostalgia, refers, in the proper sense, to the perfect which, like a guest of the passage, remains from the imperfect, a smoke which vies for the consistency of marble with the shadow which it casts in full daylight. Nothing is "superfetatory" in being alive; nothing is improper. Still: but for the substance which denies—this death which we call "I have lived"—what life, devoid of substance, could recognise its living quality? W h a t body? T h e spirit? W h a t heart? Its abandon? It is difficult to fight against one's heart, but we all do so, under compulsion. T h e wager is not the heart; nor is it the spirit: what we truly want has to be paid for with our soul, as with Faust's pact. Apocatastasis is a certainty. Condemnation is another. T h e aporiae of thought might appear passable, as long as there is sleep, which can always be offered as an answer. N o , lucidity itself cannot be one. Only the flesh, with its life full of glory and misery, achieves again and again, against time, the coincidentia oppositorum of our improbable make-up, in favour of the light. 6 2 . T h e cosmic in a culture is not the order which pre-exists, but the possibility of giving to a life, to any life, a destiny equal to it: a haven in harmony with the essence of what that life is. Now we say of the nucleus which generates a culture that it embodies generality when its internal mould is able to elevate into style the diversity furthest beyond thought. This generality is bad, in a way, if we think that it serialises, it regiments,

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it dresses in uniform. Style is, in the first instance, an elevation to the dignity of the uniform. Still, there is another destiny, an improper one no matter what n a m e we might give to it, and it is visible in the personal soul which a culture is capable of fashioning. I say " i m p r o p e r " because neither the wax nor the seal c o m e entirely from culture. W h e n it creates personalities, a culture turns into the receptacle of a power which is not hers alone, and which is not cultural. I am at a loss for words to express it. It is in the air which you breathe, in the lung which consumes it, in the mouth which kisses it. T o live means to embrace. Our life is the active spawn of shared love. T h e acts by which our organism lives are like the movements by which we give and receive pleasure when we make love. T h a t we live and do not die at once is the erotic consequence o f our being loved, and surely it has to be added that the vitality o f a culture, which is different from its fecundity, through which destinies are created, is given by the capacity o f showing, offering and nurturing serenity. Cultures which cannot lead to aequanimitas cannot survive, because they are atrocious. I now c o m e to C a m u s ' problem in his Notebooks: the meaninglessness of the world, could it not be the ill-will which you embrace because of your own, personal, lack of value? I can understand that hierarchy is necessary to order (and not just to ordinances), but how can you tolerate an edifice whose origin is not your personal value? Besides, as everyone knows, only they who are true well-springs have value. Everything which lies in consequence of your own origin can be saved (by yourself). At eighteen the only natural answer which I found seemed to me, alas, inevitable: one had to be a creator in order to be a receptacle of value; and whoever had no value was a failure. O n the knife-edge of this particular abyss I exhausted all the terrors, the nightmares o f my adolescence. T h e central issue o f value-centred consciousness is the p r o b l e m of failure. O f course, you may c o m e up with the objection that failure does not exist, because any man is a creator in an absolute sense. T h e day-to-day acts o f any authentic life are creative. Value belongs in this equation only as a diminished and somewhat peripheral term: creation is o n t o logical and it excludes the question of relation. M y natural m e d i u m was (is) culture, however, and culture is not breathable unless one is in the position o f a creator. T h e r e are works in culture and the works are the c o n s e q u e n c e of value judgements. Accordingly, in culture ontology is recessive in relation to value, which is the central issue. F u r t h e r m o r e ,

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value judgement involves the judger, so that any value amounts to establishing a relationship. Whoever is in search of value assents to being indefinitely enslaved to whoever offers it to him. T h e dialectics of value stringently involve the master/slave relationship. T h e n , through the gates of comparison which are beyond one's control, one enters straight into hell. In paradiso terrestre not even the comparison with oneself could be made. T h e comparison with others, which reduced me to the state of an object for the other's judgement, was the ordeal o f my adolescence. Failure terrified me, because my life, with it, stopped being mine. In failure you are a slave, which is why, if you reduce it to value-centred consciousness, culture is one more difficulty on the path o f redemption. I, for one, wanted to redeem myself at any cost, although I did not have the faintest idea o f what that might mean. W h a t I had to find out, first, was that the meaning of culture was in no way the shaping of a human type capable of defying rival comparison effectively. At a much greater depth than "being cultural" and even than "being m y s e l f " my experiencing the events and acts of a culture fostered in me a faculty which I ignored for a very long time, but which was relentlessly at work inside me, a faculty by means of which one may plunge beyond the world of the five senses, and which lives in culture because it is connected to the fact of being aware. T h i s faculty revealed itself blindingly for the first time in the afternoon of an otherwise insignificant day in January, 1983. F o r the time being, I shall tell you that, when it comes to our lives, the difference between active and passive is essential. W h e n the subject is passive, evil has already begun to settle in. Discernment in the face of lethargy, which is the absolute evil, is essential. B e active and awake! T h a t is the foremost principle for happiness and, equally, for understanding. T h a t is the nucleus of serenity, saved in me I know not how, in spite of my frustration, intelligence, vanity, erudition, seclusion and undelivered condition, and which I discovered to be the fundamental of my being just as it has been the fundamental of eternally contested history—an improbable and unforeseen sign of the presence o f G o d in the world. 6 3 . T h e distance between serenity and gloom describes the only authentic ontology of the being which lives in time. W h a t could deliverance from time mean, if not the experience o f joy? O n the other hand, suspended between gloom and serenity hangs any soul in whom deceptive time and elusive hope are battling. T h e former cheats; the latter

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shirks. This is the regime of any speech also, and it embodies the statute of the word. There are the things which can be seen, and there are the improper ones. N o t e the fact that I do not say: hidden. My criterion of reality consists in rejecting the idea that someone is playing us a trick. Everything which we need lies at our disposal for whatever it is that we have to do. Suffering—and I mean the most harrowing suffering—is in the feeling that what you need to save yourself (or to be happy) is not available. This is impropriety. T h e r e is still one more difficulty: we save ourselves through people (and, of course, we lose ourselves through them, also). In this sense, impropriety is something which has not yet secured an adequate witness for itself. T h e h u m a n beings whom I have known, and who have loved me, have been the steps of the ladder which has m a d e me what I am. Without them I would have gone nowhere. On the contrary, without others I would have reached much farther or, who knows, somewhere else. This is the rub: some parts of our destiny receive a consistent shape only in the presence of certain witnesses (confessors). Since we, m o d erns, make contact with our fellow beings through the mediation of the soul, which is impropriety par excellence, the compass of the difficulty is huge. In other words, the chance of not getting where one ought to is considerable. Think only of the extent to which the soul is an improper functioning of the thinking heart. It is impossible to appeal to the soul without abuse: for the risk of having a soul is the risk of losing it when the impropriety is resolved. W h a t I wish to say here is not simple to say. Whoever has a soul (and we, as moderns, cannot help b u t have one) is c o n d e m n e d to go through every impropriety which follows f r o m its "in-betweenness": neither heart nor thinking, it is somewhat like a heart which thinks and like a thinking which, descended into the heart, has transformed itself completely into prayer. I shall add, obliquely, "in enigma" that, until 1548, the only woman who was entitled to a seat on the official platform during French festivals, next to the king's procurator, the bishop and the nobles, was the representative of the corporation of prostitutes. 6 4 . Nineteen seventy-six was the year of the entrance examination to the faculty. I know for a fact that the previous year I had read at least one important book of physics, namely Atomic Physics (Max Born). Nevertheless, none of my papers makes any mention of it. This is due to the conviction I entertained that physics was in no way instrumental

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in the formation of personality. School had been successful in instilling in me the sentiment that science subjects were essentially, which is to say, inconsequentially, practical. Physics was about the solving of problems and the potential advancement in competitions such as the Olympiad. Insofar as it was intellectual theory, the level of the textbooks did not rise beyond a vague psittacism, whose arguments echoed true physics poorly. T h e intellectual prestige of a subject set in an unintelligent light is nil. In terms of its cognitive span, physics meant nothing to the intelligent pupil, for none of the inane twaddle of textbooks could show its epistemological scope to any advantage. In sum, my option for physics was motivated by two types of attitude: 1) its extra-school prestige in my eyes, built through readings which had nothing in common with the school curriculum and were even directed against it, even though this prestige was, unfortunately, quite "literaturised" in essence. Indeed, the books of a Bohr, Einstein, and Gamow, which I read at that time, together with journalistic monographs dedicated to the invention and construction of the first atomic bomb, which, as a rule, presented sensational, brief biographies of personalities involved in physics, in between those of Bequerel and Oppenheimer, all these, in short, gave an attractive, and very deceptive, impression of the essence of physics; it should be mentioned that school never put in front of us even one fundamental text of physics, let alone commented upon it, so as to give us the slightest suggestion of what doing physics and being a physicist meant. Even so, those bastard readings still made it possible for me to understand the inept textbook problems from a more "cultured" more "intellectual", perspective, to enter, that is, into a more profound relationship with the epistemological paradigm of physics. In fact, all that I acquired during high school in terms of a respect and passion for the subject of physics I acquired in spite of textbooks and their discipline. 2) T h e second reason for my option was somewhat defensive in nature: sickened by the gregariously practicalist bias of the school, I decided that the Polytechnic Institute was below my intellectual expectations; moreover, a factory career, that of an engineer, was nothing to me. T h e purity which I had reached concerning the field of the humanities, and my awareness of the derision which faculties of this kind had to bow under, precluded me from preferring letters or philosophy; I chose the lesser evil, namely a scientific discipline which was purer than an engineer's, and, what is more, possessed a high intellectual and cognitive potential. I could, of course, have chosen one of the "pure philologies", and I am thinking of Greek, of Latin, or of one

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of the exotic languages: Arabic or Persian (Chinese did n o t awaken any vocation in me then). I confess, however, that the need to "possess" such languages was m u c h less evident to m e at the time. Origins did n o t as yet play a leading role in m y thinking. T h e r e was still o n e m o r e thing: my vague familiarisation with the mentality of physics h a d given m e the barest inkling of t h e essentials of the way in which physics viewed the world. In fact, t h e faculty w i d e n e d n o t only the b r e a c h b e t w e e n the official g r i n d i n g litany of physics a n d the individual search for the intellectual t r u t h of physics, b u t also the dissociation b e t w e e n the two passions which I felt, heart-rendingly, to be conflicting, the one for physics a n d the other for the h u m a n i t i e s . As for the bridging of this b r e a c h , my late r e a d i n g of T h o m a s K u h n was the m o s t m e a n i n g f u l for m e , since this fuelled a p r o p e n s i t y for seeking a historical explanation for a given ontological dissymmetry. 6 5 . T h e r e f o r e , b e i n g so very unwilling to c o n c e d e a cultural m e a n i n g to physics, n o m e n t i o n is m a d e at that time in my Books confessing to any of this "illicit" reading. T h a t I did so, however, is witnessed by the b o o k s w i t h their u n d e r l i n i n g , n o w h u r r i e d , n o w clumsy. S o m e t i m e s these b o o k s were r e a d , in total c o n t e m p t of school rules, in the m i d d l e of s o m e class, to the indignation of the teachers. I recall a course o n probabilities as applied to physics which I was c a u g h t r e a d i n g u n d e r my desk whilst o n t h e b l a c k b o a r d p r o b l e m s were being solved, the skilfully inane ones f r o m G h e o r g h i u ' s anthology. O n a n o t h e r occasion, in the biology class I recall r e a d i n g Aristotle's Poetics, a n d yet again, d u r ing French, reading a F r e n c h translation of The Tragic Sense of Life ( U n a m u n o ) . I can say t h a t everything which I did for m y cultivation I did in conflict with the school, rejecting its example. T h e faculty only gave a m o r e dramatically intense twist to this breach. F o r o n e thing, if you really w a n t e d t o d o physics, in other words, to s t u d y it systematically, above all else you were f o r c e d to take it u p again after g r a d u a t i o n . All that this m e a n t was a l m o s t five wasted years. Energy does decrease with age, a n d so does ingenuity. H o w can one believe in the purity of physics after it had been systematically debased for five years by weak or u n q u a l ified m i n d s , a n d discredited by m e d i o c r e intellects after slavish textbook exercises? It m a y seem h a r d to believe, b u t in this university ( f r o m which I g r a d u a t e d ) , in five years I did not c o m e across o n e single m e m b e r of the t e a c h i n g staff w h o , in a lecture or in a seminar, w o u l d c o m m e n t u p o n t h e original text of any of the c o n t r i b u t i o n s w h i c h have shattered the epistemological p a r a d i g m of this century. T h e p r o b l e m s

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of physics are electrifying and hot; the professors, on the other hand, proved lukewarm. 6 6 . In 1976 I embarked upon reading about the monks and the prophetesses of Judaeo-Christian antiquity (Ferdinand Delaunay, 1874) and initiating myself into the civilisation of classical Islam, from Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine. I tried to meditate in writing on the link between emptiness, silence and light, in the wake of George Steiner's essay The Death of Tragedy (Book XI). In the meantime, I discovered with delight how to describe, through an artifice of calculation, the movement of two masses connected with an elastic spring as a harmonic oscillation around the centre of mass of a material point whose mass is equal to the reduced mass of the two bodies. In summer, after the entrance exam, I noted: systematic study of Greek literature, with chronology; until I procured the books, I resumed the study of Egypt (Book X, p. 15v). In parallel, until I went for my term of military service, I read Lucien Leuwen (Stendhal), Essays (Camus), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez), the works of Mateiu Caragiale, the chapters on Egypt in The History of Art (Elie Faure), Short Stories by Borges and Buzatti and fragments from Human Historiology by Iorga. T h e most important event of the summer, and noted as such, was the discovery of Noica, through his modest-sized booklet "Eminescu, or Thoughts about the Whole Man of Romanian Culture" (discovered, by some good chance, in a pile of assorted books at Sadoveanu Library). However, in terms of my current life, the most decisive event of the summer was that it eventually came to an end and, with it, the epoch which may be entitled by the expression otium cum dignitate. At the end of September I went to serve my time in the army. 6 7 . T h e essence of the army, far from being martial discipline and dignity, is rather the petty spirit of falsification and violence applied in a cowardly way. Cowardice means here that the rule of "give and take" is violated. T h e enormity of the stupidity, grumbling and wickedness which I sampled in the army served for me merely as a faint foretaste of the enormity of the stupidity, grumbling and wickedness which I was to sample in civilian life. In a nutshell the army revealed something which to me appeared impossible ever to be introduced: the irresolute rule of aggressive stupidity. I say irresolute since I have seldom seen brave stupidity: it is pusillanimous, if anything, or else it is lazy, foul,

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always under cover, striking with a long club and then only from behind a fence. At first the army stupefied me: it was aberrant to such a degree that it could not be true. T h e extent of the stupidity was so unexpected that you could not help but burst out laughing at times. However, this was stupidity in boots. Which had a long arm. One of those Homo moronicus vulgaris caught me in the act of reading a translation of Jewish Antiquities in the Belles Lettres edition and snatched the book from me at once, triumphantly ordering me to declare on the spot what was the "imperialist tongue" in which it was written. H e stared at me greedily with his mouth open. I answered him off the cuff: "In Guarani, the universal language of South America", which did not stupefy him, despite the obvious enormity. "We'll see, we'll make inquiries and then we'll know for sure how you got to know this language", he said. He went off erect and satisfied, with Josephus Flavius under his arm. Inquiries were indeed made, and when they caught me out they wanted to expel me from the U T C 1 0 , after shaving my head, in a public exposure meeting. With books the Romanian officer feels somehow indignant. Books are for him like a personal offence. Their usefulness is, in any case, unintelligible. After confiscating Bagdasar's Anthology of Philosophy, bellowing and shaking it (and the copy was, in fact, dated 1943!), a lieutenant confessed to me the next day, when I wanted to know whether he had browsed through it, that he had read it in full before falling asleep. There are instances when the absence of a reply makes the question superfluous. T h e m a n had edified himself snoring. After all, Descartes solved his own problems sprawling, and Newton whilst asleep. He might have given me these illustrious examples had I sneered at him, and had he not ignored them, this glorious idiot, thinking that anything at all might be learnt with no cognitive effort. In the evolution of the lemonade, the army plays a leading role. As almost everything today is of the essence of the army, which is another way of saying that it has the power of the lemonade, the role which it plays is, at bottom, decisive. T h e nature of the army also defines very well the essence of violence: stupidity, lying, imposture and cowardice. W h a t would have become of me in that moronic universe h a d I not known the virile fraternity of comradeship, that of the unit against the officers, and of the individual against the unit? Everything was massed 10 T h e U n i o n of C o m m u n i s t Youth (translator's note).

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in the army, starting with one's individuality. Here I stripped myself of the auto-erotic suffering of distance and irrevocably lost all taste for the enthusiasms of the mob. I have, from that time on, been unable to tolerate any longer any of the "humanisms" deriving from the gregarious. T h e symbolic image of the army is one of mixing and promiscuity. You mix when you know how it is to be crushed, and you mix when, in your turn, you have to crush. Here evil is served to you so that you yourself might apply it, with resentment and hatred. I have several epitomical images of promiscuity, but the most compelling which I experienced in the army is this. After almost two weeks of sweating and rolling in the mud, the "hierarchy" consented to allow us to bathe. We were, therefore, marshalled into columns, in separate platoons, and taken like cattle to the slaughter, shuffling along, in disarray, towards a longish building behind the barracks. We entered first into a vast, dark antechamber with windows which were located about two metres above our heads. We were in something like an infected pit. T h e floor, chilly and unwholesome, was covered by a dirt which was a good match only for our own abundant filth. Against the wall there were two rows of benches of unplaned wood and, towards the centre of the room, looking like the hooks on a gallows, were spread two rows of metallic pegs, rusty and hideouslooking. I was struck by two things: the degrading filthiness of the room and the fact that my future comrades-in-arms were, for the most part, blind to it. As long as the abominable still shocks you there is hope. In no time at all the mouldy room was teeming with shouting and naked bodies, as explodingly naked as only the bodies of the deported in their aggressed nakedness were in the extermination camps. T h e third thing which struck me was the extreme variety of the morphology of the male sex, astounding indeed. I looked around me in bewilderment, all of this whilst I was jostled around by those benighted souls who, possessed of an unfailing instinct, knew exactly what it was they had to do—to penetrate, that is, through a narrow, heavy metal door, into the main room of the "bath". Barely undressed, I was shoved inside; this was the fourth thing which overwhelmed me. A room still vaster than the former, even higher, it seemed, and much darker, opened up, oppressing and devastating to my eyes. What I saw was surely a scene from Dante, from the Inferno, to be exact. Every two metres, planted like trees in the ground, trees which had dried out or had been struck by thunder, showers rose from the cement, twisted but still in unfaltering lines. Their mouths were spitting out plopping drops of water. The naked bodies of my comrades were swarming like chalky maggots chaotically writhing among

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these metal shoots. To cap it all, these improbable animals extracted delight from frisking about in that degrading nakedness. T h e sight was hallucinating and totally recessive: it came straight from hell and, just as in hell, the penitents unwittingly ignored their penitence. This is a flaw of the heart, a lack of culture of the heart. T h e n came the water, at first boiling, thrown directly onto the frozen skins. T h e howls of those who were scalded were hardly different from the squeals of pigs burned by the welding machine on St Ignatius' N i g h t T h e n , after a few minutes' interval, a spray of cold water changed the bellows into indignant grunts. T h e whole process was repeated at least four times, with no palliation: steam alternating with ice, as in Hórbiger's cosmogony. As the skin became accustomed to it, the soul, ever servile, consented. T h e cattle professed themselves satisfied and r u b b e d their scarlet skin gripped by an inane ecstasy. I never knew if the treatment, fit only for raving lunatics, with its alternating shocks of hot and ice-cold water, had been due to a bungle by the boiler-man, a stercoraceous joke, or simply the natural way in which baths functioned in the army. This was the last time on which I set foot in that sordid room, in every way comparable to a bolgia of hell. Promiscuity does not reside in the display of evil, which is inevitable anyway, b u t in those who consent to it. You are entangled whole in that something which has enmeshed you, and torn you away from the familiar. It is no accident that individuals en masse will strip themselves only too readily of their being if faced with a custom: functioning replaces truth, it replaces individual character by the "tic", the involuntary reaction, du mécanique plaqué sur du vivant. This, however, does not provoke the slightest laugh. Ritual is not only a substitute for being, in situations such as this it is its contrary. In the army order is replaced by organisation, the individual by the executor, and the soul by the legion. You can see what I am hinting at: "My name is Legion" 12 ... T h e malevolence of the army always springs from the temptation and the invitation to kill: personalities on the drill square and h u m a n beings at the front line. Throughout my military service, all I did was to kill in myself the sophisms which pretended to justify the army. One of those dogged sophisms was Marxism.

11 I n the O r t h o d o x calendar, D e c e m b e r 20, the day w h e n pigs are traditionally slaughtered for C h r i s t m a s (translator's note). 12 Mark,

5: 9 (translator's note).

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6 8 . Destiny is a reality which imposes itself on one's consciousness either when everything falls into place or when nothing remains which can be saved. A destiny via some middle way is rarely felt to be a force for order. The 12th form ended, leaving me with the feeling that I was totally formed and that no decisive encounter might happen to me from that moment on. Of friends I had discovered the essential by loving Dominic Dembinski, whilst with women I felt that I would discover the essential by loving Ioana, a loving process which had just begun. When it came to books, I knew that I had been reading just as much and just as widely as the most industrious of my generation. That I possessed neither a proper scientific background nor a fully-fledged one in the humanities, the former presupposing mathematics and experiment, the latter philology, did not seem to handicap me. I displayed the rash shallowness of the neophyte, plunging into discussions about anything on earth. What I could call destiny during this apprenticeship was the happy accident that everything had fallen into place at the very first attempt, without failure and without the pain of beginning anew. Nevertheless, I knew from some obscure, blessed instinct that there was such a thing as failure and that, even if improvisation might be saved, a lack of the fundamentals never could be. Although I already passed among schoolmates and teachers as an erudite, I knew my own frailties perfectly well. Education through culture teaches you how to recognise and understand already formulated problems, which are other people's. Culture teaches no one who he is, or what could redeem him. The only prevailing emotion which did not cease visiting me was a stifling, irredeemable dilemma, which, at the outset of my initiation into culture, had predestined my first affinities with existentialism (into which I stepped, however, uncalled). Of personal problems, however, I had none. There had been suicide, of course, but even there it had been Pavese looming large in the foreground, together with, ostensibly, the theology of the gratuitous act, which had stirred my passions. There had been, also, that obsession with the "possible man" through which I had tried to express the total state of readiness I was in towards anything which I might have wished to achieve and for my own potentialities, too. It is a ruinous flaw to have qualities in excess of your will-power. To know what you want is no dream, any more than it is an act. In my adolescence I had read Jules Payot's book, The Education of Will: I had not extracted any spiritual technique from it, however, since it seemed to me useless to desire something which did not offer itself spontaneously to one's inclinations. Among the presumptions which had been kindled by an undemanding

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education and by the recognition of my intellectual powers which came prematurely and which was insufficiently demanding was also the fact that, thanks to the talent which I possessed, I could accomplish anything. If destiny were in this picture then this destiny was inimical to me. Instead, things become confused. The circumstances of my life I detested. My own inadequacy was evident to me and I suffered because of it. However, what dominated my adolescence was facility: I only applied effort where that effort derived from something which came naturally to me. This is another way of saying that I desired only those things which would lend themselves to desire. This, of course, is the formula for volition in the faint-hearted. There is more to it than that, however. There was in my past a unanimous recognition of what I was (and of what I was going to become), and I do not know whether this was not the ultimate temptation which brought about my downfall. In spite of this stifling irredeemable dilemma, my adolescence was one of simple questionings. 6 9 . Life's lack of consequence means precisely that nothing which we found endures. T h e Gnostic will instantly come up with an answer: "That is because the foundation is flawed." The form towards which destiny has urged me has been a way of being in the world contrary to the conviction that signs are integrally and univocally de-cryptable. What I want to say is that I graduated from high school convinced that success in life depended on the choice of authentic fundamentals. Leafing through my Books, I am startled to see that I spontaneously identified eternity with the world of values. As an adolescent, I believed in posterity. The reason why I no longer believe in it now is not the feeling which I have that the physical future of the planet does not exist. One example which would make my thought accessible is this: I once thought that the dissociation of aesthetic values theorised by interwar criticism with such laudable assiduity was beyond argument. T h e adolescent which I was saw in the creation of literature a wholly meaningful thing. The ideal of culture was for him an ideal which had no fault. Authenticity could have no other meaning than that of a recipient of value. Besides, as there are no heroes without a Plutarch, there are no values without an audience. Without being aware of it, I was the scene of blatant confusion, segregated by Nietzsche, that between the artist and the actor. The confusion cannot be resolved. It lies, among other things, at the origin of Stavrogin-like problems (in Tihon's, the "damned psychologist", decoding); besides, this confusion was there, lurking, when

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the transvaluation of all the values of my adolescence took place in my first two years after military service. However, the sign that the crisis was about to be launched in me was the encounter with Doru Kaytar. 7 0 . (At high school I did not understand one elementary thing: that my genius implied being recognised. I needed books, which are the most docile public. I needed elite friends, through whom to verify my superiority. I needed to be loved, because the fervidity of the void means exactly this: try everything, ignore all hierarchy, since everything deserves to be tried. I did try everything, indeed, and I swam with every tide which offered itself to me, because I could not cling to anything: any opportunity for confirmation was an opportunity for being. To be a creature of ritual does not necessarily imply being an impostor: the metaphysical profundity of ritual lies in the reality which even this simple ephemeral relationship institutes: essence stems from perception, eternity from being observed. You exist to the extent to which the gaze is turned upon you: in the person who is so gazed at, this type of servitude sanctions the consciousness of value. In the final analysis, culture conditions the behaviour of spectacle. There is, however, a degree of equivocation about this, which resettles the truth of culture on a new foundation, restoring to it, apart from its charm, its fertility: let us not forget that the cat's eyes narrow not only in the presence of light, but also because of enigmatic memories deriving from a physiology which transcends the organic and transmits to the implacable "purring" return of the cosmic rhythm.) 7 1 . In September 1976, when I met him for the first time, I had come to the commissariat carrying with me Carlyle's book on the worship of heroes in history. I was waiting to be called in, chafing at the foreign atmosphere of that army greyness. I read through the book although somewhat distracted. On the bench in front of me, with features straining in a determined concentration, sat a fellow in casual, unkempt clothes: shabby jeans, bare feet in clogs with torn uppers, a mackintosh at least three sizes bigger than the wearer; he was reading from The Trilogy of Culture13. This creature was such a bizarre and unnatural spectacle as he savoured, imagine the scene!, the smoke coming from a Chinese incense stick smouldering away in his hand, totally divorced from all reality, in a room which was a totally hostile setting, that, in spite of

13 By Lucian Blaga (translator's

note).

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my astonishment, which was also embarrassment, I found it difficult not to laugh. After all, I myself was putting on an act of defiance, having chosen that book, of all books, to read in that place, but my defiance was motivated by a whole range of values which could have been defended. D o r u , on the other h a n d , well, D o r u Kaytar, was making a total laughing-stock of himself. His unruliness was so subjectively fragile, so apodictically, demonstrably personal, that anyone could have demolished it with barely a flicker of a smile. What astonished me was that no one saw the ridiculousness of that apparition. H o w best can I p u t it? T h e absurdity came not so m u c h f r o m the outlandishness of his clothes, or f r o m his somewhat precious gesture of actually smoking those fragrances, as f r o m the laboured ostentation, f r o m the elaborate pains which he was taking to put on a "couldn't care less" pose and from his flaunting an air of authority which was blatantly artificial. In this first phase of his arrival, D o r u had a slightly homosexual air about him: in the feminine beauty of his face, in the "rouge" pursing of his lips, in the neurotic thinness of the fingers, his nails bitten to the quick and clawshaped, in the protruding cheekbones which set off a large, oblique profile, as blue as could be and unspeakably perverse. Also, by some whim of chance, the fact that his legs were slightly bandy, which was noticeable f r o m his b o d y posture, merely strengthened the notion of masculine-femininity which sprang immediately to mind. T h e m a n seemed abstracted, b u t abstracted as only h a m actors are w h e n they play the recluse and mimic the typical stance of somebody deep in concentration. Everything about him was ambiguous and shrieked fakery. D o r u was ambiguous in the way that crises are ambiguous, their truth is that they are short-lived: you wait for them to go away and only the fact that they have disappeared lets you know what normality is. W h a t was there in D o r u which promised to be normal? One h o p e d that he would become conscious of the totally ridiculous figure which he cut and would find a quiet, discreet solution to the problem himself, sparing others the tension which his presence inflicted on those w h o m he simply irritated with his shamming. But no! D o r u lived out his sham as others live their own nature. Mythomania? With D o r u , what was normal needed to be redefined, because his presence itself was tension and, no doubt, forced others into flight in some way. T h o s e who have learnt to love him—those, that is, who have understood his lesson—know that D o r u was to the highest degree endowed with the unsettling genius of straining simplicity. H e was an immediate incarnation of a kind of freedom which challenged one to react, either by embracing or by question-

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ing it; his freedom was not one of laxity, but of a permanent imposition of truth: "What authentic matter is there to give to living now?" and "How can authenticity be assumed?" The Doru whom I was to know later on in the army was a living challenge to doubt any mode of judgement which had STANDARD written on it. Set against the institutions in whose name I was living my life, Doru cut a rather raffish figure. I had little regard in those days for what I might call hooligan values, as they are made to speak by Mircea Eliade, for instance, in The Hooligans. At the end of my childhood I myself had led a "hooligan" life, but it had been completely natural, totally lacking the horizon of the free act, undertaken in its auctorial precariousness. With Doru freedom was not an asset one earned, it was an exigible gift. Getting drunk at thirteen, listening to the noisy, trivial music of those years and, finally, taking drugs, all these came from the decision of a libertinism which was not freedom. Against these Doru assumed an experience of freedom which was both genuine and pure. The inevitable confusion of this position, of which I shall speak later, only added to the charm and heroism of his tension. He was (how can I put it?) free by virtue of a permanent compulsion. He could not leave you indifferent, or at least he did not leave me so, because the sense of his attitude, and also his deliverance from those strains which controlled him, lay in the abolition of relation. If I stop to think about it, whenever I came upon any of the things which were important in my life my first reaction was one of rejection. It was no different now: my puzzlement at Doru did not leave room for anything else in me at our first encounter, and I rejected him for his own ridiculousness, which, although real, was an appearance. 7 2 . Later, when our army life was already a few days old and my dormitory comrades were getting drunk and happily giving voice to infantile filth, thumping and belching as though in some crazy pub, I watched the city lights in the night with Doru. He told me: "Here is the world of relation, from which we've escaped." His gesture spanned all the radiance of the night. "What does it mean to free yourself from the world of relation, in a world which cannot transcend it?" I asked him. Doru became, from that instant on, significant for my destiny. He answered " A f t e r all, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FAILURE."

I was stunned. The sense of his answer obviously exceeded the capacity for wisdom of a young man of eighteen. Destiny becomes sensible in such moments as this when something more profound than ourselves singles us out as its receptacle. I had to hear that voice, that night, to be

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able to go beyond the sphere of representation which belonged to mere consciousness of value. 7 3 . I impregnated myself with those five words for three years, until, through them, I became an initiate. I was only dimly aware of the work going on inside me. T h e revelation which resolved my assimilation of Doru's words occurred in the autumn of 1979, in the countryside, and was occasioned by the fragrance of a small wine-grape. T h e second revelation, with no key, came in 1981/1982 and remained unintelligible to me until the afternoon of January 13th, 1984. That was the day when I finally laid my hands on the key to those partial mutations which had dislocated the value-centred universe of my high-school years. Looking at things as from a catalogue raisonné of life, the period between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight is unitary: its meaning is that of the culture of awareness; all the illuminations of which I have spoken had no other role than that of deepening the very concept of the paradigm which had been spanning my actions. Surreptitiously, every one of them prepared their contribution for the epoch which began at the age of thirty and which was preceded by two interim years, the most dramatic, in their suffering and confusion, which I have lived through to this day. In one sense, in those two years I atoned for all the excesses and inadequacies which make up the glory and success of the superb epoch of awareness. T h e shadowy and heart-rending misfortune is that this atonement had to suffer the death of my Father, before whom I had been unworthy to stand. However, as the follies of the world are constantly summoned to confound the wise, this also came to pass, which is intolerable. Still, I am not the one called upon to confirm the ways of the divine in this world. 7 4 . Doru knew how to reinvigorate the old truth which says, " T h o s e who see us do not exist." Whilst we cleaned the unit privies, he would sing. From among the ordure his beautiful baritone voice rose, not in defiance, but with a strange serenity and poise. True strength always manifests itself through non-manifestation: in his good hours, D o r u reigned over adversity through his beaming, smiling absence. After that night when we had contemplated the city lights together, my consent to his presence was total: the remainder of our army days meant an unbroken dialogue, carried on in affection from both sides. From the point of view of army regulations we were both irresponsible. In the first weeks we would play truant from general musters on the parade-ground, simply

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because we felt more like having a stroll in the orchard, or staying in the dormitory, me smoking, and having one of those discussions. At night we would jump over the perimeter fence of the unit and give our beloved ones a call, touched by the thrills of an immensely pure brotherhood. W h a t brought us together from the start was that Doru, as I myself, observed the rule of "no familiarities". Between us, our confessions were spiritual: we related experiences rather than exchange confidences (which were bound to become, sooner or later, mere tepid and demeaning indiscretions). The tone of our discussions was intimately connected with the meaning which both gave to spiritual evolution. By degrees, I, too, learnt the way to ignore the conditioning exerted by those who happened to be next to us. I already knew how to set the distance between myself and the world by an imposing politeness. Cold, distant, contemptuous, when necessary, or intimately loving, politeness was never absent from the code of my presence, even with those whom I loved. T h a t rule I never abandoned. However, in time, this ceased to be the only distance. My fragile timidity, emerging from the painful awareness of my frailty, indifferent to the reassurance which I found in values—they were never universally recognised and certainly there were always more people for whom living those values was eccentric, than those for whom culture was not so—my fragile timidity, as I said, developed, little by little, a tough shell: we normally strengthen ourselves on account of growing shamelessness. Instead, starting from the effort to assimilate the unique apodictic quality of Doru's manifestations, I began to discover in the human being reduced to himself and stripped of the exterior privileges of culture, the foundation of the power which made him able to resist assimilation. What was happening? I became freer even though I did not begin to feel any less constrained. I was about to discover the unspeakable charm of natural simplicity, just as I was shedding off the assurance of simple questioning. 7 5 . Among the constraints which Doru exercised in order to earn his authenticity was the proscription on possessing a library. D o r u kept only the "essential" books. T h e rest deserved only to be read and then, as circumstances required, to be given away as a present or merely thrown away. T h e excess of fakery may cry aloud but the profound significance of this sacrifice of "cultural intellect" is also evident: the exclusive passion for books reflects our incapacity to understand the world of creation as it should be understood. At issue here is not whether Doru, at that point in his life, understood it, but the fact that, instinc-

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tively, h e came to a vantage point which did n o t destroy h o p e of such an u n d e r s t a n d i n g , but, rather, m a d e it possible. 7 6 . Still, whilst we were waiting for o u r t r u e f r e e d o m (which, in o u r m i n d s , would follow our military service), and in spite of the circumstances, which were those of aggressive detention, we b o t h experienced a f r e e d o m without b o u n d s . A m o n t h after our military service began, I wrote, "In the midst of the cruellest restraint, and in spite of the body, which obeys, one feels a severe freedom" (Notebook IV, p. 3). T h a t "severe freedom", however, did not free m e from the tribulations of drill and, as a result, immediately before my passing-out parade, I was a d m i t t e d to the military hospital with some galloping debility or other. H e r e I re-read Blaga and wrote poetry. At night I would go o u t into the d e s e r t e d corridor, flooded in cold fluorescent light; I would drag the small visitor's table in front of the armchair and I would read (or write) until the nurses, appalled by my lack of discipline, chased m e away. Later, however, I e a r n e d their respect and, with it, their complicity, after I h a d read to t h e m f r o m a mediocre book of Bernard Grasset's, dating f r o m 1929, called Psychologie de I'immortalite, which I translated in the hospital. From that m o m e n t on, they would look u p o n m e with respect and sometimes even bring m e cigarettes. T h e r e I also read The Dialectics of Loneliness (Octavio Paz), and was seized with melancholy whilst p o n d e r i n g the issue of the h u m a n heart and its ambiguity in the wake of La Rochefoucauld. I exercised myself in the epistolary genre also, by writing to Ioana, with w h o m I was passionately in love: " T h i s is m o r n i n g and Wednesday. Needless to say, I am in one of my study hours. Last night I talked with m o t h e r and then with you. I was almost angry, b u t I got over it at once. At a r o u n d eight it snowed majestically: huge, heavy, white flakes, in their stately fall. I lived through the whole joy of it with y o u " (Book XI, p. 40). Ioana always brought to me, in the hospital, books, magazines, cigarettes and writing p a p e r — a n d food. She was alive a n d fresh, u n imaginably beautiful in her briskness, a wild thing in love. It is h a r d to speak of the love of a w o m a n w h o m you have never ceased to love. De nobis ipsis silemus. T r u e suffering and love have n o words. 7 7 . T h a t year there was Hölderlin, too, w h o m I read t h e n for the first time in his entirety, and greedily. I wrote a few p o e m s in his m e t r e and one of these, which was a b o u t friendship, I dedicated to Cälin Mihäilescu. Cälin was that part of my past of beautiful, aesthetic instruction, the core of my education in high school. It was at his side that I had

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started to read Hegel, Ortega, and Unamuno; the aestheticians. Croce, in particular, I had discovered through him also. I remember that Vico did not stir any particular passion in us, because of our total lack of interest in history. It was typical of my high-school instruction to ignore history. I had, of course, general notions about the chronology of events, but I was far from grasping the foundation of historicity itself. An existentialism of the urges of the soul had blended well, in my case, with an aestheticism of the heart. At that moment, however, when my army service had only just begun, I found myself at once dissociated: the old vein of tenacious initiation into culture was now set against another, the vein which discovered an interest in the sphere of problems which had led Doru to his own personality formula. T h e first orientation quietly pursued its own work, with a calmness beyond time, as well befits culture: not defying, but ignoring what ignores it. Therefore, since everything in the army which did not involve stupidity, vulgarity or violence was done by stealth, I had to give up taking notes in copy books of regular format and started instead my series of Notebooks (ten in number); these were pocket books or small-size jotters, which could easily be hidden under the tunic if you were caught writing (a heresy!). As I had planned at the beginning of summer, I took up the Greeks. I learned the alphabet, sketched a non-systematic dictionary of words—of the kind which one encounters in philosophic monographs, and took up the first volume of Plato's Works, which had just come out. Using the method well proved in high school, I made lists of words from my readings. T h e way in which they scatter in all directions evokes in me a passion with which I wanted to cover everything: empathetic, irreprehensible, cephalalgias, superficies, gerontocratic philosophy, commiseration, ipochimen14, stucco, tile, cancellus, loggia, pisaniai5, chiostro, majolica, comeraj16, plethoric, priapic, parenetic 1 7 , etc. With some of those words the source, apparently, is a book on architecture; a few quotations are noted from this (Notebook III) but it is not named. This signifies that I read hastily and thoughtlessly, no doubt constrained by the thought of being observed. At about the same period, in the hours when I played truant from my speciality classes (in transmissions), I read the three volumes of Anton Holban's Complete Works, on which I wrote an appre-

14 R o m . ipochimen,

from N. G k . ipokimenon,

individual, person (translator's note).

15 R o m . pisania,

inscription sculpted or painted in churches or on t o m b s (translator's

16 R o m . comeraj,

from Fr. commérage,

17 R o m . parenetic,

from F r . parénétiqite,

jabber (translator's note). moralising (translator's note).

note).

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ciative essay (Notebook III, pp. 12-31). Based on readings which I have forgotten, and generated by an interest which I ignore (I was then far removed from any adequate interest in Christianity), I wrote an Attempt on Christianity (idem, pp. 32-43), expository and impersonal, espousing an abstract-philosophical point of view and rising no higher than the level of a textbook lesson. As for the rest, Notebook III is brimming with notes from the Greeks: quotations, reactions, and, again, exercises in Greek writing. 7 8 . A curious sentence occurs in the essay on the origins of Christianity: " T h e decline of Greece, perfect in its aspirations, proves the impossibility of perpetuating a certain model of h u m a n and social existence, in truth, the outdating of a mode of production" (idem, p. 32). T h e last part of the sentence astonishes me even today, or, more precisely, the offhandedness which emerges from the unhesitating use of the solecism of Marxist extraction, " m o d e of production". This is the second vein of which I spoke. I was surprised to notice at the beginning of our friendship that D o r u had well-formulated political opinions and that he took the problem of politics to be of great consequence (I myself ignored its existence). I had never articulated my way of being in the world in political terms, despite the great mass of Marxistoid literature on various contemporary philosophies which I had ploughed through (for lack of anything better). D o r u , on the other hand, defined his orientation as being to "la nouvelle gauche". This was a challenge to me, for here was something which eluded me. I did not understand the purpose of political concern. I can see in my notes that I once interrupted my reading of a monograph on Jaspers to study the New Left and the Frankfurt School. T h a t is a sign that there was some urgency involved. My disputes with Doru were ruthless in the extreme. Irresponsible idiocies, such as Abbie H o f f m a n n ' s revolution at all costs, "for no other reason than that we may see", or the ingenuous product of the bigwigs, such as the puerile slogans of a Cohn-Bendit, "learning and culture are commodities", all of these constituted vehement imputations which I, in all innocence, brought to Doru's orientation. In him the fundamental was the anarchy and not the system, as I would find out by degrees, so that any theoretical discussion was rather an oblique dialogue, lacking any substance. Conceptual theory was not the strong point of Doru's paideia. It is more indicative, however, that I began myself to discover a certain legitimacy in leftist politics as I meditated now, for the first time, on the Hegelian Marxists of the

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' 2 0 s , Karl K o r s c h a n d L u k a c s , or o n the singular Walter B e n j a m i n . In h o s p i t a l I h a d h a d t h e c h a n c e to skim t h r o u g h Le gauchisme (Daniel C o h n - B e n d i t ) — w h i c h disgusted m e . However, the interrogation which c h a r a c t e r i s e d t h e M a r x i s t p o i n t of view h a d attracted my a t t e n t i o n . C e r t a i n t e n d e n t i o u s i n f o r m a t i o n , a n d a l u k e w a r m inclination towards an " o p e r e t t a " f o r m of h u m a n i t a r i a n i s m , n u r t u r e d by the political cloaca in t h e c o u n t r y , i n d u c e d m e t o believe, in F o u r i e r ' s t e r m s , t h a t there c o u l d b e n o justification for a civilisation which was f o u n d e d o n starvation a n d oppression. I lived here s o m e t h i n g of the revolt which Ivan K a r a m a z o v gave voice to in " T h e G r a n d Inquisitor". T h i s is h o w it came about that, within a short while, my twofold partiality towards ethics a n d towards D o r u h a d created in m e the premises f o r my reading of M a r x . D o r u ' s M a r x was one motivated by anarchy, a n d yet D o r u h a d n o t read h i m . After all, D o r u ' s gospel was The Fruit of the Earth, a n d those words of B a k h u n i n ' s , " t h e passion for d e s t r u c tion is creative", might as well have been spoken by Gide. D o r u was only t o o glad to lord it over the b l u n d e r s of that m a n i p u l a t e d mass, which I, f o r one, intuited to b e an expression of evil, because it did away with personality a n d invalidated the reality of the individual. I suspected that a n historical r e s e n t m e n t was lurking here, whose root I w o u l d discover later, w h e n I e m b a r k e d on a systematic s t u d y of Nietzsche. N e v e r t h e less, I h a d l e a r n e d to reap m y anti-leftist a r g u m e n t s f r o m t h e works of t h e M a r x i s t s themselves, a n d I w o u l d r e b u t D o r u with the words of a G i o r g i o Strehler, for instance, w h o h a d claimed that "a revolution w i t h o u t love is n o t h i n g b u t violence a n d it entails all t h e h o r r o r s of m a d n e s s " . I was h e a d i n g towards G u c k s m a n n , even before I r e a d M a r x seriously. T h i s was quite natural, too, since adolescents are h o n e s t witho u t restraint. A t h u r i f e r such as D u m i t r u P o p e s c u 1 8 m i g h t as well have s p o k e n of his " p h i l o s o p h e r " of predilection, b e n t as he was o n the most c o m f o r t a b l e chairs of history. M y disputatio with D o r u K a y t a r was a u t h e n t i c (and, alas, so scholastic), because it arose f r o m options which m e a n t heresies with an initiatory value. At all events, M a r x i s m was so u n p o p u l a r a m o n g m y c o n t e m p o r a r i e s , even a m o n g t h o s e w h o were happily elbowing their way to t h e t o p of the political heap, t h a t to r e a d M a r x was for t h e m just as extravagant a n d involved as m u c h disgrace as t h e r e a d i n g of S o l z h e n i t s y n did f o r the " M a r x i a n i s e r s " . D o r u d i d b o t h , q u i t e objectively. H e h a d e x c h a n g e d The Gulag Archipelago f o r

18 D u m i t r u P o p e s c u , a h i g h official of t h e c o m m u n i s t r e g i m e , w h o h a d t h e f u n c t i o n of s u p e r vising t h e i d e o l o g i c a l c o r r e c t n e s s of c u l t u r e in R o m a n i a (translator's note).

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Marx's Capital, whilst on the door of his room in Maior Coravu Street there loomed a huge photograph of Solzhenitsyn. 7 9 . I shall not detail my initiation into Marxism, which I pursued with stubborn tenacity for two years, to the anxious indignation of Drago§ Marinescu, who kept wondering whether I still was in my right mind. A lengthy study of Lukacs took up the whole of the s u m m e r following my fresher's year, with no break, and involved reading, pencil in hand, the whole corpus of the work which had been translated into Romanian, plus an ensuing study of Goethe, a complete reading of T h o m a s M a n n (in Romanian), and the grim perusal of some obscure articles written by Lenin before the coup of November. All this effort eventually led D r a go§ to believe me alienated, as alienated Maiorescu had once thought Klara Kremnitz to be, in a note entered in his diary. However, this thorough study had to be carried out to enable me, with full knowledge of the subject, to demolish this temptation which had been the essence of the century. As I remember, an acquaintance of Voltaire's once noted, in amazement, that all the patristic writings were to be f o u n d in the library of the m a n who would write ecrasez I'infame and were richly covered in notes: "They shall pay me", Voltaire is said to have replied, "for the time that I wasted on t h e m " — a n d with good reason, too. As I was reading Lenin & Co., I knew full well that they were going to pay m e one day for the lost time. An explanation must be given: the presence of n a m e s such as T h o m a s M a n n ' s or Goethe's a m o n g those of the M a r x - L e n i n - L u k a c s trust is explainable in this way: Lukacs h a d illustrated his concept of literary realism with examples from, a m o n g others, T h o m a s Mann, and his particular type of materialist-immanentist organicism, with examples from Goethe. To verify the truth of the illustration, I had to take them up again from the perspective of that approach. Still, things are exactly as in Blaga's one-time pronouncement: there are so many theories which contradict each other and still describe, flawlessly, the same aspect of nature... 8 0 . Any genuine striving sends one further than the original object of the strife. Reading Marx after having read Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks, I perceived one thing which liberal Marxists have taken pains to hide: Lenin had understood Marx fully. T h e fact is significant, because Lenin is the lowest point of a decayed spiritual condition, fetishised into ultimate truth. I also discovered, as I read the famous Problems of Marxism-Leninism, that Stalin had understood Lenin well, and that there was

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no more Lenin in Lenin than there was in Stalin. Apart from that, from the point of view of t r u t h , to differentiate a m o n g Trotsky, Stalin and B u k h a r i n is futile. It is t r u e , of course, that the victim is m o r e in the right t h a n the b u t c h e r , b u t when the victim is a butcher d e t e r r e d from acting out his inclination, a b u t c h e r on suspension, then I fail to agree that the victims of the m u r d e r still deserve any of our compassion. As I was reading M a r x , I had, for the first time and before my eyes, the lavishly displayed example of the law which I was later to call realisatio. Marx's speculative intelligence, together with the exceptional penetration of his m i n d into concreteness, doubled, the two together, by that typical faculty of philosophers, which is that of manipulating concepts with suspended meaning, cannot be denied. In what he illustrated, M a r x did not lack genius. T h e p r o b l e m , however, lies elsewhere: Malraux once said of de Gaulle that his intelligence was not to b e sought in its keenness or rapidity, b u t in the weight which he judged right to accord to any p r o b l e m . It is in this that Marx's p r o f o u n d intelligence lies: for reasons which relate to the watershed which the spirit of the age experienced a r o u n d the year 1830, M a r x was unable to a d o p t the e n o r m o u s quantity of vague concepts which philosophy had been employing in the immediate a f t e r m a t h of K a n t , and he was compelled to extract only what he could squeeze through his narrow understanding. W i t h o u t even testing the referent, he equated the function of the word in language to that of ideology in society, which, to him, was one of falsification. F o r Marx, language was phraseology. H e appears ignorant of the fact that one does n o t fight against a world other than by proving a certain m o d e of u n d e r s t a n d i n g to be fallacious. M a n is not given to the world without mediation, b u t through the m e d i u m of language. M a r x was obsessed with " u n m e d i a t e d n e s s " and, to counter Hegel, by w h o m he felt overpowered and visibly d a u n t e d , he identified it with praxis, for n o other reason than that he was fascinated by the simplicity of violence. W h e n he refused to acknowledge his child which he had fathered o n his maid, he lived through the converse m o m e n t of the same fascination—cowardice. T h i s bourgeois, plagued by various irritations, some of t h e m d u e to h a e m o r r h o i d s , as he himself confessed in one of his late letters, seemed to ignore that what he was creating was, above all, a language which de-established previous languages and which itself, in its quality of language, m a d e it possible to acknowledge the revenge of violence. F o r it is language alone which gives cohesion to the control of resources for violence, which is another definition of power. To c o m b a t a world, one has to d o away with its phraseology, it is a

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sophism to maintain otherwise: Marx did so, knowing full well that he was in the wrong. O n e sees, in this light, that it was only natural for M a r x to develop his maniacal impression that language was a hypocritical and cynical verbalism (this was indeed the case with him). In his view of things, "unmediatedness" alone could make u p for the hypocrisy of which m a n is by fate capable. T h e values which inspired confidence for him were those which he called sans phrases, or otherwise, d u m b . Marx's confidence in things was restored when he built u p a universe from which the logos had departed. It was, therefore, natural for him to eulogise physical against intellectual work, in which he saw only a parasitic pursuit. Aware of what he was, he unconsciously sought to set the world on its guard against himself: and he did that obliquely, by showing that no one deserved credit and that everything must be discredited inasmuch as, through him, the things of the world were already discredited. In his writings one will r u n into bizarre expressions such as the following: "force sans phrase", "Bonaparte sans phrase", or "money sans phrase". Marx's idea that language falsifies and that philosophy is an illusion circulated by an instrument of error (because the reality of thought is language) is strange if we recall that he needed language to be able to think that the instrument which he used was error-ridden and that it expressed nothing. Marx expressed the fact that he did not express anything through the agency of an object which he called nothingness. Sentences such as the following: "Even the most evident changes on the surface of society repelled a brain whose entire vitality had taken refuge in language" (The Civil War in France) betray Marx's faith that authentic thinking might dispense with language as with an obstacle and a prop. To him, the truth that there is no thinking without expression remained inaccessible. Instead, Marx desired a kind of thinking sans phrases: whereas Das Kapital is but a succession, albeit a very deft one, of phrases... 8 1 . M a r x is also the author of the schoolboyish idea that to know something is to extract the essence from what hides it; essence being like a pip or stone which can be removed by cutting away the flesh of the fruit. Still, of Ricardo's way of thinking Marx once said: " T o lump together the costs of making hats and the expenses for the maintenance of m a n means transforming m a n into a hat" (The Poverty of Philosophy). However, he came back and affirmed that this anti-humanist point of view was to be found in things and not in the words about things, and that this made it inevitable and true. What is it which allowed Marx not

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to think reality through language, because it would have meant falsifying it, and yet to claim that he was expressing that very reality, as truth, through language? In his theses on Feuerbach, he spoke of a final and mystical ultimate identification of the subject with the object, a moment in which philosophy would cease to exist. It is known that T h o m a s Aquinas wrote nothing after the m o m e n t in which he experienced such an experience of identification, in December 1273... Could Marx be a mystic swamped—as a Gnostic might think—by the touch of matter? Whatever the case, Marx held that "by changing the n a m e you do not change the thing"; and yet, about meaning, I feel t e m p t e d to ask: Is meaning not changed in this way? T h e thing itself is not changed, that I concede, but the mirror is distorted, and then the thing that is mirrored must also change; that is certain. Marx seems to have known the laws of distortion to perfection, for the purpose both of forestalling distortion and of practising it himself, at his convenience, consciously or not. He was the producer of his own ideology, which he allowed to carry him away, and, the m o m e n t that he believed in it prophetically, even to cheat him. When he said that "currency is not a thing, it is a social relation", he manifestly substituted for a physical object its economic significance. Still, economy is firstly a discourse about relations, and only on its second level about things, which makes it a discourse about a discourse, a second-degree language. He developed and assumed the initial sophism, implicitly stating that he was still working with realities when he had already been manipulating significations. T h a t is because currency with him is not a sign, let us be clear about it, it is a symbol, just as the rose was a symbol for medieval people. Later, in 1859, he said, "Money is not a symbol" (The Critique of Political Economy), but this changed next to nothing in the way of "realities". Marx could not change the words any longer: realities, too, remained unchanged, this time in spite of him. His words were already written down: "Money is the representation of a social relation of production", an affirmation which comes as a direct contradiction to the other which claimed that money is not a symbol, because the symbol is a representation. 8 2 . W h e n , in the preface to The Critique of Political Economy, M a r x affirmed that social existence determined people's consciousness, he operated a significant transformation of the old scholastic correlation between essence and existence: he replaced essence by consciousness, because he took it for something already achieved that his system of

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representations completely eliminated the essence from the discussion. Indeed, and now no longer against the grain of Ricardo's thought, if man is to be legitimately assimilated into the hat, what meaning could essence still have? Content is something of which people take cognisance through forms of ideology. Form is the disposable husk for this "dialectician". Such "misfires" of thought were frequent with Marx, since by temperament he was impetuous like a savage and retractile like a fox. When he assimilated the consciousness that an epoch forms of itself with the self-consciousness of the individual, Marx implicitly claimed that, just as, when we judge a man, we cannot rely on the opinion which he has of himself, nor can we judge an epoch by its spiritual output, which, as it appeared to him, was just as subjective, and consequently false, as are individual opinions. Culture, to him, was neither objectivisation nor the manifesting of a deeper structure, going beyond the individual. For a medieval man, the fact that the pope was mistaken did not mean that the church was false, because he had that assurance that the organic whole reached beyond individual decision and conferred on it an objectivity which the individual, insofar as he represented singularity, did not possess. Yet, if language is consubstantial with the social and if the social has already been falsified, it follows that language is, a priori, false and that we could not conceive anything true in it. Conversely, from the fact that it was through language that Marx perceived the world and its relations, it followed that we were equally blind to the truth outside it. From this aporia Marx could not escape, in spite of the sophistic violence which he used to impose his convictions. T h e law of suppression (Aufhebung), discovered by Hegel, which fascinated Marx, Lukacs and Sartre, proved its blood value in the most remarkable fashion in Stalinism. 8 3 . Marx is a typical case of a thinker in crisis. Aristotle was unable to maintain himself at the peak of philosophic suspension which had been reached in Letter VII (Plato) and was compelled to particularise. In his turn, Marx, despite his individual value as a thinker, simply had to be no longer able to understand the real necessity for philosophising—which is that of sustaining the concept in the open horizon of suspension. For Marx, concepts were things—or they were nothing at all. T h e analysis which he made of language is as much, by necessity, lacking in intelligence (although that happens to be the case), as stemming from an illparticularised type of understanding, with such apprehensions as are typical of a thinking enslaved by the opacity of the referent. He experi-

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enced alienation from the sphere of thinking, which he translated using that term which denoted something added, that is, superstructure. Culture was, for Marx, a species of spiteful and partisan panelling plethorically superimposed on the bed of the lathe, which was the only true, non-falsified, reality. His incapacity to maintain himself at the high peaks of German philosophy clearly evidences not so much his resorting to a new species of realism, structured on the idea—Greek, after all—of praxis, but the regrouping of thinking on positions which are more closely fettered, more reified, more untrue (and, therefore, more alienated). 8 4 . Matei Calinescu 19 once remarked that Marxism can be surpassed not by contesting its reasoning, but by exposing the inadequacy of whatever aspects occasioned its advent. I have insisted on Marx's idiosyncrasy concerning language because, out of the two definitions which Aristotle gives man, zoon politikon and zoon logon echon, Marx only retained the former, falsifying the latter on the basis of the violent interpretation which he gave to the notion of being (zoon), improperly translated by him as "animal". Aristotle states that no one who works for wages can be a free citizen and he gives wage earning its proper meaning of servile work. Marx denied the fact that logos was proper to man, and substituted for it precisely that activity which Aristotle had found incompatible with the freedom of choice in the life of the polis: work. Marx relegated the interiority of man to the realm of Utopia, substituting violence for paideia. He found that non-violent changes were slavish and incomplete and played a game of defective complicity. In Marx, the confusion between the intelligence which accommodates and the act of thinking would find its most determined extoller—and thinking itself—its gravedigger. This thinking capable of transforming the ontology of the subject, and of the world, which had been the most consequential discovery of the later Kant, the contemplator of mankind's minority, this thinking which had been the source of the new logic of the subject discovered by Hegel, with its quite remarkable heirs in Nietzsche and Heidegger—this thinking which finally imposed itself even to the mentality of the West as the last great Western illusion, next

19 Matei Calinescu (1934—), Romanian critic and literary theorist (selected bibliography: Five Faces of Modernity,

Duke U. P., 1987; Exploring

John Benjamins, 1 9 8 8 ; Re-reading,

Postmodernism,

ed. with D. W. Fokkema,

Yale U. P., 1 9 9 3 ) (translator's note).

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to love—this thinking can only find in Marx a hostile and opaque medium. You may wonder what was fascinating in this restive thinker, whose spiritual quality was evidently inferior. It is certain that the reason for his success is encoded in the manner in which his thinking has acquired so overwhelming an influence. T h e most startling illustration of this triumph through castration may be discovered in the effect which Marxism had on such an exceptional intelligence as Sartre's. Sartre is known to have claimed, after the hope in existentialism was buried, that Marxism was the only possible philosophy (le marxisme est l'horizon indépassable de notre culture). T h e mode of this success is its very essence: the disqualification of alternative and the straitjacketed detention of the imaginary, which is to say, the extirpation of possible worlds. It is true that there was a moment in the spiritual history of the West when it appeared impossible to shake off the domination of a mode of thinking whose essence was clearly alien to Western tradition. In Marx's net were ensnared violent and resentful people, and the reason why this happened was that his démystification was not, in itself, capable of demystifying the démystification. Marxism is the contrary of any kind of scientific thinking inasmuch as it is the contrary of a rational critique. The progress of science has always relied on its capacity to reconsider its results and its approach critically. Marxism is a moralising "philosophy", and yet its drive is towards those beliefs which substitute for spiritual transformation the prison of matter, aiming at an oppressing monism of gross simplicity. Its tendency is not towards an enhancement of the possibilities of life, but towards their gathering in a single hardened knot, apt to become a key to the means for violence. Here I have touched upon the object surreptitiously accountable for the hope in Marxism's panacea-like efficacy: Marxism appeared to offer to whoever mastered its concepts (not its reasoning!) an easy ascendancy into the empire which controlled the means for violence. We know what that signifies: access to power. History has correctly decoded the essence of Marxism: an exacerbated and naked desire for power, in the name of power itself, eliminating any pretext of values or of transcendence. However, in that respect, some further clarification is necessary. 8 5 . Two more things still need to be cleared up: the position in relation to culture and the outlook on history. I shall be brief. Culture is not, as Marx claims, an activity secondary to those of survival and reproduction, but the very mode in which man is in the world.

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For man, being in the universe means being in culture. T h e world becomes a cosmos only in the presence of man, which is to say, through the particular mode in which man is in it. Amongst the puerile ideas to which Marxist hypnosis gave credence was that the Marxist analysis of societies was the only one which offered an objective foundation for the study of history. However, in regard to history which was not contemporary with his point of view, Marx held rigid and quite improper ideas. His great analytic finesse in Brumaire 18 is not to be found again in any of the historical comments which are properly so called and produced by him. On the subject of the Middle Ages he entertained a schoolboy's ideas, whilst on Greece he shared the hackneyed views of Winckelmann's period. As for the great Eastern cultures, his inadequacy of outlook is very striking. I shall not develop this here, since this represents the framework for an analysis which will have to be undertaken some day, to sweep away for ever the legend of the historical perspicacity of Marxism. I shall content myself by adding only this: by reducing history to society, and society to its so-called fundamental, economy, Marx advanced the hypothesis that the historical movement of mankind is determined by changes in the nature of economy, or by the mutations in the mode of production. From the fact that the state of things at any given moment within society is fully described by rationalising the mode of production which characterises its economy, it follows that the change in that state can be described in terms of the change in the mode of production. T h e concept of time which Marx inherited was a linear one, that is, it was inscribed in a plane. F r o m the sign of the gradient, Marx deduced the value of that evolution, dividing the world into progress and reaction. Progress meant, for him, the elimination of exploitation, or else, the elimination of that part of society uninvolved in the process of productive labour. Progress meant, by consequence, the generalisation of labour and the equalisation of the layers of society from the point of view of the workload. This triumphal scheme, deduced, let us not forget, from the specific situation of a (very limited) Western Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, was generalised for the history of any epoch, present or future. One thing must be emphasised, even were it the case that the submission should be proved correct, namely that it could only be applied to those societies which are economic in nature, societies where economy is a value similar to that tacitly admitted as valid in the societies which Marx studied. Societies are not identical structures, and the Western Middle Ages had known a type of society which cannot stand

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close comparison with, let us say, the Neolithic society which survived in south-east Europe until the end of the 19th century, and which is, in turn, drastically different from the structure of the industrial society on which Marx concentrated his efforts. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that any original outlook on history brings with it a re-dimensioning of chronology. Marx's theory, instead, slavishly followed textbook labels, content to decree as non-false its own particular interpretation of events. Thus, in a non-historical manner, Marx generalised a certain rule for describing the economic mechanism which was not an historical "law", any more than it was an empirical "rule". From the point of view of history, Marx operated with a notion of temporality which was ready-made and simplistic. He generalised a mechanism of succession which was proper to economic societies but applied it to all types of society, irrespective of the historical moment, and decreed it to be the law of "history". This law which operated unhistorically, from outside history, that is, played, for Marx, the role of the transcendence which he systematically and abusively denied. After all, led by this derogation from the historical point of view, Marx stumbled, against his own will, upon the truth according to which what confers signification on a system cannot be any of the propositions which make up the system. T h e sense of the world is not the world itself, and it is not in the world. There is such a thing as transcendence, otherwise there will be no sense in history. Conferring on history a sense, Marx is led to postulate the existence of an element outside it, designed to interpret it: the function of that element, that is, is to restore to history the intelligibility which, in his refusal of Hegel, he had denied it. 8 6 . Returning from hospital, army life began its work of erosion. Doru and I edited a wall newspaper, banned after two issues, where I "published" an essay on Mallarmé, an emendation of the paternity of the expression "freedom is necessity understood" (Spinoza), and an antimilitaristic polemic, impregnated with sincere references to Marxism, which was an attempt to bring into the world of the army a humanism without violence and unclouded by stupidity. For Christmas, we pinned up carols in the various assembly-halls and we sang, on our own, not marches but religious songs, which Doru had produced for us. Neither of us was religious, but we were protesting against society using what society's army prohibited to us. I admit, not without a smile, that the ethics of our attitude were those of 1968: prohibition simply had to be prohibited.

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O n D e c e m b e r 31st, 1 9 7 6 , 1 compiled a list of alchemy texts, and on N e w Year's m o r n i n g I discovered the coincidence of attitude of Brancusi's The Wisdom of the Earth and of the Egyptian goddess M a a t . 8 7 . T h e realities of army life increased my disgust and my vehement reaction against all that was base. I saw then the boorish jubilant t h u m p ing of (essentially inane, although cunning) cleverness, displayed in all its shamelessness. It was then that I wrote my text of committal to the heroic ethics of the belligerent "give and take", proper both to Nietzsche and to B e r t r a n d de B o r n (Notebook V, pp. 8 - 1 5 ) . It was also then that I wrote the apologue The Lieutenant, an expose of the violence of the torturer. I read the piece to Kolea on one of those nights which we spent drinking vodka until daybreak and smoking Russian cigarettes, the kind m a d e of a long, thin cardboard tube tipped with a short cartridge of strong, black tobacco. T h e next day we would be woken by the reveille after one hour's sleep, and we would have to fall into line, to be inspected by the c o m m a n d e r . I slept on my feet, leaning on my m a c h i n e - g u n . I kept on writing poetry frantically, and, just as believers say their prayers, on my knees. M y notes dating from that period are crammed with verses interspersed a m o n g study annotations or roughs of essays. W h e n I did n o t write poetry, my soul was o n the wane. W h a t is it which maintains the soul's integrity when, instead of enhancing, the world simply defiles one? Already at the beginning of 1977 I had begun to feel that, if I could n o t relive that past w h e n I first m a n a g e d to shape my capacity, I would be wasted. It is difficult to u n d e r s t a n d the temptations of d e b a s e m e n t when you have consented to it. W h e n you are in the middle of the m o b , everything reclaims the nether world, and one's interiority cannot b e saved by persisting in denial. T h e army is a space of irresponsibility: t h e r e you behave as if life were m a d e u p of n o t h i n g b u t the wait f o r s o m e t h i n g that presupposes it, yet does not contain it. To p u t u p with the intolerable and think that it will pass away, n o t knowing w h e n this will be, is one way of resigning. N o promise ever fulfils its essence if the present has b e e n refused, because the essence of life is actualised, n o m a t t e r when a n d n o matter on what terms. I decided that I could n o t wait for the army to b e over in order to rid myself of it. I h a d to find my origins again, and to re-evaluate them. In the light of my new experience, which included the army and the realm of politics, what value could n o w be given to the ethical and aesthetical education that I had willed myself into and which h a d shaped me? W h a t did high school m e a n to

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a man who had known the army? Malraux had died in 1976, and I had been in a kind of inner mourning for him, so the need to reread him came naturally to me. There was also another man, whom Malraux had been obsessed with, and he, too, had played no small part in my aesthetic formation: the man was André Gide. I decided, therefore, to read them both again in extenso, to verify myself, by verifying them. It goes without saying that I continued my readings from the Greeks and from the Marxists, and yet the urgency felt in my soul lay elsewhere: it went towards my beginnings, from which I sought to renew my fount. 8 8 . In March 1977, the month of the earthquake, I wrote: " T h e break with Marx is peremptory" {Book IV, p. lv). T h e word which I used expresses the state of that break adequately: inevitable and necessary, yet not yet manifest, not yet sufficiently motivated on the inside. F r o m March until the end of my national service period I minutely reread Malraux and meditated with resolve on his model of personality. Books IV and VI are dedicated almost entirely to this meditation. What is significant about the studious devotion which I showered on him is the global failure to which I finally admitted on June 11th, 1977.1 knew then that I had failed to grasp the deep fundamentals of that thinking which had fascinated me, but which did not allow me to exercise it in my turn (Book VI, p. 33v). You only understand what you can experience yourself. Malraux fascinated me but left me sur ma soif. In his novels I saw a world which warranted the keenest of interests, and yet its gods eluded me. In that note, as I abandoned Malraux, I admitted that his approach was irreducible and that his thinking evaded me. In fact, I did not have the invisible side of the moon. I had read none of his books dedicated to the visual arts, nor had I read either of his volumes Antimémoires or Les noyers dAltenburg. I was to grasp the empirical meaning of Malraux's thinking only when I was able to apply an auctorial vision to the whole of his work. In other words, I only understood him wholly when I had read him in full. This, however, was some five years ahead. 8 9 . In April I had a fiery dispute with Doru about the value of the gratuitous act. As we had brought up Gide, D o r u claimed that the auctorial rhetoric developed by him was consistent at least in one respect, that of the gratuitous act and the possibility of it existing. I resolved to demonstrate to him that he was wrong and took up Gide again, not so

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much the Gide of Lafcadio's Adventures as of those glittery soties. I analysed Prometheus Ill-Bound and Paludes, pencil in hand (Book V, pp. 16; 18v-26v; 30 et seqq.). This meditation was fruitful and its result unexpected. I was led to establish a relation between man and god which became, from that moment on, proper to my thinking, although beforehand I suspected nothing at all close to it. I would claim that the stuff of our acts was the same as the stuff of our liberties. The Millionaire, is he really free because he performs unmotivated acts? This lack of motivation is based on an equivoque: at the end the Millionaire refuses to enter the scene in which the consequences of his acts are enacted. Then, what is proper to the god is that his essence will not be verified through confrontation with the exterior. The mundane law of the act is the consequence. The divine law of the act, what is it? To be attacked for no reason derives from the irrational, whilst to live through the consequence of being attacked, even for no reason, no longer does so. Man can relate to the act which has been imposed on him in two ways: either he accepts it— and becomes integrated in the train of consequences, or he denies it— and closes the circle of determinations. The first case is, from the moral standpoint, one of retaliation: action is succeeded by reaction, and so on and so on; the reciprocal entangling of consequences can no longer be stopped. The second case is one of offering the other cheek; the circle is closed by suspending the reply. You need more strength to acknowledge the asymmetry of the world than to retort. It is clear that man fails his liberty by straying among consequences, whilst the god creates his on their account. Man gives birth to acts, whilst the god creates liberties. How can one abolish the determination of the act? For the god, it is easy: he is the origin of any determination. The river is not explained through its delta, but through its source. This will be so if being free means being free from precedence. Yet what about freedom from consequences? Consequences can be abolished by retreating from the act. The retort which annuls the act, as we have seen, suspends the chain. Yet, there is also a reply which does not eliminate the retort; in order to be free, it has to accept precedence as an ascendance a fortiori given, and suspend this necessity, in its consequence, as something fortuitous. The god does—and incorporates what has been done. Man does—and is incorporated by what has been done. The god assumes the totality, he is not the consequence of any of his acts. Delta and source in one, his waters are just as pure at the source as at the mouth. Man assumes the fragment and is assumed by totality. The god is the horizon of the

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act, whilst man is its subject. T h e operation through which man can become the homologue of the god is not the substitution by the whole of the part, but the realisation of that interior state for which the done and the non-done are identical. Man forces ontological mutation by assuming a psychology which promotes the will-to-essence to the stage in which essence is already realised. T h e conditions of the act are effected even in the act which renders those conditions inadequate. Alternatively, if what you do does not involve you, what the act of doing does to you can no longer be identified with what has been done. 9 0 . This meditation had two important consequences. It prepared me inwardly for the great encounter with the doctrine of withdrawal from the fruit o f the deed (Bhagavad-gita) and it opened my perception towards a negative dialectic of freedom, whose most remarkable fruit was the essay dedicated to Judas' condemnation, in which I argued for the predestination of betrayal and, consequently, for the exoneration of the traitor. My notes record the thoughts of my most insignificant readings, yet I do not find among them one single sign of a spiritual (not cultural) contact with the Gospels. T h e way things present themselves is as if they were read and understood. As had been the case with anything which was to become important for me later, my first reaction towards them was polemical. F r o m the polemic around Judas' condemnation (The Negative: An Essay on Freedom [ 1 9 7 9 ] ) to the interpretation of verse 1:27 from Genesis (Ambiguity: An essay on the Forms of Negativity [1982]), a long process of familiarisation and inter-penetration had been at work (and within this, thinking in the Jankélévitch mode dominated). I f the phases in which love crystallises can be roughly delineated, the moment of falling in love could never be so. Death and love enter us in those moments which do not belong to time and I am not even sure whether they belong to eternity. As is the case also with some mental illnesses, the quality proper to love is that everything appears to warrant it. Personality, after all, is itself nothing other than an accented interpretation given to some diffuse states. T h e act of vocation is an imperial act. Who would dare to write the history of a revelation? Its improbable model could not be The History of Eternity which Borges has sketched, because there is no moment in the manifestation of a revelation which can crystallise in anything but evanescent beings with airy bodies; this paradox resists any rationalisation; there is no response, although the effect is there. It seems as if things are the consequence of a happening which

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has all the attributes of a non-happening. What does it mean, after all, that there is no answer to the question "What is the moment of origin?" Things have happened differently than they do when you live them again, and whoever returns to origins risks finding them changed. You only search for G o d after you have found Him. Where must you look for what you have never found? 9 1 . O n e evening, I went to the lavatory after the tattoo had been sounded. A group of brothers-in-arms were noisily debating a question of ethics, in which the name of Dostoevsky often came up. I washed my face and listened with a certain dismayed interest. At some point, one of them came up with an inadmissible point of view in the matter of Dostoevsky's Christianity. Ignorance, bias and stupidity all joined hands in producing a stupefying piece of rubbish. I was unable to contain myself and replied heatedly, in terms which could have given the impression that I shared the standpoint of that "Zosimian" Christianism, which had been Dostoevsky's. T h e gathering broke up soon after my intervention, which I regretted at once. T h e news of the small altercation was swift to spread in the gossipy dormitory, only too keen to follow any scent of scandal, and so, starting from the very next day, I found myself wrapped up, by reputation, as a specialist in Christian dogmatics as well as in Dostoevsky. Thus, my attempt to settle a matter directly gave rise to much hostility towards me, but offered me, in exchange, an extremely pure devotion. From the vantage point of knowledge alone, this was a friendship which was going to prove particularly significant, for it was founded on the presentment of a profound reciprocity and it placed itself spontaneously under the auspices of a fundamental myth. 9 2 . I cannot remember when exactly it was, after that rebuke, that I made friends with Sorin Apan. I do know, however, that the first evening spent in each other's company, after the rigidly delicate protocol of introductions so typical of teenagers, was prolonged, in spite of the officer on duty, until late in the night. That night was a night in love. We could feel the heat in the other's cheeks when we looked at each other. As we spoke, we both had the feeling that we were telling each other things thought long ago, which only unnatural circumstances—such as the fact that we had not had until now the good fortune to meet—had prevented from coming into the light which had risen around us. At once we became friends in matters intellectual. On the very first day we swore

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to each other that we would go to see India together. We laid an exalted emphasis on the philosophical belief of the change of the subject, which we u n d e r s t o o d via o u r readings f r o m Eliade, especially via Nights at Serampore and Doctor Honigberger's Secret. You should not be surprised at the apparently irreconcilable diversity which I experienced in the army, all at the same time and non-dissociated. It has been an essential quality of my nature at all times, and is so still. To have successive and, at times, simultaneous, reactions to different doctrines has been for me a severe exercise of spiritual preservation. T h e fact that Montherlant was later to become one of my masters, you will note, was due also, among all of the other things, to his syncretism and alternation which were the counterpart of my own inclinations and achievements. With Sorin I met on the field of philosophical readings and of mystagogy. It was not theoretical philosophy which stirred our interest but the hidden doctrine fuelling the thinking which set itself the aim of surpassing the actual possibilities of m a n as shown in the writings of theosophists, of yogis and of spiritual masters. We were too young to detect the quota of imposture in the books which we greedily devoured at that time, written by authors such as Schuré, Eliphas Levi, Docteur Encosse, Hélène Blavatsky, Krishnamurti, Oliver Lodge, and others. T h e present condition of m a n we interpreted with an additional accent of impatience which falsified wisdom, certainly, and yet which forced out the truth by operating on error itself a process of transmutation, fruitful insofar as it backed each statement with hope and a method of living. Starting as early as the 12th f o r m , Sorin had been practising yoga exercises, which he did by ear. Everything in him was excessive. Before he discovered yoga, he used to smoke two and a half packs of cigarettes a day, at the age of sixteen. Now he stretched asceticism so far that it nearly turned into its contrary, namely anger or self-mutilation. H e followed a strict diet, was a virgin, contorted his body in positions which were painful to see, read sutras from Patanjali aloud, commented u p o n absolutely anything, possessed any competence and found an esoteric meaning in any occurrence. He was eccentric and defiant, remarkably intelligent and infinitely gifted. N o mode of conceptualising was foreign to him, he could manipulate just about any word; he could play the piano and was an absolute virtuoso in fingering on the accordion; he learnt everything astoundingly quickly: the panpipes he learnt to play in a couple of days. But for the conversion which followed, he would doubtless have learnt Sanskrit and, tenacious as he was, he would have

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gone to India, just as, now a Christian, he made the acquaintance of every important figure in the Romanian Orthodox Church and failed neither to fascinate, nor to kindle lasting antipathy in, everyone. His extrovert eccentricity was not something to which you could turn a blind eye. He would paint his face white before roll-call, pleading furunculosis, which was a brazen thing to do: a mere half-hour earlier everyone could have seen his clean, smooth face. When the command "Sing, and forward MARCH!" was given, Sorin would go to the front of the platoon with his panpipe and begin to play a Scottish march, to whose beat we moved as one man, to the exasperation of the bellowing officers. He would give bizarre interpretations to commands and defend them with a perfectly straight face, mystifying anybody who was not in the know. During the Morse sessions, instead of the messages which came with the order, he would transmit texts by the sages of the world, which the receivers, lethargic old sweats, would decode in total bafflement. Everything which Sorin did was out of the ordinary, when not utterly sensational. T h e profound substance of his being was restlessness— hence the seductive power of his eccentricity, his compulsion to bring into immediate effect whatever presented itself and with the most improbable odds, and hence, of course, his partiality for solutions of force, which conferred on the act, besides glamour, its immediate efficacy. Sorin was entranced with his own faith in the immediacy of magic and could have sacrificed anything to it-intelligence, common sense, prudence, friendship. To the belief in the truth of Christianism Sorin did indeed sacrifice everything: he even made the most enigmatic sacrifice of all, the most painful, the sacrifice of his superb intelligence. 9 3 . Let us pause for a moment to think what remains of intelligence if what gives it consistency and value is forever postponed? I do not think that Sorin's option is false. After all, the sense of living cannot be in any of its particular aspects. You do not allow a talent to possess you; if you want to get to the truth, you possess it. Sorin's lesson is that nothing has value in life if life itself is devoid of significance. In the exaltation which I experienced through my love for Sorin, I, too, discovered the meaning of the attention directed at one's own body. I have never in my life practised ascetic discipline. I am too much of a believer in the value of waiting to risk forcing grace by the means of active restlessness. Nevertheless, one evening, after having a long discussion with Sorin about the urgency of reaching the Shambala (which I confused with Agartha), and the lights having been turned off, I remained for a long

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time with my eyes riveted on the ceiling, lost in thought. At first, my eyes looked at the ceiling from the place in which I lay, from below, from the bed. Gradually, and without realising it at once, the angle from which I saw the place was changed: what struck me was the uncomfortable and alien feeling that I was looking at myself from the outside, from the ceiling. That thing in me which was now the seat of sight was effortlessly gliding on the plane of the ceiling and from there it was able to inspect any corner of the room. The body was still lying down, at rest, but my awareness was outside. I had been looking at myself in that way for many minutes when I realised that I had involuntarily undergone an experience of separation from the body. It seemed that the part which was detached had an autonomy which surpassed the power of "my" will, the will of the part left on the bed. However, who was in command there, anyway? T h e one left behind, or the one who had detached himself? Despite the common opinion, I can aver that there were two versions of awareness present in that state, and of the two, the one left behind was more blurred and seemingly less real (yet it was there, beyond a doubt). At a certain moment, the one which was detached took the decision to return. I find it interesting that, at that instant when I no longer saw the objects from a point outside myself, the merging of the two versions of awareness did not make me feel reunified. T h e sense of the two dissociated versions of awareness simply disappeared, without leaving me with the feeling that now I had only one of them. Both being familiar to me and, in a way, of the same essence, the transition towards one of them, or towards both of them reunited, was made without discontinuity. The magic theme of the change of the subject became familiar to me first in its sheer imaginary version, through Eliade (Doctor Honigberger's Secret) and through the theosophists whom I read in the army, and only very much later did I have the chance to rediscover the ontology of the same theme in history and culture. In much the same way my experience of the two separate versions of awareness as "indistinct", the body indistinct from the part detached, could later account not only for the way in which I bestowed particular signification on the "glory" of the flesh, but also for the attraction which I felt for those currents of thought claiming that the lie about the condemnation of "matter" would end when the splendour of essences had descended once more over things and beings (Yasht, 19: 90). The theology of Mazdaism, the doctrine of bodies regained after the Last Judgement, in Christianism, Tertullian's small book De came Christi, all these have been fundamentals which have underlain my present thinking. I do not believe in essences devoid

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of flesh. There, as on other occasions, I discovered once more the thinking of Nietzsche, who had once claimed that the Greeks were profound through being superficial. Indeed, the glory of the sensual world is not, except perhaps as a marginal note, the radiance of the trans-sensual world, and the true f u n d a m e n t a l of the body is nothing b u t the body itself. W h a t justifies appearance is not essence. In contrast to Goethe, I do not believe that the justification of the world is its symbolic nature, but its overwhelming literalness. To say that flowers redeem themselves through smell is just as inane as saying that the soul struggles, miserable, imprisoned and condemned, when the body knows the pleasure of another body. Since our life is a consequence of the words which we use, what is difficult to express in words is difficult to live in actual life as well. Nietzsche has said that the surest way to do something wrong is to do it consciously. Indeed, conscious through only 10 per cent of our possibilities, with our confused conception of our senses and of the extraordinary intelligence of the flesh which fuels (or animates?) our life, how dare we think the world to be just as rich as we are poor and simple in spirit—how dare we judge by the standards imposed by the aggregate of weaknesses of what we ignore with fatuous arrogance? Man is still far from being everything that he might become. N o truth can be reached by omission. T h e soul, I do not know what it is, and yet I have the certainty that, in terms of structures, the soul cannot be anything other than the body—and I do not know what the body is, either, just as I know nothing about the value which we call "heart". We do, however, live, and living, in an obvious way, does duty for knowing, at least in our present state of evolution. We know more by living than by thinking, because the inner acts (even those of a physiological nature)—ignored by our awareness, which plays its own part in the continuation of our lives—are all more replete with intelligence than the acts which become words in the process of assuming the world through awareness. Even early Heraclitus, who was not accustomed to the practice of matters of the soul, knew that it was difficult to fight against the heart, because— he maintained—what we desire obliquely, we pay for with our soul. Historical Christianism used to fight against the body with the instruments of the most remarkable discovery occasioned by the evangelising work of the Apostles (I refer especially to St Paul)—the soul. As my time in the army was drawing to an end, I felt that a kind of thinking which ceased going through the body was thinking condemned. In the end, Sorin was going to assume a contrary truth. I, for one, still live today

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in the horizon of that mutation which would eventually allow man to think of the world and himself in such terms as those in which, when it does not rebel against its own fundamentals (as in cancer), our organism thinks of its life. 9 4 . When I was in the army I used to believe that, in order to go to India, all that was needed was a strong desire, and it would happen. There are two factors involved in this statement: the belief in the value of a voyage (which would have been nothing short of a pilgrimage) to India, and the belief in the value of this type of reasoning: "You will become whatever you truly want to become." The manner of importuning destiny by acting as if I desired the opposite is one, forcing destiny through tenacity is another, simultaneous, form which my soul's (or mind's?) propensities have taken. I was later to find the same type of reasoning in Baudelaire, under the formula which has become a classic, "We all end up becoming what we wanted to become." T h e tinge of resignation in this remark should not escape us. T h e Baudelaire who had thought this had known the irremissible. The surrender is the very reverse of Napoleon's trenchant observation that, after the age of fifty, everyone has precisely the face he deserves. The force of youth springs from a vast complicity with all that does not belong to it, whilst the imperial style of maturity is revealed in that enigmatic phrase once uttered by Nae Ionescu 20 , confessing that he could no longer bring himself to talk to the people who did not share his opinions. The frenzy of youth, which is in essence avidity for the diverse, is replaced by attention devoted to the unique. The unique is diversely and changeably disputed by the ages of man. Whilst sharing the passion for India with Sorin Apan, I am quite sure that I ignored the other passion, also for India, which I knew together with Lupu Mihai, from the age of thirteen or fourteen. I do not know what roots this early passion had and what its exact motivations were. The determination to leave for India was intensely alive then, too, because Mihai did not think it odd to write this missionary dedication on one of the books that he gave me as a present when I turned thirteen, pour que tu n'oublies pas notre voyage d'Inde. As I stop to ponder upon these incomplete vestiges of the past, I realise 20 Professor of Metaphysics and Logic at the University of Bucharest, m e n t o r of the generation of C i o r a n and Eliade; the latter was also his assistant on his r e t u r n f r o m India (translator's note).

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that, although the soul survives, the body is irremissibly shattered. I have utterly forgotten what were the reasons which made that half-childish youth desire the touch of India. I was extremely unknowledgeable about the geography of India, which disqualifies a tourist-like urge as an imaginable cause for this desire. India seems to have been more like a symbol for me, as a symbol it was to become once again in the army. Still, if I know exactly what India stood for during the army, for the youth of thirteen I cannot say the same. His sphere of representation is inaccessible to me. If it is true that we only know the things that we love, then I must recognise that at the origin of my non-remembering lies a flaw of non-love. Not being in love with my past is perfectly normal, it is, after all, a sign of mental health. Still, the lapse of memory about what one has lived, which should have remained for eternity, very likely betrays the absence of the only kind of love which is capable of annihilating resentment for one's own past. This absence confesses to a state of fundamental non-deliverance lurking underneath. After all, what is the meaning behind the fact that "the awakened one" (Buddha) remembers his previous lives? Memory comes forth when the checks which have caused it to become adulterated are unmade. Those checks are none but the failures brought about by one's condition as a prisoner. We remember only when we are fully freed from the anger which goes into the making of our own past. To free yourself is the same as to accept. I forget because I am unable to free my present life from the overpowering dross (made so by illusion) of what I have lived. The presence of India speaks about a kind of non-fulfilment which I still fail to understand. There might be an imaginable connection here with the decision, which I took once, long ago, and have not as yet strayed from, that I shall never practise the Indian techniques of spiritual realisation. Each time when I believed that I would go to India, I was secure in my conviction that I would, indeed, reach that land. Then I let myself be taken over by other passions, carelessly and indifferently so. It is interesting that, whenever the memory came back to me, my forever-disproved belief did not once appear facetious to my eyes. It was as if the fulfilment of desire was not so much in possessing the desired thing as in the very fact that desire had reached the point of desiring. Hope is the courage of the weak, I concede that. What about dreaming, then? I am forced to admit that there is a world in which the overwhelming reality of perceptions makes the existence of objects superfluous. India is, perhaps, the nostalgia for such a world (which I, alas, shall never reach).

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9 5 . Calinescu 2 1 has claimed somewhere that a m a n who gets along with everybody is a man without personality. T h e discussion is a vast one. One needs to keep in mind at least the highly personal way in which Calinescu infers, f r o m the small size of a man's foot, the exceptional qualities of his personality. Whatever the truth, I have always got along with everybody (ou presque...). I shall leave diplomatic reasons aside, which have no significance for what I mean to say. T h e r e is in me an enormous and, probably, deleterious easiness. From an early age I have practised the swift alternation of opinions. T h e explanation for that is my innate ease in embracing contraries. I cannot rest for long in one single determination, without the feeling that I am mutilated. This cognitive ease has certainly left its mark upon the heart: my faithfulness is not vocational except for extremely general purposes, those of ideas understood as the "dance of the fairies". 22 As for faithfulness in what is concrete, it pertains to an ethical option which is volitional—or constrained, it matters little what we call it. Ever since I was fifteen, I ranked the mobility of intelligence as a criterion for personal value. T h e ambition to become an erudite, you will remember, had been given precisely this justification: I wanted to contain the apparently adverse diversity in units which would deny being in a feud. T h a t was the reason why I voluptuously exercised myself in multiplying points of view. In the discussions which I had with Sorin Apan, I was a "mystic" and a spiritualist. With D o r u Kaytar, I was political and concrete, with Ceaureanu (the best-endowed in physics a m o n g my colleagues) I developed an intransigent, neo-positivist position, and with Calin I seemed to have remained the same aesthete centred on the autonomy of values and on G e r m a n idealism. I did not feel that I was false in any of those opposed hypostases, living as I was in each of them an existence which was my own and which I was able to defend with the ardour which normally stems from those convictions which we call intimate. To think one thought is for me to live in its flesh. What people usually call faithfulness is the capacity to settle oneself in the consequences of 21 George Calinescu ( 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 6 6 ) , critic, literary historian, fiction writer and aesthetician, author of a vast and original work: The Life of Mihai Eminescu (1932), The Work of Eminescu ( 1 9 3 4 - 1 9 3 6 ) , The History of Romanian

Mihai

Literature from the Origins to the Present

(1941), etc. (translator's note). 22 R o m a n i a n idiom originating f r o m the h o m o n y m o u s play by Camil Petrescu a n d d e n o t i n g an inescapable and often fatal obsession with an "essence", which, although inaccessible to mortals in n o r m a l circumstances, someone has had a glimpse of in its naked dancing splend o u r (translator's note).

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an object. With an instinct which the Bhagavad-gita would later elucidate for me, I always avoided becoming involved in the consequences of what I practised. George Steiner once spoke of the light which the possibility of switching between several languages generates in one's consciousness. There is light also in the act of understanding several experiences of thinking by living them directly, when what they normally require is partisanship, or downright self-mutilation, as in those gory rites of initiation into the cult of the goddess Cybele. I have always wanted to signify more than the things which signify me. An essence of physics beyond the essential destiny which the subject who practises it spans is incomprehensible to me. Any doctrine is nothing more than a setting into motion of thinking. The most profound meaning which I am able to grant something is that of a spiritual exercise. The passions which enslave us, are they not ignoble? I have tried to live in culture as a free man, one who becomes, through culture, more than it is, and, ultimately, more than he is. 9 6 . That is perhaps the reason why I have always found ideas without substance to be vain. The sense of physics is that there is a subject capable of thinking it, and a state of mind capable of assuming it. I liked nothing better than discussing Emmy Noether's theorems with Ceaureanu, despite the difficulties implied by our insufficient information, and that was because, there, I had before my eyes a living experience of thought, in which I participated with more profit than if I had been stuck, like a "swot" (not like some diligent soul!) in Mandelstam's book (which is excellent!) about extremum theorems in physics. I obscurely orientated myself towards a model of learning which was polemic against the Western, ex cathedra, model and akin to the one of the Upanishads, which had grown from one appeal: "Sit next to me and listen." It is strange to find out these things in me, when my whole generation was completely without masters. Anything which any of us ever learnt was from books and from what the dialogue with oneself, and with one another, harvested from us. I am forced to admit that a destiny deeper than culture itself has been at work in us, a destiny which has led us with no apparent motive in the middle of what life itself planned to make of us at the outset. If this is so, it means that the petty deeds of my life (and of others, too, of course) can be interpreted from the angle of exemplariness. Books have marked the destiny of the culture in which we were born. Being constrained to them has been one of the consequences of the pestilent political context which we have inherited.

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Instead, the passion for the multiplicity of points of view, which is yours as well, stems from an oral model of culture, which had not been there before and which seems to have been put to trial in our generation. There is in us a kind of restlessness vis-à-vis culture, experienced with the means of culture, and this suggests the germination of something new. Besides, one further thing is also significant about our generation. Any one of us could have been anything: our native gifts are manifold, and the intelligence which shapes them together is extremely mobile and protean. This being the case, none of us has followed a "cultural" career, but a scientific one. The fact is meaningful insofar as it has saved us from that bad professionalism which could have turned us into a bunch of paper-crazy littérateurs, just like those many who fill to overflowing the faked space of culture these days. As it is, we have preserved an authentic feeling for the real meaning of culture, and have seen in it that way of being-in-the-world which is typical of man. Culture does not designate the particular performance of becoming a "genius" and being homologated in one of its compartments, but the way of assuming a precisely circumscribed historical situation, by means of a spiritual "situatedness". After all, culture is no less than the diagnosis of what being human still means today. This diagnosis is spiritual, that is to say, it presupposes a relating to the world of transcendence which has nothing to do with the stock exchange of values and with their interested manipulation, things which have currency at the very heart of the intelligentsia. When it becomes dictatorship, error, which is pardonable, transforms itself into fraud, which is no longer so. The concern of our educated classes that Romania still does not have a Nobel Prize stems from an erring consciousness and from an ingrained instinct of mediocrity. 9 7 . The value of culture does not lie in being cultural; the value of culture lies in its spiritual meaning. This is a dominant note of my thinking. Just as the actual stage of consciousness no longer permits an unmutilated relationship with the world which does not go through awareness, a soteriology which does not involve culture is no longer possible today. At this point, I must recall Dragoç Marinescu. The tie which binds us is one of deep congeniality. He is the first man whom I have met who, like myself, could experience several opposing modes of thinking at the same time, with dexterity. Dragoç, too, understood faithfulness as a shifting of points of view from inside a oneness which, in order to become "visible/intelligible", needed, above all, to be lived in succès-

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sion. However, whilst we shared the same formula of alternation, its motivations and its final meanings were drastically different. Starting from his medical experience, Drago§ had come to give a strictly cosmic meaning to the possibilities of man for salvation. History, to him, was a delay without substance and a degradation which only yoga technicalities could save you from. In this way, Drago§ fell upon the solution of India, aggravated by his refusal to see in our Western culture anything else but noise, violence, and madness. To me, quite the opposite, although empirically elusive and deceptive, history is an essential and inevitable process in the great adventure of the change of the subject. I give consciousness a profoundly historical meaning, whilst for Drago? the act of liberation is not in any way rooted in (or hampered by) the historical condition of the subject. The very notion of a subject of change he finds absurd, which is perfectly consistent with asserting the meaninglessness of history. He believes that the world has a key, which can clearly set what is illusory apart from what is real, whilst for me the world is a cipher which essentially lacks a "key". Or, if you prefer, the "key" for the world's cipher is man, not as an instrument, but, in hermeneutic fashion, as a way of being in the world: in other words, as life lived. By living, man solves the world. Yet this process cannot be expressed in finite words, it cannot take the shape of a key at hand, to be used by anyone as they please. Drago§ would say that the world has a secret, which, once you own it, you can use to redeem yourself and also to disentangle yourself from the illusion of error. I would say that, although profoundly mysterious, the world has no hidden secret: everything is visible, the essence is "here", you can touch it with your hand, all you need is to know where that hand is which is fit to touch the visible essence. However, that is not the problem of finding any key but one of the change of subject. 9 8 . You will have noticed that my formation, in the words of the common language, has had everything to do with books, experiences, and people. In fact, it has been about ideas and their bodily existence. The global meaning which I give to my life is this: there is a meaning. The books which have spoken to me did so because they addressed in me a part which needed them in order to become manifest. The experiences which I have been through were revealed in order to break open in me those horizons but for which I would have failed to bring to light the signification which orients my life. The human beings whom I have loved are those who have loved in me something that, without their love, would

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have been found unworthy to live on. I am, therefore, grateful and fully accept the life which has been given to me. I have seen ideas and have known their flesh: life deserves to be lived with gratitude. I became aware via being a man of culture. H a d I not seen in value-centred consciousness what Cioran called vérité d'erreur, that would have been a shortcoming. Still, I found out in due time that anything thought in life must become an upsetter of thought in living. With a cumbersome phrase, Marx has named this process "the exchange of matters with nature". Sheer nature, man has lost. What remains for him to do is to earn back, through culture, the cultural quality of naturalness, and then to abolish it, too, in favour of a nature which might express its essence by preserving at the same time its change. Culture itself must never obscure the kernel which nourishes it: the divine in man oriented towards the divine in the world. Confucius had the following advice to give to the young: if the effort of becoming a m a n has left some unspent strength in you, devote yourself to culture (Analects, I, VI: 1). T h e attention you devote to virtuosity must not prevent you from creating your works. When you live, the sense of urgency is never clear. What is that life which is not a coming closer to Al-Mu'tasim? When the army was over, I believed that nothing was changed and that, once back in my studio, I would step back into my old habits. In fact, if, until then, I had been ceaselessly learning what culture meant, its unlearning began then. It does not mean that I stopped training myself, but only that my feeling towards what I pursued had changed. T h e sense of change is very slow to make itself felt and we normally become aware of things only when their action on the senses ceases. We know only when the origin of knowing is gone. The change in my attitude concerning the sense of culture began in the army and received its first conscious form between 1982 and 1984. What was the sign? Signs are many, but their self-reference is deceptive, even seen in retrospect. When, finally, the army was over, the feeling of liberation was complete, and yet, the freedom which I awaited certainly could not be confused with the mere change in the ways of repression. T h e inanity in the army had made me attentive to the disgusting workers' "holiday" outside it, to which I had been blind before. The sordid was there, it could no longer be sidestepped. I groped in search of a meaning for a precarious life: what I stumbled upon, instead, was the thread of a work, which I resolved to take up, feeling that at its end I would find the hand of Ariadne auguring well.

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9 9 . T h e r e is a feeling unpleasant to the writer, namely that what is said darkens the capricious richness of life. T h a t I used this to be the way in which I describe myself here is beyond question, and yet, if the meaning is well enough expressed, the immediate body of my already shattered life is not quite there. I may have succeeded in making my struggle visible to you and showing the lines of the progress m a d e by intelligence. Still, no one has any further use for my sensibility when it has died for me. All that cannot become intelligence is c o n d e m n e d to perish, which is unfair. N o increase of intelligence can be achieved without a preliminary mutation in the refining of sensibility. To talk endlessly about what you have thought is vain and deceiving. T h a t is because what is left of intelligence is still the heart, and nothing but the heart— the heart in love. You must not forget that the adolescent who exercised himself in intelligence did not for a m o m e n t cease to write poetry and that the secret of his quality lay in being a poet. When you do not believe in miracles you are likely to have a distorted vision of what a miracle is: you believe that a miracle is something which does not happen. On the contrary, what is characteristic of a miracle is its presence. I do not believe that at that time I felt settled in my life, as if in a continuous miracle, as I do today. M y only contact with the presence of the world was the fact that now and again I felt an irrepressible urge to pray in writing. I did not know how to pray otherwise, and so I would write poetry. Insofar as I identified myself with value-centred consciousness, I wanted, it is true, to reach a certain threshold of value. I would not have been ready to accept without pain some evidence of my own literary non-existence. And still: poetry has so little to do with its recognition! To achieve the form of poetry is to transform yourself into a god. T h e state in which poetry is generated is a calling and creates a vessel: those forces of the world which live their life poetically are invited to the temple in which the god's incarnation is solemnised. H e who assists the gift of poetry, commonly called a poet, can at best be f o u n d worthy of the n a m e of priest in the temple whose body and soul he serves. It is an overwhelming h o n o u r to receive the title of poet. I do not know whether what I am saying now is a general experience of the poetic act, valid for other poets as well. I am a poet by virtue of this choice: I have been chosen to receive the presence of the god in me, when the god is willing. It is probable that any poet finds out at a given m o m e n t that he himself never makes poetry, and that everything which fortuitously comes to life has actually been engendered by that god. Poetry is liturgy, and to be a poet is the priesthood, of which we are all unworthy.

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I have said that to receive the title of poet is an honour. There are two name-givings but a single consecration. The consecration lies in choosing your own body as a place for a temple; that is the first naming. The other, which gives a man the title of poet, is the task of human beings and it happens within the value-centred consciousness. What is a great poet realiter? One thing only: somebody who has shared in the substance of the divine. Lucid (and useful) arguments can be composed in favour of the value of expression, and yet the truth is only one: the meaning of poetry cannot be any different from the essence of what is human, which is the realisation of the divine. Man is what transcends him, or he is nothing at all. 1 0 0 . I could never have found a way out of the anonymity of exception if I had not known poetry. I had all the premises for becoming what might be called a "situated man". A career is easy to achieve, for whoever refuses it. The problem for me was not to become something, or else, to become an object, a manner of operating, but to push to the very extent of my gifts to see what was left of me when the sophisms which come with what people term "the valuable" disintegrated of their own accord. The essence of man is what remains after everything which has supported him is removed. The wager on essence is difficult to meet. Not seeing, when you have eyes, is more difficult than seeing when you do not have them. It is certainly not the body which occludes the essence—on the contrary, only the body might, if it is up to the task, make it sensible. The difficulty of grasping the essence bears on the difficulty of being alive in a conscious way. I could only believe in a god who dances, Nietzsche said. That is the truth. Our body knows perfectly well how to live. There are physicians who claim that some diseases might be cured more efficiently if patients could give up their consciousness. However, consciousness we can give up no longer, and the problem, therefore, amounts to this: if the individual consciousness of each of us could extend itself over the world, and be like a god to her, could we then keep our life? If yes, then this is redemption. If no, then it follows that we embody a type of man destined for liquidation. What we would destroy in the world, if we were god, is what we destroy in ourselves, being men. The problem of divinity is no different from the question on which being man depends. How could we liberate the divine in ourselves? The fundamental premise of my thinking is that the world has to be saved under any circumstances. Espousing this point of view from the outset,

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I could not possibly have circumvented history any longer. Apocatastasis pânton is not a mere heresy dateable in time with the name of Origen, but the very essence of that point of view which claims: "Beauty will redeem the world". This assertion is enigmatic; yet everything is so in this unintelligible world. I had to understand why truth was no longer a sufficient criterion for identifying the vérité d'erreur. There is a symbolic attitude which claims that truth is hidden and that a certain adequate decryption evokes it and, in the last instance, even expresses it. T h e r e is then a "literal" attitude for which truth is all that exists, and essence is its own appearance. The first attitude likens the world to a nut and seeks to reach its kernel. T h e second attitude compares the world with an onion: none of the layers is "deeper" than the other, although it might be hidden better. Truth cannot be obtained by exfoliation, as the kernel of philosophy cannot be taught by means of a discourse: the second attitude has received a clear formulation in Plato's Letter VII. I did not have a presentment of what the philosophical endeavour was really about until I read those resigned pages which shed light on the truth which guides the true philosophers. 1 0 1 . If my intelligence was still reflecting on the reason why Dostoevsky had chosen beauty to redeem the world, instead of truth, I realise that my heart—she, too—had made the choice. As soon as I left the army I wrote down in my book: "Art is the reverie of thought"; "Art precedes thinking, and art follows thinking, too" (Book V, p. 31). I came back to, and made notes on, the Nietzsche of my first enthusiastic encounter—as I was wont to do again and again—and on the front page I wrote a quotation from Plotinus (which mimicked more than mirrored the level which I had reached with my Greek), Où8e twv KC/Âœv, à'KXa Koà to Ka^ov fiôr| ijnepGétov (Book VI, p. 34). I could not find a better way to express my new-found freedom than by reading Nietzsche, the author most dearly loved of my youth. T h e kind of ecstatic phrasing which I used in the poem A Eulogy to Feebleness derives from Nietzsche. In a few days, seized by a feverish haste, I read Tragic Existence (D.D. Roçca), Introduction to Philosophy (David), a book on Paracelsus, one on Mesmer, another on the history of stupidity, and finally a monograph on Thomas Mann, Quo vadis by Sienkiewicz; in addition, I sketched a catalogue of Sumerian divinities, fascinated by Gilgamesh and my own death (ibid., p. 38v et seqq.). There was nothing new about the way in which I resumed my study. A list of readings dating from that summer (1977) shows mainly philo-

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sophical titles, either primary sources or historical commentaries. New, however, was my interest in authors such as Pierre D u h e m , A.C. Crombie or St Körner, whose remarkable books negotiated my introduction into epistemology. Physicists were, of course, present, but still only in "humanist" books: von Laue with his History of Physics and P. A. M . D i r a c with The Evolution of the Physicists' Outlook on the Picture of

Nature. T h a t was also the time when I read Materialism and EmpirioCriticism (Lenin), not realising how bad it was until, in my third year or thereabouts, I read Mach's remarkable reflections on Newton's mechanics. Guided by a healthy instinct, I quickly came to detest Päträ§canu's books 23 , superficial and servile. How sinister the epoch when such books could have passed as normall I was looking for Principia Mathematica in the library and ran across the volumes of Bertrand Russell's Autobiography, which I read with interest, although cautioning myself to avoid the "easy" tone which characterised them (VI, p. 40v). In that same intense and fervid July, I initiated myself into the music of Chaliapin by listening to his complete Russian edition. For mere orientation, I sketched out a catalogue of folk songs and compared the different interpretations. I read L'Education sentimentale (Flaubert), which was to become one of my essential references. I reread Hölderlin, whom I found solid, and waded through "What is metaphysics?" (Heidegger), which was, for the moment, alien to me. I took Marin Preda, opera omnia, with me to the seaside, and went through it in ten days. When I returned to Bucharest, with some obscure design, I practised some Russian, a language which was to remain, alas, forgotten for the most part. September was Noica's month; I studied him, pencil in hand, on Dragon's books. Noica sent me to Heidegger, and I made sense of the latter for the first time with the help of Anton Dumitriu's 2 4 commentaries in Philosophia

mirabilis.

1 0 2 . T h e months of August and September were devoted to a thorough study of Noica and of Anton Dumitriu. Noica gave to me the insight into being, and Dumitriu, whom I visited together with Sorin

2 3 Lucreçiu Pâtrâçcanu, one of the few intellectuals w h o b e c a m e m e m b e r s of the C o m m u n i s t Party in the interwar period, author of works of propagandist philosophy; as Minister of Justice until his arrest (1948), he authorised the introduction of the People's Tribunals and abolished the irremovability of judges (translator's note). 24 A n t o n D u m i t r i u ( 1 9 0 5 - 1 9 9 2 ) , R o m a n i a n philosopher and logician, a u t h o r of Polyvalent Logics (1943), History of Logic (1969; English edition 1977), etc. (translator's note).

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Apan in November, led me with determination into Heidegger and logic. To my interest in Greek, the latter was to give a "fundamentalist" turn. M o s t Greek words which I had learnt until this year, when I began to study Greek more systematically with Adelina Piatkovski, were assimilated in Heidegger's "archaeological" etymology. For instance, the first meaning of the word öecopevu was to me not that of knowing, but that of contemplating, of taking part in a ceremony, whilst BecopiKÖ^ used to mean "what pertains to a ceremony", 9eo)peiv was not simply "to love", but "to welcome someone as a guest, with honour, with solemnity". Even before I had a decent grip on declensions, I knew that the archaic form of ei8o^ contained also a digamma, a letter later fallen into disuse, and that it read "weidos"; I knew that its etymon was the same as that of the Sanskrit word vidyä (science, sight), which had given the Latin video-videre, to see. T h e path which I had tried to carve for myself into the Greek language was through philosophy, as Heidegger understood it. I was m u c h as when I had tried to master G e r m a n by translating with the dictionary directly from Nietzsche's Götzen-Dämmerung. I failed in both cases: G e r m a n I know as well as does a dilettante, and Greek I only began to learn with some method at the age of thirty and then, alas, at the People's University. 1 0 3 . Noica's lesson was simple and salutary. Firstly it m e a n t that, whatever you did, you had to lay solid foundations for it. Secondly, language is not an indifferent instrument. Language implies instinctive metaphysics, which one does well to intuit ante factum. Noica took his etymologies f r o m Etymologicum Magum and from Sextil Pu§cariu 2 5 ; some of his examples were quaint, extracted directly f r o m a Neagoe Basarab, a Cantemir, or a Eufrosin Poteca. But for his example I may never have come back with interest to the chroniclers and may never have perused with an attentive eye the Romanian texts from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Noica taught one to discover in the word a historical tradition and an established philosophical vocation. His reasoning seemed to be that there is hardly any need for one to be intelligent if the language in which one speaks is so. Whatever the truth, I would never have come upon the old Romanian religious texts without Noica's example. T h e n , had I not read them, the euphonies which are in Lis25 E x t e n d e d etymological dictionaries dating f r o m the late-19th and early 20th centuries (translator's

note).

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tening to Death, and the liturgically hieratic quality that underlies some p a r t s of it would never have b e e n b o r n . F o r the t i m e being, I was trying to m a k e sense of the distinction b e t w e e n the self (sine) and what, whilst n o t ceasing to be the self, is in m a n deeper t h a n the self (sinea), and also of the opposition these two f o r m with the "I". I sought, with exasperation, to define the word "being" and ran into a void. T h e first attempts to u n d e r s t a n d the first p a r t of Sein unci Zeit failed precisely because I was unable to associate any kind of representation to the enigmatic " c o n c e p t " of being. T h e t r u e " e n t r a n c e " into philosophy was given to m e only w h e n I was able to u n d e r s t a n d passage 3 4 1 c - d f r o m Plato's Letter VII. Starting f r o m the m e a n i n g of that fragment, I was finally able to understand the difference between the philosophical pursuit and the scientific one, and also the reason why the definitions of philosophy cannot be given in the m a n n e r of geometric disciplines. T h e object which the m i n d s of philosophers have exercised themselves against, f r o m the earliest times, is n o t vain, a n d only becomes frail when exigencies which are alien to thinking seek to r e - f o u n d this object in terms of manipulation. I f o u n d there a n o t h e r example of the law which I was later to call realisatio. 1 0 4 . W h e n you d o s o m e t h i n g , you do n o t fully know w h a t you are doing, and that gives the action its fertility and richness. T h e beauty of a p r o b l e m which belongs to physics lies in consonantia cum claritate (ut dicit Dionysus). T h e claritas of physics comes f r o m the way the eye of the intellect b e a m s through the core of the question by effecting c o m m e n s u r a t i o n (the t e r m belongs to T h o m a s Aquinas—commensuratio) of calculus. Just as in the sonnets of Baudelaire, in physics, w h e n you have started, you always know how you will end. In life things are n o t so. N o t h i n g of what I have written above was clear to m e when I did those readings from Noica. I am forced to a d m i t that destiny does its work in us without help f r o m our awareness. L e t m e give an example. T h e clearest evidence of the d e p a r t e d life is that there is n o m o r e vanity. M y Books are full of notes of helplessness and abdication. Their recurrence guarantees their sincerity. Looking at things f r o m a distance of ten years, their t r u t h escapes me. I was later to discover a banal t r u t h , namely that sincerity is a vérité d'erreur, a n d that only troubled times can find g r o u n d s for t r u t h in the self-assurance of the subject/actor. In essence, the miraculous seems to reside in h o w all the m o m e n t s of truth go through us, whilst we keep forming our decep-

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tive notions of what they might mean. All that befalls us must be relying for its effect on the complicity of our ignorance. This reminds me of the physician who found it preferable to treat unconscious patients. Our oblique participation in what we are going to become is an enigmatic fact, for no one will fail to notice how it matches Anaximander's warning about "what is proper": "for things make reparation and satisfaction to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time" (Simplicius, Physica, 24: 13). If we keep in mind that poor is he who has not had learning and just punishment, we understand that any life fulfilled is a ruthless revelation of the weaknesses which have made it. I refer not so much to the fact that we base our manifest virtues on hidden faults, as to the circumstance that in every man there lurks the destiny of a corpse. If I would only close my eyes and die, my destiny would be accomplished just the same. I do not have the feeling that my life is a game. Despite its beauty, I am tempted to believe it to be more like a trap. Its labyrinth is not passive but shaped from a destiny of firsthand condemnation. As in that medieval poem quoted by Jaspers in the introduction to his Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, its commination inside me does not preclude me from being happy. Above all, keep cheerful (Gordon Craig); true, yet I cannot, for an instant, forget that no matter what truth I embrace, it is first of all lived as a vérité d'erreur—and also that, looking inwardly, I do not know more of me than I can ignore and that the dialectic of knowledge is just as banal, and just as glamorous, as a woman's body: when it offers itself to me, I seem to think that I know it, and it disappears; when it refuses, I seem to think it worth knowing, and it disappears. In fact, what I call knowing is a certain way of possessing, and the feeling that everything escapes me derives from the fact that, tragically, what I have I cannot possess, and what I possess cannot become mine. My life, I have it, and yet I never possess it, although I keep sampling it, endlessly. Sometimes I can possess what I love and yet the beloved flesh never goes into my flesh, and loving her means forever experimenting with the incapacity of having what I possess. T h e way in which I become what I am amazes me. Sometimes, at the rolling of the dice, one wins the highest stakes, the krita, which for the Hindi was expressed by the number four. However, during a lifetime the Rubicon is crossed countless times. T h e stakes are so much the more meaningful in themselves as whoever has seen the Rubicon knows that it is a miserable river: the stakes are life itself, and the rolling of the dice is what happens on a daily basis. We lose more than we win, and

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the price is but this: we die. When I look at my Books, filled with such minutiae and self-denial, I always remember that the black time began on February 18th, 3 1 0 2 B C , on a Friday, and that it is going to last for 4 3 2 thousand years. I have turned thirty... 1 0 5 . Noica's culturalism was annoying in its excess of immanence. After all, what can the beauty of a woman without charm hold for one? I doubt that the hermeneutic approach can be limited to the transcendental. Did Heidegger, in his late years, not use to say often that only a G o d could save us? T h e meaning of philosophy is certainly not that of egressing into theism. Its meaning is precisely that of keeping the suspension alive. Still, the horizon in which the suspension of concepts is being effected has to be made clear. Culture itself means nothing if the man within it does not mean more than it does itself. Here one must discriminate between two factors: Noica's system and his education (paideia). I shall not discuss the former, because Noica's influence on our generation, although exerted through his books, was borne mostly on our existential options, or else, on our foundations for life. In ignorant and aggressive times, Noica preached a hermitage of culture. T h e finesse of his means, the grace of his language, the solidity of his references, all these have made of him a model to which his work, at least for the time being, is subordinate. As any sage worthy of the name, Noica does not teach you what life is, but how to turn it to good use. Still, in me there exists, inquisitive, an impatience of the wrong sort. What is this subject which culture does not modify? An elementary observation shows that poetry is not made according to textbooks; Tacitus constructs his periods without consulting Quintilian. In the same way, culture is the medium through which something which is not culture becomes clear. Culture does not express it, it merely shows it. This is as in Plotinus' invitation: in order to dwell upon God, one need not invoke Him in words, but through an aspiration of our soul, as in prayer. Culture must be lived more like a theologia crucis than a theologia gloriae. I mean to say that to the prestige of strict observance which classic philology, for instance, enjoys, philosophy can never aspire (if it means to remain philosophy). Jaspers once said that to philosophise means to participate through thinking in the movement through which thinking performs the act of going beyond, without resolving itself into an answer which has the consistency of a content of knowledge. T h e philosopher does not derive his legitimacy from the accuracy of his means, upon verification, but rather from his own charisma. T h e value of a doctrine

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lies in the force of the personality behind it. More to the same effect: words are ordered by a light which is not signified in them, and yet their flux reveals it. T h e authority of Noica lies in that continuous presence behind the text. T h e enigma which confers truth on a philosophy (for it is evidently non-experimentable) is the same as that which transforms a life into a destiny. Taken separately, each statement is a conjecture without value; the whole, however, is no longer contingent. Goethe is in every one of his works; "Goetheity", however, lies in the whole of his work, and so it is a sign of aesthetic vulgarity to say that there is more Goethe in Faust II than in that jewel entitled Hermann and Dorothea. T h e truth of a life does not result from the truth of any of its moments, which are almost all false or erroneous. This is perhaps why any authentic philosophy is also true: no life can be false, and the form of life seems to be identical with the form of philosophy. 1 0 6 . T h e reason why I had to know Anton Dumitriu in person was none other than the feeling that he was a m a n who had managed to give an answer to my impatience. T h e cultural prestige which his books warranted was enormous: through him, logic became familiar to m e (as a discipline worthy of attention), and Aristotle readable. I mean to say that he offered me a reading "grid" capable of discerning in Aristotle the signs of signification which rose above mere cultural instruction. In the preface to his Philosophia mirabilis, Dumitriu speaks of a "vaster power" of man that has been forgotten and which survives, in fragments, in the works which have been preserved from the Greek philosophers; that "power" is no longer understood because it has always been translated through the filter of a mentality, ours, which ignored it completely. In a purely idiosyncratic manner, he linked megalithic culture to that power. In reality, Dumitriu is talking about another subject. His theoretical argument is sensationally simple. H e starts from the question, "What do words really say?" and the answer which he offers is bewildering enough, being elementary: words say what they say, or else, the only thing which they show is themselves—their meaning is literal. To understand Aristotle, we first have to see what are the meanings of the words he uses. This is the reason why the first thing which Anton Dumitriu does is look into the historical potential underlying words. A mentality is expressed by means of the sense which it impresses on words, that is how it remains engraved for eternity in the shadowy corona which constitutes the history of a word. By pursuing the archaeology of language, one transforms the mere linguistic geology into the outline

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of a functional anthropology, although with one condition only, that words must not be interpreted symbolically (the banal case: a sense from outside forces a meaning which is taken to be ad interim), but literally. If essence was named using a word which meant sight, this means that essence at that time could be sensed directly, as in direct and unmediated seeing. We must believe what appears incredible. This is what makes it simple. Anton Dumitriu was thus led to the idea that the subject is mutable. In flawless logic, this position obtains immediately from accepting the premise: the Greeks must not be interpreted in order to find out their meaning, but meaning lies in believing them to say exactly what they are saying. Thales' phrase that the gods are everywhere is not a metaphor, but a description. Thales offers an adequate description for what the world still was in his time. 1 0 7 . We came to see Anton Dumitriu without announcing our visit. A lady opened the door for us, not young, but gracile, lithe and feminine, extremely distinguished, and we instantly guessed her to be the wife of the man who was called "Sir Minister" in prison. We introduced ourselves as students who wished to have a conversation with the Professor. The abruptness of the visit disturbed her, and Anton Dumitriu was reticent at first. We let him know that we were students of physics and sought some clarifications of the philosophy which he had developed in some of his texts. It astonished him to hear that his Philosophia mirabilis had raised an interest among young people. He wanted to know what philosophical readings we had and whether we understood anything from the epistemological side of modern physics. The result of the examination being satisfactory, Dumitriu grew warmer and gave us his waggish smile, that of a child grown old overnight. His conversation had a rigour verging on pedantry. He practised a style of a slow unveiling: the meanings he always saved for the end, abiding by an epic thread which was like an apologue. He talked to us a lot about Christianism, without saying the name, presenting it as a global wisdom, outside time. He advised us to read with method and debate critically all that seemed to be devoid of truth (without offering us a criterion for truth, however). T h e reason why I relate this meeting is that when we were on our way out, we started down the narrow spiral staircase ahead of him, half turning back to show respect. We had just been questioning him on his short text entitled "Terra mirabilis", recently published in a weekly periodical. As we were climbing down the stairs, his voice grew fainter and

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fainter and it sounded as though he had remained upstairs. A mystery which was not vested by darkness and which sprang from the furrows of his mouth illuminated his features. From the spiral of the staircase, light was disappearing as the day drew to a close. I am quite positive that the light on Anton Dumitriu's face was not due to any of the physical means of illumination. Light itself is not normally seen, we just see the things which reflect it. Anton Dumitriu's childish face was flooded by a light which clearly sprang from the joy of thinking. Was he, for educational purposes, performing in front of us an experiment of the ecstatic 26 intellect? I could see him from below. Rather than a halo mixed with darkness and challenged from the shadows, in the Rembrandt style, his face evinced a Byzantine aura. The impression was not of a saintly, but of a hieratic quality. The mystery of his lips was transmuted as an initiation of the eyes, as Anton Dumitriu's gaze laid bare in front of us the image of the vision by which he was so clearly possessed. The logician lived occlusive and enthralling passions. Even in the esoteric gnosis did Anton Dumitriu betray a system. I wanted to know about what his article had left in abeyance: the location of Mount Kogaion. Before that he had spoken to us about the long seclusion which his pursuits implied and of the lack of consequence of revelations at the altar, when they could not open themselves further towards the nave. Seclusion was that side of loneliness devoid of consequences. Now he answered us and a kind of pathos vibrated in him which sent one to the long-extinguished scenarios of consecration which had taken place in the catacombs in the first years of the Christian era. More than the words he said, the hieratic quality of his gestures (his hands, very beautiful and smooth, reminding one of Rodin's Cathedral, were level with our heads) made one think of grace being imparted on us by concentrating toward the top of our heads those uncreated energies which, we had just been told that evening, Gregory Palamas had spoken of. The Kogaion, he told us, was a geometric centre of the Hyperborean world; if from its top one drew radii (the equivalent of a sharp look), laid tangentially on every form of relief around, they were said to meet the plane of the earth after a contour which was a map; this map was—and here Anton Dumitriu leaned scrutinisingly towards us and the look in his

26 T h e term belongs to the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga, who distinguished between two species of intellect, the enstatic, which corresponds to the functioning of the intellect within the province of logic, and the ecstatic, which corresponds to the attempt to transcend logic and categories (translator's note).

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eyes became hallucinated—this map was the very map of Great Romania: this was the true Terra mirabilis, known by few people. 1 0 8 . Passions rooted in an arbitrary absolute always convey a slight sensation of madness. For this is what madness is: one single idea boring, as in an act of possession, through an isolated head. For Anton Dumitriu the problem was symmetrical: you either have Romania, and then you determine the Kogaion, or you have the Kogaion, and then you can determine authentic Romania. I found this patriotism a outrance strident. T h e logician had fallen into a noble madness, which we all fall under, that is certain, even if our ingrained mediocrity prevents it from shining through; that is why we seem so sane. Aristotle had said it early: no mind of quality is spared a grain of madness. Poets were, after all, possessed by mania, if we are to give credit to Plato. Like Densu§ianu, Dumitriu was hallucinated by the archetype of the original land. It must be said, however, that the work of Nicolae Densu§ianu will never be disqualified under the accusation of being a "fantasy novel". As a fantasy novel, Prehistoric Dacia sketches out a solution in epic form: the way out of the labyrinth. Anton Dumitriu did not find the solution for life in scientism, as he had tried to in the fourth decade, nor in what he later called ontological logic: he found it in a Christianism strongly impregnated with the lure of a paganism which was entranced with the noumenon of the origins. Anton Dumitriu was a Christian as Heraclitus was when he invited his guests to join him next to his oven, in the kitchen, because there, too, were gods. A story from the days of his youth recounts how a young man thirsting for knowledge and sickened by its lability anchored all his hope in the advice that an Indian sage, who happened then to be in Bucharest for a brief stay, could give him. The hotel room where the sage was lodged was crammed full of books and people were swarming around him, in crowds. Social ceremonies succeeded one another with ridiculous dedication. At long last, after those frivolous guests had left the room, the young man addressed him abruptly with the ultimate question, "I have read all the books of my culture and I have found truth in none; what book is there which can give me the truth and set me free?" The sage remained silent and then he pensively went to one of the many shelves of books, "I believe that this book is quite widely available in your country; this is what you need." And he handed him the Bible. The meaning of this apologue is easy to decipher. It is true that you shall know the truth and that the truth shall set you free, yet not every

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truth is equally to hand. It may be that all paths lead to heaven, yet not every path is for anybody. T h e r e are truths which we breathe f r o m our earliest days: those are proper to us. T h e surest way to save yourself is to save the place where you were born. In the countryside people would say that a m a n who has never in his life planted a tree is not a whole man. As trees grow in the soil, man only truly grows in God. T h e planting of a tree is an apologue with a twofold horizon: you plant it where you live, and you live where what you have planted has yielded its fruit. We are not creatures of chance, except in the face of hazard. Bernanos once said that on ne fait pas sa part an sacre: destiny always takes f r o m us the share that is d u e to it, as what we deserve at any given m o m e n t is by virtue of what we have deserved, and truth is an eternally exigible price. It is senseless to think that there is one single thing in this world which suits you and yet which does not await you. Things happen exactly as in the apologue of Eisik from Krakow: truth is never far from us; it awaits us somewhere in the nooks and crannies of our own house, yet only after wanderings in foreign places, driven by faith, does the meaning of the forms in whose midst we live emerge in its essentially familiar simplicity. T h e one who reveals our innermost message to ourselves must be a stranger to our nation and to our faith, just like the Indian sage who offered young Dumitriu the Bible, a book otherwise so overlooked. One has to exert oneself m u c h in order to reap but a little. Although glamorous, truth is not extraordinary. There was nothing of Rembrandt in Anton Dumitriu: his light had the smooth clarity of the resurrection light in the icons wrought in gold by the Byzantines. 1 0 9 . T h r e e years later, I set out with Sorin Apan on another initiatory journey, the last. This time, the declared purpose of our ascension was Byzantium itself. We climbed towards Sihastria 2 7 one clear a n d cold morning of September, in the year 1980, crossing on foot the old, long-settled country of U p p e r Moldavia. T h o s e places had beauty like that of old wine and of gentle, weary light, a kind which is difficult to express and to do justice to its fragrance. Chekhov once said that everything must be beautiful in a man, his clothes as well as his face, his bearing as well as his soul. This precept well suits U p p e r Moldavia, where everything is beautiful and dignified, starting from the clothes and ending with the heart. T h e first contact with the monastery of Sihastria was cold and abstract: everything was shaped to match an experienced 2 7 T h e t o p o n y m m e a n s " h e r m i t a g e " in R o m a n i a n (translator's

note).

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and a somewhat timorous asceticism. We arrived there at 6 o'clock in the morning. After 9 o'clock the autumn sun overcame the harsh premonitions of winter which had been so very present whilst the night was still resisting being banished, and the wordless sweetness of this most royal of seasons spilt its warm golden honey over the lawns which still showed green and on to the cups of the Moldavian hills opening themselves to the sky in a very feminine way. In their folds and on their slopes the nuns from Agapia were swarming like bees, white and black spots in search of the raw materials from which they, industrious souls, would distil the sweetmeats of winter. A tall and pure silence rose from the herbs, brightly stained with the dappled petals of autumn flowers. T h a t calm was not simple unspoilt nature, any more than it was resignation or haughty spirituality; there was nothing but a familiar and gentle peace which settled with the earth's deep purposes. Transcendence had not been imposed there through power-driven ideas, nor had immanence been wrested from those purposes by suspicious denials. Grumbling and lack of measure were naturally cleaned out from the lesson of that beauty, which did not convince through hauteur and was still, not for one instant, neutral. Coming down from Sihla, where we had seen Father Paisie, I wondered what was the secret of that power which conquered one with its grace, its submission and its warmth, and not with the constraints of a spiritual method grown efficient by possessing the means to exercise force? In Western asceticism I admired the way in which coercion had given birth, through the life of the spirit, to the greatest imaginable form of freedom; here, however, I was confronted with a spiritual life of the laissez-faire, which was not in the very least indolent. It was easy for me to understand that ethics were made with kicks in the rear; my difficulty was to come to terms with the ineffable force which subsisted other than by exercising its own violence. What embodied this force was indeed visible: it was a presence which was not at all common. Two things must be noted: firstly, that the overwhelming presence did not crush and did not constrain, it convinced without seducing, a n d conquered without ravishing you; secondly, that it could not be shown—its epiphany was not connected to an object, but to a certain state of the world. What I understood then was that humanity was not unassisted in its appropriation of a way of being unique in the universe, b u t nature itself participated in a particular state which the world had, and which was its sacredness. In Upper Moldavia, people are blessed not only by their own goodness, but also by the enthralling beauty of those places. It may be exaggerated to call that corner of Bucovina an

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earthly paradise; it is an unavoidable truth instead that in paradise the earth partakes of a state of holiness not to be found on terrestrial earth. I understood then that holiness was a way of being dans le vrai, that truth was not an intellectual operation, b u t a way of living, and that living in truth means truly living. 1 1 0 . I had come to Sihástria to sample from the source a type of spirituality of which Sorin had been speaking to me with embarrassing pathos. Reading the Phylokalias was insufficient, I was told, and so we set off to the M o u n t Athos of Romania, I with the feeling, which in part Sorin had kindled in me, that there I should find the Byzantium of Christian Orthodoxy. N o t a trace of that, as it turned out. T h e only indisputable holiness there was that of the place, which I have spoken about already. People are certainly not to be overlooked in this tableau of saintly life which a piece of land reveals and yet their particular holiness stems from other sources than natural Christian holiness. In 1980 there were in Sihástria two remarkable men: Father Ioil and Father Cleopa. T h e former was already very old when I met him. It has been more than four years now since he left this life for the one of which, in his holiness, he had been worthy. Ioil joined together in one person pure monastic ardour with the transparent incapacity to think rationally. T h e feeling that the father had regressed to the age of childhood was not the last to cross your mind when you looked at him. His cardinal virtue was moral cleanness. I am tempted to think that his great sin was his lack of intelligence. Ioil's life work, an exquisite one, was the perfection of an epigone: unable to understand intellectual courage and restlessness of the heart, he was the perfect type of monk who cannot be reproached for any breach of the rules. I shall not be the one to judge this venerable old m a n , whose joy in his winter years were the ridiculous little rhymes which he m a d e up, jogged by some garbled meters and exalting in puerile apologues virtues which were equally simplistic. His light was, however, indisputable: it shone through f r o m the very first contact. Despite the words which he uttered, which, with all their disheartening innocence, could not make you sad, his saintliness revealed itself at the immediate level of his physical presence: he would purify the body of his interlocutor with a mere touch. I am not mistaken in saying that what is inextricably intricate in a h u m a n soul became clear and confinable in the simple rules which the old man used when he gave advice in person to that soul. Let us be clear, any personality must be judged against the criteria which have made its glory. Ioil

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was perfect in relation to his own type of perfection, banal as it might have been. People may share banal ideas and yet the people who lend them their own flesh are never banal. Besides, Ioil's perfection observed the rule of verification and, whilst the rule was banal, its perfection was effective. Its pneumatology transformed the intemperate chaos of the man under inquiry into simple chains of virtues and sins, which existed in reality under the power of his influence. Only in this state could they find a cure and could evil be converted into the pure and transparent gold of good Father Ioil's presence. Cleopa was a monastic of a wholly different quality. I must say from the outset that, in spite of the slightly fatuous veneration surrounding him, I felt him to be my equal from the very first moment. Whilst I was a histrionic in culture, Cleopa was a histrionic in monastic-religious culture, where he was a redoubtable erudite. Like Iorga 28 , whom he resembled even in appearance, he was uncontrollable with his quotations. He quoted often, from incredibly obscure books, which were, most of them, manuscripts which no one else read, buried under the dust of monastic libraries. Of the works which no one read, Cleopa had read everything. Two details are suggestive for an outline of his personality: 1) all the monks in the monastery had pictures of Cleopa in their cells, hanging on the wall among the icons and before which they crossed themselves constantly; Cleopa alone had only icons in his cell, despite the veneration which he showed for Father Paisie, his confessor, whose picture he did not have; one must add that Father Cleopa knew of this iconic cult, and that he looked upon it with an encouraging eye; 2) one morning, at the burial of an archimandrite, he made a funereal oration devoted to the things which happen to the soul in the first forty days after death; his references were not from Bardo Todol, but from a manuscript, Poarta pecetluita (The Sealed Gate), owned by the monastery of Neam; since the beginning of the 19th century. In the evening, as was the established custom, there was a pilgrimage in the father's cell (he also had a monk-secretary, very devoted to Cleopian hagiography); a physician from Bucharest wanted to know what had been the subject of his funeral speech that morning and, when told, he showed regret at not having taped the speech; I was stupefied to hear

2 8 Nicolae Iorga ( 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 4 0 ) , multivalent personality of R o m a n i a n culture, historian, politician, writer, theoretician of culture and art, head of some i m p o r t a n t literary magazines, promoter of the traditionalist literary trend of Sämänätorul, azines which he directed (translator's note).

so n a m e d after one of the mag-

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Cleopa say that if he brought the tape recorder immediately he would repeat the discourse word for word, for him to tape it. Although nourished with written sources (manuscripts, most of all), Cleopa's genius was essentially oral. Endowed with a prodigious m e m ory, highly accurate in detail, everything in him was put to the service of an alacrity in self-expression which was in no way humble, even if fully Christian in its essence. Voluble, extremely modern in intelligence, subtle, expansive, imperial, scrutinising and devoid of the naïveté of the soul to the point of immodesty, domineering and awesome, a believer verging on fanaticism in the vigour of what he n a m e d Christianism, Father Cleopa was the opposite of an epigone. W h e n Ioil exemplified the way of monastic rules, Cleopa incarnated that aggressive and domineeringly brutal sainthood of the first fathers in the wilderness of T h e b a i d . An abba in the full sense of the word, p r o u d and certainly afraid of G o d and of himself during prayer (yet not in front of others!), Cleopa gave Christian meekness an extremely personal interpretation, and it had not one ounce of feebleness in it. T h e sense of his belief was the imperium, theologia gloriae. He not only knew people, he mastered them: and his master's hand was always crushing. Cleopa brought you to your knees all by himself and he had the ironical humility to take you to the altar and say that it was God. Everything in him was grandiose: which is why what was really frightening about him was the absence of hollowness. Cleopa was haughty and was whole. Feeble spirits have given credence to the ready-made thought that the grandiose is an overemphasising of form at the expense of content. In the case of strong natures, and also in the baroque, that is obviously false. Montherlant once said that dans la grandeur il y a la pompe, mais il y a aussi la sévérité. T h i s virile severity gave Cleopa the right to stand next to a Bossuet exclaiming, doctrine de l'Evangile, que tu es severe! 1 1 1 . About the real religious life of Father Cleopa I can say nothing. T h e mystical wheels of his personality elude me, that is certain, and there can be little wonder at it, given my ignorance in matters spiritual. Father Cleopa had spent his childhood at the back of beyond and as a youth he had had a natural experience of the prayer of the heart, which he had brought to life again in his monastic establishment. Next to that Iorga-like verbal ease which was innate in him, there is the indisputable fact that his reputation was already solid at Mount Athos, and those who sought him for technical purposes wanted nothing less than to attain a genuine prayer of the heart under his guidance. In U p p e r Moldavia,

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Cleopa was the uncontested master of the Hesychast tradition. T h e roughness of his temperament, I sometimes think, must have been congeneric with the rudeness of temper of the other great Hesychast from Byzantium, Gregory Palamas, whose spiritual commerce with his fellow men did not, as is well known, include sweetness among its ingredients. 1 1 2 . The third remarkable man of this land was Father Paisie who was based in Sihla. We climbed up to him, sent by Cleopa. We had been warned that he had had his fill of busybodies and was apt to snub those who had no reason to be there or who were indiscreet. We made a detour from our path round to the cave and fountain of St Theodora, who had dwelt in these parts in the 17th century or thereabouts. The fountain was a kind of trough on top of a cliff, where rainwater collected. The saint would scramble up a track which required great ability and from there she was said to have drunk water. Well, we know that eccentricity is one of the signs of holiness, and do remember that St Francis would send his disciples to do penance by crossing the town naked! The cave, however, transcends my understanding and is downright appalling: a slant cut between two rocks, narrow and then a little rounded at the bottom. A handful of dry straw thrown on to a slab of rock polished by some exalted body—that was the saint's bed. It is hard to give in words an idea of the surprise and horror which the details of that ascetic life stirred in me. I do not know whether human nature is by such means transgressed in favour of angelic nature; what I do know, however, and I know it as an imperative, is that going beyond the limits of life in such ways is totally devoid of consequence. The horror at that dwelling place "of piety" is still with me today. I can understand the holiness which permeated Fioretti, or that which spurred St Teresa de Avila to write her Way of Perfection. If, however, the correct image of the Paterikon is delineated by the circumstances of that saint's life, then I admit that the spiritual core of Christian asceticism eludes me. The saint had lived as a recluse and had been fed by birds. Rigorous reclusion implies two things: denial of the use of language and renouncement of the sacraments. This particular fact is what I fail to understand. The Franciscan touch in being fed by birds is only apparent, because, prior to destroying bodies, Francis formed sensibilities. Besides, Franciscanism did hold the sensitive soul (and the appetitive one even) in high esteem, which is reflected in the encounter of the saint with St Clare in the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which is said to have given out light from

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within during their conversation. The theme of light is present with this saint also at her death, when the body of Theodora began to exude light. What can I say? After all, the dead body of Zosima gave off an infernal stench. On the other hand, "my" Christianism looks upon Ferrapont with extreme suspicion. Christian revelation is, in essence, nothing but the annunciation that God loves us and, for that reason, we shall not die. 1 1 3 . The example of St Theodora showed me precisely what I could never be. I am not, of course, qualified to speak of the futility of extreme mortification. Yet, as Nietzsche could only believe in a god who danced, I do not believe in the value of a way of redemption which is unable to bring joy. Beyond Stoic serenity lies the supreme criterion of truth, which is that of being happy. It is true that what we believe in gives an obsessive shape to what we are. I also know that any vocation gives voice to an often embarrassing sum of weaknesses. There are a few principles, however, from which I cannot stray: 1) there are more things worthy than unworthy of praise in the human being; 2) the true causes cannot be found by looking for them downwards, but by lifting your eyes up; 3) virtue does not produce happiness, but happiness makes it possible for us to life a virtuous life; 4) the chain of evil is not severed by retaliation, but through the ethics of the "other cheek", 5) there is no way in which you can become better if you have not managed first to become happier; 6) happiness consists in that state in which there is no alternative to being happy. This list may be widened at any time, with variable profit. As always, what is important is not the discourse (Heraclitus' polymathia), but the state which makes possible its surpassing qua living in the direction of what transcends it. Many of us may ignore the fact that speaking proceeds from an unfinished apologue. Words send to objects from a perspective which is not theirs. What transcends language in a language is the very fact that we are speaking it. We are words or fragments of sentences from a discourse for which we are not objects, but allusions. We know not who it is who speaks, any more than we know what is spoken about. We are in every way like that scorpion in the Koran, crushed by the wheel of a wagon which happens to be going along the road; what does the one who is crushed know of the thoughts of the one who drives the wagon? St Theodora's choice eludes me. It is true that no life is false in itself, as long as it is lived, but still, the fundamental which declares itself in the form of living, can that be false? Buddha eventually turned

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away from the illusions of asceticism because, although the tapas which ascetics accrued were real, the power of being holy did not transcend the endless cycle of karmic retaliation. After he revealed the yoga techniques, Patanjali observed with resignation that all that this elaborate apparatus could do was to substitute, in a bastard and cramped way, for the expectation of the moment which might bring forth grace... 1 1 4 . It was of this particular matter that good Father Paisie spoke to us. From the Cave of the Saint it is only a short way to the Church of One Wood, carved by a solitary monk in 1723, and then one goes down a gentle slope to the rock hermitages of Sihla. The second cell belongs to the father. Half-blind, at eighty-four (in 1980), Paisie was what they call a man alive in soul and feeling. He was waggish like an old peasant and his harshness was tempered by a broad kind of tolerance. Or, would it be more proper to say of him what has been said of Goethe, that he was tolerant, yet without kindliness? I am not sure: a portrait fits many frames; all that fits it looks as though it was designed to fit it from the start. Paisie was recondite in the tight and challenging interrogation which he threw at death, and I cannot tell whether it made him one with life. As he spoke to us, I was struck by how he kept looking over our shoulders, with so much purpose that you were tempted to look back. The secret interlocutor of the old man waiting for his end was unfathomable death, which he saw lurking behind our perishable bodies and, of course, at the root of his already departing eyesight. With God you live: when you die, however, you die alone, just as you were born. At eighty-four, restlessness brings challenges to faith, even if it cannot depose the latter. It was here that Paisie's supremacy over Cleopa lay, in how he acknowledged in himself the universal humanity which is threatened in death not by the disappearance of God, but by His indifference. Death is circumvented by ritual, as the latter invariably presupposes the death of the one upon whom its denial rests. In a profound, or at least profoundly Christian, sense, the father was feeling lonely now. This permanent settling in belief which is the life of devotion seeks now, at the end, to possess the final term on whose very premise it has been built, and it already denies itself to certitude by modifying the terms in which the problem is posed. The prayer of a dying man is not the same as the peroration of a spirited well-fed preacher. This final decency, enthralling and heart-rending, Paisie shared, in 1980, with my father, who died in 1985.

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1 1 5 . I knelt before the father, spontaneously, and asked for his blessing (I had never knelt before Father Cleopa!). He sheltered me under his surplice, stroking the top of my head. T h e n he remained silent. I stood this way for many minutes on end, waiting for something which was reluctant to respond to this evocation. Finally, the father started to talk. This was not the usual blessing, it was a story told in that infinite repose of one whose hours are no longer infinite. Here is what he told me: "In a hermitage far away, a young novice asked his teacher about a thing which he had been turning over in his mind for some time. H e had found out that, after death, the righteous soul finds that place which was saved for it before Our Lord the Redeemer, and that it spends there the whole of eternity which is given him, contemplating the luminous face of the True One. Could it be that for the whole of eternity the souls do nothing but this one thing, which is worthy of all praise, that is of course true, yet perhaps just a little monotonous? T h e young man spoke his mind and humbled himself greatly and was already embarrassed at the boldness of his thought, in which he could feel a lack of wisdom. However, the old teacher did not react to the young man's embarrassment but eyed him with kindness and told him in a fatherly voice, ' T h o u art right to say that souls might find boredom in such a thing of wonder as seeing the face of Our Lord the Redeemer. Yet there are more things to be said of this matter, and of them we shall talk when thou hast gone and fetched thy bundle of sticks, for the day is far spent, and the forest crawls with many a wild beast at night, and the cold will overcome us during matins if we do not kindle a fire. So, first get thee hence and gather those sticks and then I shall talk to thee, as has been agreed.' T h e youth picked up the wood-sack with all the haste he could muster and left for the forest. From the brushwood scattered on the ground he quickly knocked together a bundle of sticks and, just when he was starting out on his way back, a voice fine and rare reached his ear and he froze where he was, in astonishment. At first his eyes could not make out anywhere around him any creature worthy of such richness of voice. However, when, after a while, the singing died out, the youth saw a bird wonderfully graced with feathers of many colours, and she flapped her wings gently towards a tree not far from the place where he had been distracted from his way home. He moved towards that tree, careful not to frighten this marvel away, and hid himself out of sight by the roots of the tree, at which point the bird started again to enchant both the greenery and the trees with that honeyed voice she had. "Merciful God, what a blessed sight T h o u hast shewn

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my eyes", said the youth to himself, bewitched, unable to take his eyes off the creature, gazing at her with rapture, as if his sight could feel that voice when ears seemed not quite enough, and he wondered and wondered as the bird rewarded him richly with her rare gift of song. The more he looked at her, the more he listened, the more he found there to admire, and the ecstasy which he then felt he deemed beyond all pleasure. In this way, from tree to tree, charmed by the singing of the bird, our youth came at long last to the edge of the forest, where the wonderful winged creature seemed to melt into thin air. Seized by total dismay, he cried out for it and prayed to the Lord Almighty, that He might bring her back to him. But that was the end of the bird, for she had vanished. Then did your young man realise that he had lost unthinkable time on his way, chasing a creature of shadows, and that the good Father was waiting in the hermitage for the fire to be lit. He saw that night was just beginning to fall over the fields, made haste and ran along paths known only to himself, as if he wished to recapture lost time. He was back in the hermitage in a short while, having taken the straightest path which he could find, even if his chasing of that wondrous singing creature had taken him far from home. Here he saw in wonder that two of the huts were now in ruins, although he knew them to be strongly built, and it also seemed that others had been built whilst he was gone, which was something so much beyond the natural that he rushed into the hut which he knew so well to ask the old teacher about it. He was lying there, covered up, on a low bench, a candle within reach and dressed all ready for the last journey. The young man knelt with his face bathed in tears, letting his armful of firewood fall in front of the fireplace, and asked him, 'What have I done to thee, Father, to be left by you like this, not yet fully a man? Dire will be the Lord's punishment on me for the grief which I have caused thee, being three hours late with the sticks thou hast sent me for!' The old teacher, now so old that all the years on him weighed him down under their burden, smiled at his beloved disciple with kindly warmth and said to him, 'Thou wast gone not three hours, but nine years have passed over me as I waited here to give thee the sense thou deservest. So listen now: if one poor creature, coming from the hand of God our Redeemer, could keep thee under its spell for such a long time, and with thee thinking naught of it, although well thou knewest that thou was awaited at our early morning service, tell me: how dost thou think that it will be in the hour when the angels make haste to roll up the carpet of time, when thou shalt look upon the much blessed and hallowed face of God? If a bird has

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made nine years pass as three hours for thee, the Lord thy God, the Redeemer, will He not make eternity pass as one priceless instant, may thou be blessed by Him with it? For thee I shall pray when He will call me to His face, that He might give thee His eternity.' Thus spake the old master, and the light in his eyes died away. And the young man saw that everything was done according to custom and ceased to believe, from that day on, that God is contained among what lives in time and shares the time of the things that perish. And he found out that what is possible in God, in no mind exists." When the father stopped talking, silence settled again, for a while. Then he laid his hand on the top of my head, made the sign of the cross three times, and lifted me up by the shoulders, as in an embrace, blessing me this way for the strange thing which he had seen in himself when I had come to him and knelt, just a few moments earlier. 1 1 6 . In Notebook X, page 32, I find the following note, "Of this old man, and of Brother Ioil, too, I shall write some day." This is what I have done, with all my love. You must, however, note that we are equal not even in death. 1 1 7 . As I left Father Paisie, the words which he had once said seemed to be stuck in my mind: "Then did your young man realise..."—the words were obviously addressed to me. Why? Years later, I was to chance upon this apologue again, the place of the young novice taken by the popular figure of the monk Nárada, a hero whose stories are in Matsya Purina, in The Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna and, retold, in one of Heirich Zimmer's books. Whilst I listened to the father as he spoke, a great certainty kept growing inside me. I had come to see the life of holy men and discovered myself strengthened in a vocation which was not theirs. Why did the father say "your young man"? Tua res agitur, of course, yet why that particular warning against the illusions of beauty? I stop to think. From all the brethren in Sihástria, Paisie was the only one who advised Sorin against his monastic vocation. He was proved right, and in the end my friend married. What has become of me? My vocation was never that of asceticism, in fact, all that I did all this time was to fight the teachings of Nárada's parable. The end might itself be predictable: the father had said to me: "You shall go back to God." Instead, I desperately believed in the full meaning of this body, which will endure. The praise of illusion is not heretical. This is why, I assume, he gave me that kiss. As we

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followed the paths of the mountain back to Sihastria, we ate blackberries, which were sweet. We watched the rich light of autumn, liquid and mat, like old gold. Dim flames were burning softly in the leaves, announcing the fiery bite of the first frost. They rustled as the wings of the dragonfly rustle in the scorching air. The sun had already cloaked itself in a fold of the sky, like an eye between lids when the joy of delight borders on weariness. On our train back I looked at the hills in their unbroken march-past in high and enwrapping stillness. Meletos made noises around me. Who was he who, after the slaughter, looked at the clouds, with an equal and wondering serenity? Revelations are propitious, awareness not so. When we love, we close our eyes. In the same way, not simply to accept life, but to love it, is an act of courage. Pleasure can be increased by looking at the bodies in commotion, the feeling of communion not so. Paradoxically, communion is received through a withdrawal into the depths. At the origin is not the self, and is not the other. Look at the clouds. Be alive. 1 1 8 . It is strange that you can redeem yourself by fiercely denying even a tiny portion of the world. Cut off by means of his own exception, which is a risk, man saves himself through stubbornness and selfimposed fidelity. It is known that Eleazar of Worms preserved the required formula for building a golem. The golem is matter without spirit, amorphous matter, man created through combinations of letters. Among the things done to the golem to animate it, it is needed that the word "emet" be engraved on its forehead, which means truth: its builders know that this creature could be destroyed by erasing the initial letter. Life is gone when truth is mutilated: indeed, on the forehead of the golem remains the word "met", which means "death". 1 1 9 . The living truth has only a few things in common with the notion defined by Tarski. Truth must be another name given to life. Like God, truth is man's genuine nature and he does not have another. Yet, when it comes to life's unique fragrance of life, we cannot make use of theocentric concepts. We belong to the absolute just as much as we are also children of illusion. Let us not forget that illusion is the dynamic side of the absolute and that it, the illusion, must be accepted for what it is: the irradiation of the divine, the only irradiation of the Absolute (provided such capitalised words do not embarrass you). Shall we call it "the unique manifestation of divine energy", as it is commonly called?

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O n e fact is certain: with Schwa, "P&R, if we remove the s i g n f , which is the sign of Shakti, of the G r e a t G o d d e s s , the procreating a n d c o s m o g o nic symbol, or maya, the o u t c o m e of t h e a m p u t a t i o n is a Shava, a corpse. Schwa seen as Shava, B r a h m a n deprived of Maya, they are all meaningless if we look at things f r o m the viewpoint of the world of m a n ifestation. W h o s e world? M y world or n o b o d y ' s world? D i d you k n o w that " H a d e s " m e a n s invisible? Still, I can find n o b e t t e r way to express what I went t h r o u g h after I left the venerable father. Precision does n o t clarify the a c c o u n t , it trivialises it. W h a t , t h e n , is left of its d e p t h if p r e cision dispels it, a n d the result is n o t a m u d d l e ? 1 2 0 . Paisie rescued m e in an o u t - o f - t h e - o r d i n a r y way to t h a t inner genius which you receive only w h e n you are in an u n c o n d i t i o n e d accord with yourself. H o w may I p u t it? Moi qui ne crois pas,je ne puis croire qu'a ceux qui croient. Et cependant ne puis comprendre qu 'ils croient ( M o n t h e r lant, letter addressed to Philippe de S a i n t - R o b e r t three weeks before he c o m m i t t e d suicide). I n a way impossible to explain, Paisie h a d given m e his blessing for the destiny in which I h a d bashfully settled myself. To feel that you are a writer after you have ceased to believe in values, is that not a t o u c h ridiculous? T h e r e comes an h o u r in the life of a h u m a n being w h e n f o o t m e n s u d d e n l y lose their i m p o r t a n c e . I use the w o r d " f o o t m e n " to describe all false, quaint, or foolish ideas. W h e n you know what you are, the rest ceases to matter. Being contested is a serene pleasure, as long as the f o o t m e n are there. Whilst singularities pass away, the individual grows dim: the point of view and the m o d e l of personality begin to m a t t e r at that precise p o i n t . M a n is n o t only the idiosyncratic self, h e is, b e f o r e all else, t h e p a r a d i g m o n behalf of which he lives. As I was climbing d o w n f r o m Paisie's h e r m i t a g e , I knew that this p a r a d i g m existed a n d that I was already settled in it. 1 2 1 . W h a t is i n t e r e s t i n g is t h a t even a f t e r t h e visit w h i c h I p a i d to A n t o n D u m i t r i u , what lay b e f o r e m e to b e d o n e r e m a i n e d just as clear to me. I recall one of the discussions with Sorin, after the lecture on theoretical m e c h a n i c s w h e r e I h a d soared high, experiencing, with Binet, the life of the f o r m u l a w h i c h b e a r s his n a m e : h e voiced his disgust for the physics which all those ignoramuses were inanely c r a m m i n g into o u r heads; also his m i s t r u s t f o r the schoolteacher's philosophy a n d also for the lack of d e t e r m i n a t i o n as to w h a t is to b e d o n e . I, for o n e , was going t h r o u g h a spiritual m o m e n t of great c o n f i d e n c e . I h a d p r o c e e d e d to

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discover theoretical physics, which was i m m e n s e and refreshing; I h a d b e g u n the c o m p l e t e reading of N i e t z s c h e , which fulfilled o n e of the p r o m i s e s of my adolescence; I experienced the c h a r m of a c o m p l e t e intellectual friendship, alongside D o r u Kaytar and Drago§ M a r i n e s c u , a n d I rediscovered virile affection and t h e value of silence, t h r o u g h Mircea Parpalea; besides, I was living the energy of two capital discoveries, the most noteworthy of my middle age: P o u n d and M o n t h e r l a n t . M y m i n d was fuller than my life, and my life was only too glad to share in the excess. I did not understand Sorin's hesitations, which were going to consign h i m in the end to the u p r o a r s of conversion. I was going t h r o u g h an exhilarating m o m e n t of culture, when culture b e c o m e s secondary in relation to the possibilities of life which it awakens. It has been said that it is easier to d e e p e n your knowledge of a m a n in his denial t h a n in his fidelity. T h i s may well be. T h e r e is in m e a resource connected with the richness of being alive, and it is a kind of fidelity whose m e c h a n i s m is w o u n d u p in m o m e n t s of rapture. N o t only o n e single separation was being enacted in me at that time, voluptuously, and these farewells opened me, in all richness, towards my f u t u r e destiny. I was detaching myself from the f u n d a m e n t a l vocation of my adolescence, the value-centred consciousness; I was detaching myself from Marx, or else f r o m the spiritual direction which infers an essence f r o m the exchange or f r o m use; finally, I was detaching myself f r o m the obstinate fidelity which says demeurons identiques par vertu (Robert de Traz), which M o n therlant f o u n d to be la comble de I'idiotie, yet which h a d m a d e m e make i m m e n s e and fruitful progress towards self-control by controlling the i n s t r u m e n t of culture. I like to end things. At twenty, I felt in control over what I wanted to throw away. Until that age I had been looking for something, because surreptitiously I wanted everything. Later, I was able to look through the whole, because I finally w a n t e d something. Fervidness, which, in essence, is avidity for the diverse, was superseded by the attention devoted to the unique. M y old performances, those of reading one or several books every day, suddenly lost much of their stringency. Unawares, I had c h a n c e d u p o n a capital fact, that not everything deserves to be known. 1 2 2 . Whilst this new principle was at work in me, the reach of my preoccupations widened instead. O n D e c e m b e r 2 n d , 1977, I wrote, "An irremediably weak being is always a being which has always c o m p l a cently known how to account for his weaknesses" (Book XI, p. 53). What

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I called weakness was the lack of will in the ascetic exercise of work. In order n o t to bury myself in the vicious auto-eroticism of the lack of self-grounding f u n d a m e n t a l s , I went on modelling my life according to the c o m m a n d m e n t s of the first age (fifteen to twenty years old), which were all impositions of force; o n D e c e m b e r 7th, I exercised what you have called the "ethic option": I p l a n n e d to strengthen myself in the heroic ideal, to strip myself of the mysticism devoid of lucidity, to fill in the picture of reality in perspectivist fashion (an allusion to Ortega y Gasset?), to love m o r e , to believe in the philosophical value of the physics which I was studying, a n d finally, to live m o r e intensely {idem, p. 55). T h e r e is, of course, an imposture in every effort of change, yet it is an imposture of truth, n o t of error. After all, as I jotted, for some reason lost to m e now, directly in French, on page 64 (Jan. 15th, 1978), agir c 'est settlement savoir qu 'un jour la redemption sera possible. 1 2 3 . D e c e m b e r , 1977, was a m o n t h dedicated to logic and to the history of science. T h e n I read Florica C à m p a n ' s digests o n the history of mathematics (I still could not find Paul Tannery, for w h o m I r e m e m ber that I searched maniacally, with desperation) and Oskar Becker's b o o k on the g r o u n d s of m a t h e m a t i c s ; I read Frege excitedly, t h e n Leibniz and Poincaré, and then f r o m A n t o n D u m i t r i u I took schoolboyish notes f r o m The New Paradoxes and Polivalent Logic. As with Paul Tannery, I searched for Russell, too, everywhere, frantically, a n d I could n o t lay my h a n d s on a copy (the library of the Faculty of M a t h e m a t i c s had n o book by him!). In this way, I had to content myself with dry, sad compilations such as those of G e o r g Kraus. W h e n I b e c a m e tired I read M a u g h a m a n d Eliade's short stories; I a b a n d o n e d the c o n s t r a i n t of note-taking as I studied Dilthey, with w h o m I had one first, propitious contact (Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung). Excited by the controversy about the logical possibility of induction, I took down notes for an essay which I was never to resume. Finally, I m a d e notes on C a n t o r ' s theory of the c o n t i n u u m (Book VI, p. 44 et seqq.); I learned of his outbreaks of m a d ness, which he h a d f o u n d a way to t u r n to profit, starting f r o m the observation that he b e c a m e extremely lucid when they were exhausted. Dostoevsky had his m o m e n t of devastating illumination in the one flash preceding the outbreak of his crisis of epilepsy. T h e finale of the year 1977 I spent demonstrating three of Euler's theorems on the "topologie bridges" and practising the system of symbols of prepositional calculus set u p by G o t t l o b Frege.

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1 2 4 . T h e year 1978 I did not begin with the question " W h e r e to?" since I only needed to go further on the paths which were already known to me. On the morning of January 1st I read Dialogues with Mussolini (Emil Ludwig), and in the evening I made notes about the redefinition of conjunction and implication in polyvalent logics. At the same time, I pondered on the meaning of the fact that all the magnitudes of physics are magnitudes which modify themselves in time and space. I resumed "Transcendental Aesthetics" in that light (I found that theoretical mechanics evolved in a full-fledged Kantianism). At the same time I read Tao te ching, for the first time in the whole, in an English translation, and planned to abide by the moral of the ten daily achievements (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra); I speculated in Noica's wake on the distinction between capability and possibility. I translated La Tentation de ¡'Occident (Malraux) and at the same time I read Radu Cosa§u's Survivals', I took up again The History of Physics (von Laue) and read Feynman's Conferences for the first time. I charted our post-war literature for myself, with Eugen Simion, and was bored with Alain, in the way that we are at a loss with men of weak sexual performance. On the other hand, Ecce homo left me in a trance. I am giving you this chart of my preoccupations to give you some idea of the "dispersion" which was then my life. Although I continued to be interested in everything, my attention was dedicated to seizing a kind of reality of which I only knew one thing at that moment: that there was a silence which spluttered and one which preceded the word, and that the former silence was more than the latter (Book V I I B , p. 4). 1 2 5 . There is the story of an artist who decided to be silent because he felt that his art was judging him. What judgement was there? When in the name of joy you say no to the Day of Judgement, and the Day of Judgement happens, there are two possibilities: either you were wrong about man, or about God. Let us make this clear: the eyes of the saints painted by Raphael were targets for the arrows of the Germans, turned by Luther into fanatics and by Charles VI into pawns, and yet Raphael did not have to kill anyone to save his art. German boorishness won the day, as had, earlier, the hordes of Arminius against Varus's legions, which Augustus mourned as he rambled through his palace. Clement V I I was constrained to retreat in Castel Sant'Angelo and the Renaissance came to an end. On one of the days of Leo X ' s pontificate, two messengers dashed into the Curia, demanding entrance to the pope. They were both received at once: one brought the news of the religious

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dissidence of an obscure Dominican monk, Luther, and the other news of Raphael's death. T h e former was dismissed at once, but Leo X burst into tears in front of the latter. 1 2 6 . Art means, above all, a certain type of man. It has been said that Raphael was killed by a surfeit of love. Renaissance comes to an end when the people capable of loving it disappear. Saving a work of art means saving, in effigy, that humanity for which that work of art brings salvation. Sartre put it trenchantly, with that genius specific of partiality: before a starving child, literature has no value. It so happens, however, that each man is less than the paradigm in the name of which he lives. T h e life of a starving child is not worth more than the life lost by those who saved the Venus de Milo from deportation in 1944. A work of art always lives from the life of those who are capable of understanding it. Apart from love, a work of art can offer nothing. In the same way, people can save each other only by loving. 1 2 7 . For many weeks on end, at the monastery of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, before the white wall, Andrei Rublev can paint nothing. Teophanes had said, "If Jesus had come once again upon earth, once again would they have crucified Him; it is not for people that I paint, I paint for God." During the pagan feast which he involuntarily watches, Rublev discovers an irreducible fact: the joy of the living body repressed through the violence of the doctrine. In spite of Teophanes the Greek's Pantocrators, he feels that he has no right to paint a frightening Last Judgement. However, the knez had blinded his master-builders, from the same jealousy which had driven Negru Voda to want Manole's sacrifice 29 . Rublev did have an example at h a n d of what it meant for a m a n to be cut off from his work and judged outside of it. In the absence of God, only art vouches for man. It is art which Nietzsche summoned, to save us from the havoc of truth. It is interesting that, faced with the white wall, the deaf woman's lumpish spirit gives way: she cries in front of the scribble which she herself is doing,

29 The Ballad of Master Manoie, one of the myths considered epitomical for the genius of the traditional R o m a n i a n culture, in which M a n o i e and his nine masons, after erecting the most extraordinary monastery yet seen—which had d e m a n d e d the sacrifice of M a n o l e ' s beloved wife, Ana—are left by legendary ruler N e g r u Voda, the commissioner of the work, to die on the church's roof, for fear they would then go and build its like, or better, elsewhere (translator's note).

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in coal black. T h e reaction to this befuddlement, which goes through one of Luke's eight blessings, comes as a Last Judgement of joy. T h a t particular appeal for abrogating resentment is gorily sanctioned by the horrors of the Tartar invasion. From the devastated church, with its ravished frescoes, Rublev saves one human being, by killing another; he saves the woman with the feeble mind and then wanders off in silence. Two things need to be mentioned: 1) the saved witness is mad, and she is saved through a crime; 2) the witness who is not mad refuses to bear witness, forcing himself to silence, whilst the mad witness is estranged from those she has been saved from. Whilst granting man the joy that he did not deserve, Rublev feels he is estranged from God and betrayed by men. When he no longer paints for men, Rublev refuses to paint for God. For an artist, silence means precisely that the art for which he lived has exhausted its assurance. 1 2 8 . (Now, when I truly have something to say, I can say it no longer. Just as in my childhood, but for different reasons, everything now accelerates and becomes jumbled, although not dim. As I come nearer to what I am, the excess of my own self invades me. Everything is too clear to be really well understood, and the key which I thought to discover in my life is certainly a false one. Just like a ladder which leads nowhere and which is not a ladder in the first place, the key which opens all doors does not really fit any of them, at least as long as you are alive. W h e n you understand everything, the only thing that you are still fit for is dying. M o r e often than not, however, you do not understand everything, there is a rest and so life lives on in you, made limpid in the brilliance of the enigma which has remained hidden and which is, by suspending consequence, its true foundation.) 1 2 9 . Why is Rublev silent? D o not forget that his silence, which is deliberate, parallels the silence of the feeble-minded woman, which is imposed. Besides, that Last Judgement of joy which will be destroyed by the Tartars together with the Church and with all who had found refuge in it, had been the outcome of a dispute with Teophanes, his master, of a revelation of joy, and also of an urge which was valid as a warning: the scribble (announcing Pollock) which the feeble-minded woman made on the pristine wall. See the image of the two contrary pristine states, face to face, as in a mirror, one which precedes the work, the other, which is still innocent and yet which already announces the evil outbursts of stupidity. There is the fact that the young Tartar Khan

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is not sensitive to the images of feasting—had the idea of feasting been deserved by men, it would not have failed to speak to him, no matter how alien religious representations might have been. Moreover, the jealous brother of the knez, the one who played the traitor in summoning the Tartars, is himself insensitive to the appeal of joy: he watches the slaughter of his kind and the defiling of his religion without batting an eyelid. Of course, art is helpless: it can at best better the good but yet can never turn an evil man into one who abjures his evildoing. For the sake of this humanity—innocent only by chance and possessed by a deceptive charm closely interwoven with the subterraneous sources of stupidity and wickedness—this humanity embodied in the woman whose silence is befuddling and whose intelligence stammers, Rublev accepts the exchange of Karma: to save a man, one must kill another. After all, the solution which Rublev offered to the disputes with Teophanes the Greek is a simple one: he renders God's justice to Teophanes, and the justice of painting, to man. Teophanes had said, instead, "Evil has nestled in man; to destroy it is to strike people, also." What is art which gladdens an unworthy human specimen? Derision, against which Rublev comes abjuring and annulling. Rublev is silent because art is strong for the artist only. 1 3 0 . This film, which does not contain explicit images of the sky, is flooded by light, measureless and serene. Its subject is flying. T h e first image is that of Efim trying to fly. T h e film then goes on to suggest again and again Rublev's efforts of flying, with such means as his art provides. Andrey Tarkovsky's film is traversed by the obsession with flying: there is the image of the murdered singing bird, under the horses' hooves, in the dust—with its counterpart, the blinding of the masterbuilders—and there is the torn body of the dead swan, in which Foma, Rublev's apprentice—he who will be killed by an arrow in his back— rummages with a wooden stick; then there are those big birds, in their ghostly flight on the night of pagan celebrations, the same as the white geese which hover forcibly and timorously over the crowd which is being butchered by the Tartars. When silence comes the images of flying disappear, condensed in that tellurian begetting of a flight which is the image of the huge bell—imposture and daring—being built. Do note that the shape of the bell is that of two angel's wings arrested in their flight and joined. All those images of flying haunt the film, and it is they, above Rublev's biography, which give it its true coherence. All those images of flying, side by side, will be merged into the universal image

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of a divine white bird, open wings soaring, girdled by a circle of ochre and gold: it is the triad of the Old Testament, painted by Rublev after his silence was raised, when flight was finally found again. The iconic subject of Tarkovsky's film is in the frescoes at the end. The method in which they are rendered is the same as the manner in which the film reveals its contour: paint is removed touch by touch, to the white canvas, and then onwards, to the hand which paints and to the soul which thinks. And beyond—there is God. 131 . When I first saw that film it was in May, 1978. It was on at the Doina cinema. The impact which it had on me was immense. During that same week, I saw it five times. I took self-indulgence to such lengths that I went and saw it twice on the same day. I would take a book of notes with me and write in it, in the dark, scraps of dialogue, observations, signs and visual symbols of the enigma which kept me under the spell of that piece of work. It did not take me long to understand that Tarkovsky was speaking about me and that Andrei Rublev was myself. I felt that the essence of what I was lay in that film and also that through it, provided that I understood it, I would also understand my life. What I believed was not wrong: except in the sense that the effects are not immediate. The filming technique in the last sequence of the film, with those gradually disappearing, inward moving, touches of paint, induced me to conceive a metaphysics of sight which haunted me for a very long time afterwards (I found it again, much later, in Benvenuto da Imola and I was, after that, able to recognise it in Dante, too). I owe to it the inspiration for the first poem "with an epic" which I wrote, in July, 1978, entitled "Redemption of Sight through the Unword" 3 0 and dedicated to Andrei Rublev. You would be right to believe that, in the wake of Anton Dumitriu, I also found that essence (eidos) unfailingly contained in sight (veidos). The inner mutation effected then, I see clearly now; Tarkovsky had been my chance to discover a way of existing in art which was truly and unmistakably mine. It did not take long before the sign of change was seen: in 1978 I completely stopped writ-

30 T h e word (Rom.

necuvint)

is a coinage belonging to the leading R o m a n i a n poet of m o d -

ernist persuasion Nichita Stanescu ( 1 9 3 3 - 1 9 8 3 ) , whose creative obsession was t r a n s c e n d ing the conceptual n a t u r e of the word and recuperating the loss of n o n - c o n c e p t u a l thinking that occurs with the use of words; the umvords—words

that go beyond words—are the

attempt to bridge that gap, with such m e a n s as poetry, as quest for t r u t h , has

note).

(translator's

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ing occasional verse and since then have written only long poems and cycles (with a plot either implicit or developed). 1 3 2 . When I saw Andrei Rublev again, this summer (1987), I knew that its formative role, in respect of my own life, had ceased. I found everything in that film, once more, was exactly the way in which I would have done it myself had I been Tarkovsky. I watched it with true aesthetic joy and yet that was all; I found in it nothing that I did not know before. As soon as they are assimilated, works of art leave the stage of life to enter the m u s e u m circuit of aesthetics (where they die, if they do not find again a way to ignite immediate life passion in live flesh). Passions die through identification, if they were ever yours. They die through resentment, if they have refused themselves to you, or if they were forbidden (resentment, in this case, will be aimed at some other object). With your passions you do not live, you burn. In order to live with them, you have to kill them, or they have to be torn away. 1 3 3 . Nineteen seventy-eight, 1979 and even 1980 are years which bring back to mind all those exertions by which I was trying to build up a tightly knit, ethical meditation. To hold one's intelligence as courage and one's stupidity as cowardice, that was the beacon of my thinking at that time. I would feed on Unamuno, on Berdyaev, or on Solzhenitsyn. I would side with a Luxemburg and Liebknecht against Lenin. Speaking in general, I sought to save the purity of ethics from the crushing opposition which I could see how an immoral efficiency, glorifying the indifference of means, would put up against it. At eleven, I had been irreversibly traumatised by the invasion of Czechoslovakia and by Jan Palach's self-inflicted end in flames. They say that the heroes of one's adulthood are fashioned after those of one's childhood. If this be so, it follows that Tintin, Teddy Ted or Bob Mallard never really impressed me. T h e only heroes which I remember—and the reason I do is that I once wished to be like them—are Corto Maltese and Constantin Chiri^a's boys and girls, Cire§arii, if you take them as one soul. T h e memory of Jan Palach, instead, sends shivers up my spine even today. It is like a destiny which could be my own and which I can feel lurking out there for me. T h e imperative of ethics might well have come, in my case, from fear, a fear which anticipated its own torture. It may be that I detested torturers and executioners simply because I felt terror at the thought of tortures and executions. Whatever the truth, my ethics have all my life spoken for a conviction of the viscera, while my aesthetics,

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at a somewhat more superficial level, for a conviction of the heart. One thing must not be left unsaid here: fear of torture is not to be mocked on the grounds that it is self-love; its mechanisms reach much deeper and its enigma may well be unfathomable. Physical courage is the foundation of all justice, the justice of the judge and that of the judged. It is, however, a very hackneyed thing to say that only the human being who has risen above his or her self-indulgence has physical courage. Malraux was indisputably a man of great physical courage and yet he admitted—and an act of courage that was, also—that no one could know whether he or she would resist torture. This is why we are left in the dark as to what there is which rises above the pressure of torture in a human being; fear of torture is something else than mere egoism and, I have said before, it is unfathomable. It is one with the profound sense of integrity of the self, something which struck roots in us as soon as we stood upright. Uprightness may be served vitally by gluteus maximus, but it is clearly not reducible to the latter. 1 3 4 . By the time I was twenty-one, I had come to the conclusion that everyone must write his own books (I had, as yet, written none), and without engaging any literary scruple in it: I exist and the world exists, that is all. T h e sole criterion was the intensity of my encounter with the world. At the bottom of it all Unamuno's words rang clearly in my mind: any cultivated man is either a dilettante or a pedant: you must choose. My deep instinct turned to pleasure, to being in love, to dilletto. I was later to offer an apologia for the dilettante. F o r the time being I saw in the vocation of being in love the repudiation of square-toed work and of pedantry: most of all, I resisted the idea of "speciality". O f course, I have always prized precision in one's statements and clarity in one's learning. I remember that, at the time when I was twelve years or so old, Cristi Ocro§ and I would challenge each other in the street to quizzes on verbatim quotations. (He would get the better of me every time.) I wanted my "speciality" to be that of living intently. Culture, naturally, was the field from which I reaped and stored the most significant load of intensities which the experience of intelligence could possibly give me. T h e meaning of Pope's famous " T h e proper study of mankind is m a n " had to be tailored then to suit my understanding of culture as, rather, the experience of a certain way of being in the world than as museion of humanity. Besides, the dislike for the callousness of museums has always been with me. Everything which cannot become life will pass into nothingness; and everything which has never been life

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does not deserve to live. Life is a dignity higher than any of its manifestations: for man, it is the very form of eternity. I also understood that physics is not a profession, but a certain way of looking at life; in other words, I knew it to be an instrument of knowledge, and its value to lie not so m u c h in the technology bound to emerge from it as in that distinction which m a d e Bishop Bellarmin a finer epistemologist than his opponent, Galileo Galilei. Being cultivated is not a profession, just as classic philology falls short of the mark when it does not yoke a spiritual geology to its linguistic archaeology. T h e reason why that happens is that the g r a m m a r of a language does not contain merely the rules for generating well-formed statements, but also the totality of what can be t h o u g h t employing it. W h e n it comes to classical languages at least, G r e e k is not merely a way in which something can be said, but, and before anything else, a f o r m in which the experience of thinking is being lived. T h e r e is n o doubt about von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff being a great Hellenist, but the groundbreaking orientations of Erwin R o h d e come from Nietzsche, and not f r o m the learning of the great Hellenist. T h e attacks launched on Nietzsche by the famous Hellenist of strict observance are quite notorious. To go beyond your own narrow contour and give a meaning to "speciality" means to cement yourself to one of the great fountains of spiritual living which give the soil of culture a soul. T h e god does not live in the temple, nor does m a n in culture: however, the god does at times descend into the Holy of Holies, while m a n forever lives in that root which implants culture into firm ground. This being the truth, even von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff himself, for all his classics-nourished Greek, could exclaim, speaking of Paul's Epistles, "At last the Greek language communicated a spiritual experience ardent and alive." In culture you do not run into M a n but into his simulacra, as Odysseus in the C i m m e r i a n realm: wandering shadows, eidola, the souls of the already dead. Etpraetera nihil... 1 3 5 . T h e essence of man is survival: he is all that he cannot forget, should he forget all. On the other hand, from the point of view of knowledge, there is nothing except your will to found what has taken the shape of certitude inside you. Certitude precedes truth and, although it does not prove it, it sets the grounds for it. In the last resort it is also apparent that m a n has the vocation of his failures. Although, on the other h a n d , one must not forget that it is not by the weaknesses which he shows that it is right to judge a man, but only by those which he cannot

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defeat. T h r e e lemmas result from this: 1) if you cannot b e c o m e better, it still lies within your power to force politeness; to the cynicism of evil I prefer, under all circumstances, the hypocrisy of goodness; as for one's internal standards, to have quality is to perceive evil as vulgarity; 2) to lack respect is to judge a m a n by values which are foreign to his internal make-up; 3) humility is the revelation of what is objective. You will, if you please, attach the following explanatory codicil to the above: the importance of history lies in the contingency that paradise is destined to no one; the importance of man lies in the fact that paradise exists. You have here, in a nutshell, the essence of what I was, starting from 1978, the essence of what I still am today, in 1987: less than sure of what drives me, b u r n t and ragged in places, like a broken wave withdrawing in tatters from the shore. T h a t wave will not find its m o o n again. H o w shall I express this? I know that from here there is no escape and yet I go on with it. And I do not go on from a kind of indolence, but always glad and always in pain, equally, both glad and in pain. M y only hope lies in the fact that I fail to understand what is at the b o t t o m of this joy, a joy which can be described adequately only in terms of a mystique of light. We do, from habit, understand only those things which have exhausted their purpose. To understand means, in a way, to bury. T h e inexplicable quality of this joy I call transcendence. T h e r e is no reason for me to be happy, and I do not deserve this happiness. It does, nevertheless, exist and, the Lord be praised, it is always given to me as a gift. T h e inexplicable foundation of this joy I call G O D . If you feel the peace with which I am filled, the kind which comes not from solving the enigma but f r o m accepting it, it means that the portrait I have drawn of me is also of you. More so than if I had talked about you, you are, as I am, to be f o u n d in the signs written on paper which we have b o t h gone through. 1 3 6 . Engaged as I now am in this written scrutiny of my progress, in the way in which it has emerged in my consciousness, I know what risk I am taking: I might reach my goal and contrive to explain everything. If this should happen, there will be no arithmetical remainder and the being, thus explained, will already be dead; it will mean that the mission which first inspired it will be totally exhausted at that very m o m e n t . If there is such a remainder, this will simply mean that (contrary to my very best intentions) I have been unable to say all there was to be said, and that the being in whose n a m e I live still abides in me. As in the

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essay on Radu Petrescu, the problem is that of your work versus your redemption. Will I write something accomplished at last, or, in my own unaccomplished state, will I begin to search again? T h e law of life will be this: when I am at my weakest, I am at my strongest; the m a d m a n puts the wise m a n to shame; to secure your life, you must lose it. W h e n will the waste of my life be able to overcome the loss of what I am? 1 3 7 . Between May 26th and July 14th no book was recorded and no thought written down: I was studying for my exams. After that came Nicolae Breban's Bunavestire (The Annunciation)^1, which I read pencil in hand. In a short while I devoured all the other novels by this author, seduced by his Nietzschean streak. Until late S e p t e m b e r I read c o m plete works, Lukacs and T h o m a s M a n n (that was the s u m m e r when Drago§ pronounced me out of my mind). Before going to Cochirleni (for the obligatory practical experience session in agriculture) I m a d e plans to reread all of Blaga's philosophy from beginning to end; at that time I also had a failed contact with Aristotle's minor treatise De anima. In the train taking me to Cernavoda, I turned over in my mind, with some irritation, the notion that this absurd forced labour would all but ruin the huge appetite for study which I thought I had. To punish myself, I had only brought one book with me, one which I had come across before, although unsuccessfully: this was Erich Auerbach's masterpiece, Mimesis. 1 3 8 . I had known nothing of a u t u m n , or of Greekness in its natural state, until I saw the village of Cochirleni. Next to Andrei Rublev, this was the second crucial experience of the year 1978. Cochirleni is an unremarkable settlement, not far from Cernavoda, on the right bank of the D a n u b e , straggling along valleys of low placid hills which looked, to my eyes, as if made of dust and chalk. I knew it in the way that it was between September 20th and October 6th that year. Whilst the village itself may have been unremarkable and the people banal, both nature and the season were majestic. T h e area is good for wine growing, and every hillside is covered with vine terraces. T h e Greekness of the place is not immediately apparent. One afternoon, when the sun had already 31 N i c o l a e B r e b a n (b. 1 9 3 4 ) , R o m a n i a n w r i t e r of p s y c h o l o g i c a l fiction, a u t h o r of Aiiima/e Donjuán

bolnave

(Sick Animals),

(translator's

note).

Ingerid de gips (The Plaster Angeí),

Bunavestire,

Francisca, Amphitryon,

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fallen obliquely below the clouds, setting and truly sanctifying everything over which he set 3 2 ,1 went up a narrow, dusty path which climbed between two rows of vines. I was heading for the top of a hill which was the twin of another, the two separated by the ravine along which I was walking. I had the feeling that I knew all this so well, the dust, the heat, the leaves scorched by the sun and left to rustle, paper-like, under the fingers of the wind which stroked their seared edges, the grass marked by footsteps, the silence itself, so much akin to the water-meadows of Amaradia. It all reminded me of my grandparents' village, when I was a child. There was a spot where the ravine first sank a little and then rose more steeply only to open up behind a dam set, fantastically, on the very top of the hill. In the sunken spot, where the shadows of darkness could no longer be kept at bay by the stray tongues of the sun, the calm stillness of the leaves was polluted by a vibrating, pungent buzzing. An improbably numerous swarm of green shiny flies, mingled with some grey, hairy specimens, slower in flight, were busy devouring the carcass of a horse, its belly torn open in a vilely gaping wound. The carcass did not seem older than two days. Its legs stood stiff, parallel with the ground: its beautiful sensitive nose was now grimy with the dust which also coated the changed glimmer of the eyes. But for the buzzing of the flies, this grand cadaver would have been scarcely noticeable. It was not hidden, and the leaves did not bury it: it lay on the path, as large as life, but the shades with which death had draped it made it one with the path, and the rot gnawing at it had already started mingling it ever so slowly with the dust. I drew nearer to chase away the flies, an absurd gesture. I do not know whether I was sorry for the murdered beast: instead, I shamefully felt the terror which one feels in front of a corpse, the terror which I was fated to know once again at my father's wake, on his first night as a dead man. In fact, not only did the flies not give in, they did not even budge: a fraction of them, enraged, surrounded me. Their loathsome little feet planted themselves on my body and the skin of my face was defiled by their dirty, aggressive, predatory flight. I felt that cadaver marks had been left on my body. I am not ashamed to this day to confess the fear which I felt under the attack of those angry flies. With the feeling that I was still haunted and chased, I went to the top of the hill, which, as I said earlier, was only

32 In R o m a n i a n , a metaphorical p u n based on the phonetic closeness between a sfin;i, "to sanctify", and a asfimi, "to set" (of sun) (translator's note).

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a short way ahead. There I shivered for minutes on end, horrified and queasy, spitting and shaking myself. It is reported that Nunez de Balboa, the first man whose eyes ever embraced both oceans which border the Americas, ascended the peak where he sighted that extraordinary vista after a bloody battle. My lungs were still filled with the foetor of the corpse and my skin still shrivelling from the loathsome memory of the flies' feet, when, turning my eyes to the view, I was left in wonder. For a Christian, accustomed to feel the sacred in the vertical closed spaces of cathedrals, to feel the sacred sharply, in an unforeseen and total revelation, in open space and in Greek-like amphitheatre tiers is totally improbable. However, without ever having been to Greece, I had the certainty, supported by nothing whatsoever, that I now saw for the first time an authentically Greek piece of land, and I mean by this a place both ancient and Greek at the same time. Large tracts of foliage unwrapped themselves gently at my feet, cut in generous arcs, which closed and were then followed by the curves of yet another hill, springing from the last, naturally and harmoniously like the breasts of a woman from the line of the neck or from the prolongation of the stomach rising to the breast bone. T h e r e was something ineffably erotic about the place and, at the same time, despite the calm and the serenity of so mild an essence, there was something severe and archaic, asleep from ages past, which still spoke, like the unfinished face of Queen Nefertiti, of the passion a m a n had had for that body, a man to whom that beauty had been a trance. So was this place: one missed those ceremonies which the landscape I was contemplating spellbound seemed made for. I saw then distinctly the procession of maidens going along the valley and I heard the cries of the corybantes dwindling in the distance. I cannot tell whether I saw that receding procession in a way which was oracular or, closer to my own mind, straightforwardly ocular. I would remember that procession after exactly one year, when I wrote 'Apvcoaxcp 0£(p. Nothing stirred around me in those moments, the air was as hard as stone. It seemed as if a god had cut off this plot of land, leaving aside only me, who contemplated it, whilst he plunged it into the age to which it belonged by right. It bore an impress of sacredness which I could, vaguely, recall and which gave me the feeling that I had lived it before. When? I felt that I had to kneel or cross myself. However, when, to communicate my veneration, I tried to make the sign of the Christian cross on my chest, I understood that the symbol I sought to employ was a bastard one in relation to the world which was revealed to my eyes. W h a t I saw came from before Jesus

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Christ and could bear only an embarrassed connection with Christian revelation. 1 3 9 . T h e n , the m o m e n t that I became aware of the inadequacy of the cross, I remembered where I had been through a similar feeling. I was a child of about nine or ten on a summer holiday in the countryside. That s u m m e r the r u m o u r went round that wandering Gypsies had camped among the bends of Amaradea, with the clear purpose of stealing children. My grandmother was apprehensive about my playfulness, which drove me every morning from daybreak to scour the wild places, all on my own. I only returned around lunchtime, p r o d d e d by hunger and wrecked by exhaustion. River meadows with young poplars, the kind with two-coloured leaves, pliable and wet to the touch, and to the ear, too, like maize silk not yet burnt in the sun—I loved to go through them and gambol in them, especially early in the morning, when the heat was still sweet and the water had not yet caught that foul marshy smell which any river in the plains starts to exude when the water becomes warm. T h a t morning I had been wandering around, I had climbed up to Macedonski's mansion house, drunk chilled water f r o m the almost deserted fountain of the White Church, sprawled on the cool stones of unweeded graves and crushed many juicy plants between my lips since, next to their smell, I also loved to try their taste. I was already tired, and it was almost lunchtime, when I strayed into one of my favourite water-meadows, intending to rest there for a while, before heading for home. There was not the shadow of a ghost around, and I felt pregnant with elation at that boundless freedom which childhood alone knows, or, later in life, happiness alone. I laid myself down on one side, almost fully recumbent, in a patch of tall grass. My eyes were level with the tips of the blades: I could see their slight throbbing, which was their response to the exertions of the wind. T h e meadow was almost circular: the place had probably been cleared on purpose, for it was strewn with the felled trunks of poplars too young to feed a fire. Here and there, vigorous offshoots sprouted young and fresh from the dead stumps. Blue dragonflies went past the two-coloured leaves silently, in precise dance-like vaults, wiping off their fine dust like bees wiping their pollen-carrying feet on their wings. T h e sky was high and blue, eminently pure and clean. T h e stillness of those places was that of the grove: leaves were rustling, bumble-bees were buzzing, insects were swarming, the wind was hissing, the earth was breathing. I felt very hot, all of a sudden. At about the same time all the natural noises of the grove seemed to remain

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quiet for one instant, and then a silence so complete, so opaque, descended, as if all the sounds had been sucked into the earth. It was a material silence, a heated one; I felt that I was in a walled space vaulting up, under a pressure which grew slowly and inexorably. T h e form in which I felt that pressure was that unlikely silence. It almost crushed my eardrums: the air "grew", leavened by an invisible presence which terrified me. T h e tension, built up in every blade of grass, was on the verge of exploding, and yet it did not explode, it just grew, endlessly. W h e n I stood up and saw the stony stillness around me, I felt a terror bordering on insanity beginning to invade me. At that very instant, the wind started to blow out of the blue, as if somebody had just granted it permission to do so again: the leaves twisted violently, as if hit by a tremendous mass of air, before I could hear their rustle. T h e n I felt sure that I heard jumbled voices, covered at times by shouts and by the sounds of shrill flutes far away, or, rather, just about to fade away. I knew that they were the Gypsies who had come to kidnap me and I felt despair seizing me by the throat: I ran off, staggering, helpless as I was. From the coppice, the path led up to a neighbour's cornfield: he was fiddling with a broken cart. I went past him like a storm, without bidding him good day, which surprised him greatly: when I looked back to see whether the Gypsies were on my trail, all that I could see was the old man, looking after me reproachfully. It was not easy to try to explain to grandma what had brought me to that state I was in. I was trembling from top to toe and shaken by fits of hysteria. That summer I had also killed several chickens with arrows made out of grandma's cart needles, and I was wild and unruly—something I remained until I grew up— and so grandma was strengthened in her simple conviction that the son of her eldest daughter had something wrong in his upper storey and should be seen by doctors. 1 4 0 . I soon forgot all about the incident, absorbed as I was, at that time, by the extraordinary wealth of tricks which I invented. In Cochirleni, instead, as I watched how the rows of vines gave the hills contours which made them resemble the regularly retreating tiers of a Greek amphitheatre, as I saw the procession of maidens and heard the cymbals of the corybantes, I understood the significance of the fear which I had known long before and which now came back to my memory. I remember that the time was close to noon, the hour of the smallest error and of the excess of light. It was all so simple! I had been seized with terror

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because, without knowing it, I had gone through the Panic hour, the hour of Pan. I had witnessed an epiphany of the god taking place before my eyes, the eyes of a frightened child. There was no Gypsy in the picture: the god had been there, it was so simple, and I had felt him, because I was clean. In the same way, at that late hour of the evening, I was granted another insight into the intimate core of those pagan designs, long since stored away in the obsolescent rooms of history. I would later find the same idea that the old gods are still alive, in out-of-the-way places or in exile, with E. M. Forster, in a short story of his about a fawn lost in the harsh climate of England, drained of his strength and cutting a poor figure in one of the thinned-down forests of that country. 1 4 1 . It is significant to me that the first revelation was one full of life and force, whilst the second, Cochirleni, was one of the end, of its melancholy. In the first I had felt the terrific presence of the god, and in the second only his going away, his serene and yet nostalgic withdrawal from the living, and it is true, also, that this happened after I had run into the devastated corpse of a royal symbol of power and seen that grim sight. Down there, a dead horse; up there, at the top, a world which, serene, gathered its own destruction. 1 4 2 . However, the real wonder of Cochirleni lay elsewhere, and meant something else. Each morning we woke up, very reasonably, at seven. We ate at our leisure, and then, after eight, we went uphill towards the vineyards where we were supposed to pick the grapes. The path was guarded by poplars with already thinning leaves, which never stopped swishing even though there was no wind. We walked on yellow gravel, which was fine and restful, raising no dust. This swished, too, when we stepped on it, and the two streaks of sound, of the earth and of the vegetable kingdom, united overhead, in a light heavy with all the gold which was in it, dripping as if from a late Byzantine icon—the gold slightly turning into red, serenity into recollection, calmness into resignation, and movement itself into the One which is Still. As always with essences, you could not, faced with the almost painful concentration of that landscape, know from where it oozed, and what it was which distilled it so exquisitely. If you opened your mouth to breathe, you felt that the air which was there fed you and that it could be chewed. A truly spiritual materiality levitated in everything, which anyone not possessing truly intelligent senses cannot understand. We arrived at last among the rows of vines. Here we were told that we

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had to pick the bunches and yet what fell then into our hands was sheer light, merely in the shape of round grapes. The grape had received all the sun of a whole summer under its translucent skin and was now returning it to the sky in the shape of the autumn. It was heavy and greenish-yellow, heavy with all the scents of new wine, autumn's very own. A beauty on the verge of fading and yet still so full, so proud, so attractive! The experience of grape-picking was almost sexual. Many times, whilst picking, I felt an excitement. Where did that incredible femininity come from? When I met the men at the end of the row, I felt ashamed. It was clear that something "unconfessable" took place between the rows, but what was it? Rationally speaking, the fact is that I have always had "mysterious" spiritual connections with women older than myself. With almost every one of my teachers of Romanian, starting with the marvellous Mrs Baraschi, I had what the French call une amitié amoureuse, an enamoured friendship. Things could go quite far (yet not all that far). The meaning behind that eludes me, however. Die cur hie. The most beautiful short story which I ever wrote (in April 1981) was dedicated precisely to such an unconfessable love. When, in 1982,1 read Anthologia Palatina, I needed to take more time to ponder over the funereal epigrams and those celebrating woman at the beginning of her autumn. Chalaos was intended as a poem dedicated to that mystery. The Nights and Listening to Death both contain heartfelt eulogies to the autumnal woman. The origin of that instinct is unknown to me, and yet it has manifested itself in me more times than I can remember. When I wrote The Feeling of Autumn (1978), an essay and a poem, it was in my mind. I can vouch that in Cochirleni I knew once more, among the grapes, that late woman who is the archetype of my erotic sensibility. She was in the air and in the body of the earth. She was in the grass and in the light-preserving grapes which I crushed, voluptuously slow, between my lips, as if kissing them against my palate and embracing them with my inner body, with my entrails, and with my chest. 1 4 3 . During those days I seemed to be under a spell. Everything was impregnated with that mysterious and ineffable feminine presence, which came from the same pagan kingdom as the gods of vegetation who had terrified me as a child. I have mostly spoken of the sweetness of the air, but there was definitely more to it than that. The alluvia of a gory age could be felt in that presence, and the zest for life, and the field, and death, all breathed through her beauty. That feeling brought me again to the late poetry of Cesare Pavese, that first master of my

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adolescence. He alone had known to relate woman to the earth, black soil and red, with the sea, and with the vine; her blood with damp dust, her silence with the heat of weeds, and her sight with bitter silt and the earth. Pavese had said of woman that she was like the hoarse voice of the field, that her season was darkness and silence and, in all, like dust and like death she was. Verrà la morte e verrà i tuoi occhi. O f course, of course. Why did I not know that I knew? All those beings whom I have ever loved remain in me until the Day of Judgement. T h e reason why I loved them is that they had long been living in me, long before understanding could account for it. What I call mystery is perhaps a piece not yet complete of that destiny which leads me. Everything which has not happened to me yet, and which I have loved, will happen, and everything which I have loved will forever return, without respite, in me. With an oblique intention, Marinescu told me a few evenings ago that I was more and more like my idols (he was referring to Malraux). I f this is indeed so, it means that I have been worthy to love them, and that my love is requited. 1 4 4 . We returned from the hill at around 2 p.m., ate in a reasonable establishment, and then I would read from Auerbach until about six, alone or surrounded by friends. Everything went on in a wonderful calm, just as in a monastery. Around sunset, I would go for a walk on the banks of the D a n u b e or take some unknown path into the hills around, at random; everywhere I went, autumn was with me; alive, beautiful, enveloping, secret, hot, lascivious, and pure. At night I would find it again, when walking through the vines to the place where the Greek amphitheatres stood, in the cold and mystic light of the moon. During the three weeks which we were forced to spend in Cochirleni, my involvement with autumn was total and unviolated. Seldom has life given me moments more beautiful. T h e extraordinary thing was that I felt that I was loved, with a love full of reassurance, encouraging me in my destiny. This feminine companion never ceased whispering to me, "You will always find me, whenever you remember, and I shall love you always; close your eyes, and you shall have me: I am in your body and in your flesh and you are mine, nothing can tear you from me; and I love you now and forever, my limpid bridegroom, you who are so tall and so thin..." When I left Cochirleni, I knew that my senses were richer than they had been when I came and that I was now permitted to see more of reality, and more deeply.

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1 4 5 . In Cochirleni I met Eugen Simion 3 3 , who spoke to us one evening about Cioran, and on another about Paris. He was astonished to find that students of physics (i.e. D o r u and myself) were interested in the humanities more intensely and radically than those who studied letters. H e then published an article about our encounter, which he somehow perverted, turning it into literature. I have never m e t him since, but his somewhat lymphatic elegance—quibbling and conceited, yet intelligent and full of charm—has clung to my memory. One day loan Alexandru 3 4 showed up also, spreading around him, like a paste, an air of laboured religiosity: a strain which cried out that its name was serenity. He talked about the white sacrifice, about Cleopa (it was then that I first heard of him), about the prayer of the heart, about the need of God's revelation, and about other matters, which have since faded from my mind. I was debating at that time very heatedly with Sorin the notion of the "curbing of the will". I have no idea what on earth we could have said about something like that, given the experience that we had. Two things I remember that impressed me about loan Alexandru: the suffering that I could see that faith involved, and his steadfast character. H e said to us, "Until the age of thirty, G o d makes to each man two signs; if the man has dignity, he will cling to one at least". An impertinent fellow from the Faculty of Letters stepped out of line with childishly atheistic remarks about his faith (his intervention was both ignorant and aggressive). loan Alexandru answered with great calm and dignity, " T h e sky is empty, indeed, but it is empty because it is broken: do we not feel the cold which comes in through there?" T h e time in Cochirleni ended en beauté with a student strike, which called for intervention by the chief party secretary of the county. 1 4 6 . W h e n I came back I turned my attention to Goya and read the most important monographs. T h e etchings fascinated me and provoked me to comment on them, and comment I did, with passion. I outlined a biography and a catalogue of the works. In connection with Goya, I rediscovered two of the favourites of my adolescence, Ortega y Gasset and Malraux, the latter with his sensational Saturne—Essai sur Goya.

33 Eugen Simion (b. 1933), reputed Romanian literary critic, author of a m o n u m e n t a l m o n o graph, Romanian

Writers of Today, in five volumes (translator's note).

34 loan Alexandru ( 1 9 4 1 - 2 0 0 0 ) , traditionalist, rural and religious poet, author of Hymns of Love (1991), and The Fall of the Walk of Jericho, or the Truth about the Revolution (translator's

note).

(1993)

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Goya m a d e me discover one of my essential themes of meditation, the distinction between infatuation and love, which I theorised upon in my essay, Commentary on the Two Majas. Moreover, I made Cayetana the main persona in the poem Chalaos, a corruption of the Spanish chalados, people madly in love. T h a t was what the children of Madrid used to shout after the first of the king's painters and the thirteenth Duchess of Alba. Goya's etchings are essential if you wish to understand my imaginary. Without an intimate acquaintance with Disasters of War, the explanatory title of Listening to Death II (Vox et praetera nihil) are incomprehensible. I then wrote one more essay about La lechera de Burdeos. Following the imaginary of terror, I devoted myself for a while to G e r m a n etchings also, but this encounter was nowhere near as fecund as the one I had with Goya. Ironically, I alternated the deciphering of the Caprices with my Marxist studies. This only suggests that I had already hit upon the alternative to the humourless sobriety of those who did take Marxism for a science. T h e plainly ethical dimension, however, was missing. This obstinacy of believing in dialectic and historical materialism I was to encounter again, in my historical studies and only in G o r d o n Childe, but enough to make me lose patience with him. For the time being, I knew Talleyrand's truth instinctively, I knew that on fait les choses en ne les faisant pas. I am astonished now at the outpouring of short essays on ethical themes, in which I sought a conceptual way out for the "state of no exit". " N o t to act is to do everything more passionately" {idem, p. 16). I was manifestly substituting intensity for Marxist determinations. I sought to find a solution to the observation most at hand that one could make: I am in one world and think in another. Indeed, many of my friends were Nietzsche's admirers—I was his envier. I craved for suffering of any kind, provided that it involved not only certitude, but also quality, that qualite d'ame that Montherlant speaks of. Few things stir more revulsion in me than rudeness of the heart. Yet, the m o r e devoted I was to the values which make up individual quality, the more I rejected privileges b o r n out of singularities. I have never taken a kind view of talent. Was it because I h a d none? Whatever the t r u t h , I was looking for a solution to life which did not involve personal talent. T h e r e is a paradox here, insofar as all my attempts to create a h u m a n type suited to my will were based on intellectual and spiritual endowments which were not average. After his conversion, Sorin developed the habit of seeking out and deriding any intellection which was not canonically Christian. W h a t irritated m e

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most were his fits of impudent scorn aimed at the glorious minds of a Hamilton, Maxwell, Poincaré, or Heisenberg. Accustomed as I was to exalt limpidity of intelligence, wherever it shone, and with the figure of Christ being a secret vocation of my heart, I suffered at this gross enfeebling of life's meaningful diversity in which Sorin, w h o m I respected, saw the very gist of Christianity. Today I look u p o n those fits of anger fairly indulgently. After all, everyone is free to believe what he thinks best: God does not renounce His being just because His presence leads the sanctimonious astray. Anyone is allowed to believe what he pleases: as long as he does not kill. T h e r e are two ways of killing: the c o m m a n d m e n t is to withhold f r o m killing in no matter what way, and at no matter what price, and so I sought to bring together Hesychasm and q u a n t u m mechanics, not with the improper, intransitive methods of a Costa de Beauregard, but by making the integral experience of all possible content: patristic writings side by side with abstract formalisms (at the end of the day, these held an enormously strong grip on me). My ideal, at that time, was a Malraux with the spiritual attainments of a Nicephorus the Solitary, who would also be able to take in Pauli's matrix calculus or open himself to the charm of Hamiltonian formalism. 1 4 7 . In and around November, I read some of Mircea Eliade's novels, studied m o d e r n Greek poetry, made notes for an essay on Nichita Stànescu's metaphysics (who has escaped this plain error?), and laboured a little more over the old obsession I had—going back to the 12th form— with writing a philosophical interpretation of Sârmanul Dionis ( Wretched Dionis)35, based on Kant and Leibniz (I am no wiser today as to whether this thought is mere idiocy or not). I read L'Homme révolté with enormous satisfaction and was indignant as I perused Sartrean reactions to this book of exemplary quality and essential c o m m o n sense. T h e prevailing opinion these days, in sophisticated milieus, is that Albert C a m u s is an author for teenagers. I tend to believe, instead, that adolescence, although, in principle, incapable of objective geniality, is the only truly genial age, which is to say, genial in nature, not in expression. W h e n I hear such remarks, I choose to avert my eyes, with distaste: in whoever despises Camus there lurks a flaw of dignity, hidden somewhere. U n d e r -

3 5 O n e of t h e b e s t - k n o w n s h o r t stories by M i h a i l E m i n e s c u , dwelling in a r o m a n t i c m a n n e r on the philosophical t h e m e s of avatars, r e i n c a r n a t i o n , a n d t h e relativity of space a n d t i m e {translator's

note).

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standing C a m u s comes natural to any intelligent man; but remaining faithful to him calls for quality of the heart. In this respect, I am unchanged. Shall I add that I am rereading The Fruit of the Earth and that I can sense in Gide the screech of a slightly demagogical inspiration? In the course of time spent on this essay, my conviction has grown that, as one's reading expands, its individual parts shrink. 1 4 8 . I used to know for a fact once that, faced with any of the things later to prove important for me, my first reaction was invariably negative, shown by aggressive questioning. Was I trying to block any fascination which I unconsciously felt? I have been an independent man all my life and have only committed myself to passions where I felt myself to be the equal of the object of my admiration. A slave I have never liked to feel. This is probably the reason why I deliberated with some distaste whether I should kneel before Father Cleopa, and ended up not doing so, and yet I naturally and spontaneously offered this homage to Father Paisie, whom I loved openly, with no constraints of rite or custom. You are, when in love, always the equal of the loved one, which is the reason why love is an eminent school of dignity. Whatever the truth of the matter, the most notorious example (though not the only one) which I can bring to support the observation of how I am bound to react negatively to decisive things is the way in which I received Christianism. My quarrel with the religion of my forebears reached its climax in the essay The Negative. An Essay on Freedom (1978-1979), where I would argue the thesis that freedom did not exist for the Christian faced with the economy of the divine plans. I referred particularly to Judas, who did not seem to me to have chosen his act of selling the Saviour of his own free will. In essence, I think no differently today. What has changed, however, is the position of my soul: today I find it less important to commit an act of intellection on the margin of a failure to understand; it seems more important to me to suspend the failure in the light of intelligence steadfastly aiming at the heart—the understanding originating in a communion of living with bare intelligence still remains incomprehensible. A new horizon of thinking is thus released, which is no longer simply intellection but sets the exertions of the heart into a rhythm which belongs to thinking, a kind of thinking which in time becomes prayer. 1 4 9 . Christianity has imposed itself upon me via the figure of Christ, to which I am highly sensitive. Intellectually speaking, I place the Bhagavad-gita, in its letter, on the same level of profundity as the Gospels.

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Yet today I know, which I did not in former times, what the sacredness of a book is. The way the heart relates to the Gospels varies. Children perceive Christmas as a feast. Like them, I perceive the words of the Gospels as a sacrament of joy. I do not seek to ratiocinate on the accumulated dogmatics, although in the course of time I have acquired a certain theological background (I read theology just as I read philosophers): like children, I find in being a Christian the feeling of great joy and the certitude that the holiday has already started with us and that it will know no end. 1 5 0 . Whilst I was rapturous over Noica and Anton Dumitriu from the beginning, and they never disenchanted, Eliade stepped into my life by degrees, with no breaks nor bounds. I read him as an indifferent author and noticed myself one day using him as wisdom already mine. I assimilated him without sensing a revelation, like something natural and commonplace. The same happened with Montherlant, to whom I am under immense debt, inwardly. Out of the blue, I found that my experience would be couched naturally in his terms and (!) sensations. That was the sign that I could never from then on be separate from him, except after a separation from myself. Mahler I was slow to assimilate, I stumbled through him, whilst Pound, like Dante, was a fulgurant, overwhelming revelation. Malraux, in my adolescence, had been a rapture, and also Pavese, my first master. I find comfort in the thought that I have not betrayed my masters, despite the differences between them: my soul has been sufficiently rich to embrace them all together. Nietzsche, too, had thrown me into rapture. Towards Jankelevitch I rose more moderately, particularly helped by La More, and by that little gem entitled Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien. When He will call me to Him in my hour of Judgement and will ask me "Who are you?", I shall say to Him, "Let me tell You first whom I have loved; then I shall confess to You the people who have loved me, and in the end You will know who I have been." In truth, I believe that we are well expressed by those whom we have loved and those who have loved us. I see no other exit, save love, from the infernal circle. When you love, you no longer strive, you are exactly like those children at play. What was the age when I found out that "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free"? To know is a necessity. It is, however, a small thing. If the truth of the things that we think is not potent enough to go into the flesh which thinks it, and the flesh thereafter to transform itself, transfigured and yet still a body of the physical world, everything

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that we have done and shall go on doing is totally devoid of meaning. M a n must become a god whilst he is still alive; otherwise all is in vain, and he is not worth more than the dust to which he will return. T h e reason I am telling you all this, my dear friend, is to let you know what the hope is with which I live and strive to be found worthy of, in that effulgence which bathes both my face and yours. 1 5 1 . From my early adolescence it has stuck in my head that an authentic work is one which employs metaphors of the human condition that remain permanently

in the mind of the reader (James K n o w l s o n ) . In

the face of value, I have had to admit my inadequacy: I never remember anything. Everything that I seem to remember, I invent. There is a good example which I can give: I was once called up to the blackboard during a Latin lesson and asked for the third declension, masculine; I had learnt it during the break, a short while before; well, I could not recall a single thing. A kind of grey-coloured blur, streaked with bright lights, very intense, preventing me from concentrating, was the only material content of what I could remember. There were things that I did recall, it is true, but they had to do with the shape of the page which I had read, the type of the printed letters, or the sounds which I had heard whilst I was "learning", Finally, pouring out of this blur of non-remembering, there was the overpowering feeling that everything was just painfully ridiculous, my posture, the teacher's questioning, the class staring at me, the fact that I was holding a piece of chalk, etc. When I find myself unable to remember a thing I am invaded by the feeling that the situation in which I am put is not real and that I alone, emptied of any representation (the object of the act of remembering), am the only real presence in the world. I am, as a rule, intelligent. Such collapses, however, are a part of the very structure of my intelligence, which is never brisk without being at the same time extremely sensitive. The material fibre of my kind of intelligence often makes me opaque, and I have provided here only an instance of non-remembering when I desire to. There are other instances, of course, equally unflattering. What I want to make you see is how low lucidity can plunge when the bizarre organism of memory becomes flawed. To remember is to recapture the body which you have lost. The meaning I give this affirmation is a technical one: it refers to apocatastasis panton, to the restoring of all things, as indicated in Yasht 19.90. How am I to explain to myself the gaps of memory, this inferno of identity lost? It could be that lucidity is incapable of holding the reins

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of memory, ruled by more arcane laws, such as the one saying that whoever forgets his past is b o u n d to live it afresh, or else, that whoever masters the past masters the future as well. W h e n I speak of memory, I cannot leave intelligence out of the picture. I believe that a stupid man has no sense of memory. After all, even a dog remembers yesterday's bone, and thinks that the one which it had was better than any other. Although remembering is a miracle which transcends intelligence, the light in which m e m o r y finds its meaning again is given by intelligence alone. What I am saying is banal, and sounds like Proust. Tant pis. What I wish to make clear, with so ludicrous an outcome, is that the absence of memory renders the horizon of perception opaque and blunts intelligence. T h e failure to remember is not only a void filling the mental sphere, but also a distress of awareness, an aggressive-lethargic state of being in the dark. T h a t I fail to remember the third declension is secondary; what is important is that the local lapse of m e m o r y triggers something like a personality crash. When one does not remember, something in one becomes degraded. It is like death: something beyond control takes possession of one, as in an abduction, such as the water into which one has been thrown, blindfold and hands tied behind one's back. All the conditionings through which forgetting takes hold of you are consummated deaths, are Ariadnes resolving from an obscure caprice to deny us their love: let us have no doubt, somebody who is not loved is condemned to stay in the labyrinth forever. T h e monster, and the fight with it, is, perhaps, given only to the chosen. Even so, the accretion of these consummated deaths ends up annihilating you physically—and out goes your last breath. I sometimes imagine an eternity unbearable for one to go through, because it is created from the delays of waiting. A suspended redemption can be said to mean, amongst other things, this: death, or Ariadne, it does not matter which in the end, are preferable to the waiting which postpones punishment. W h a t punishment, you wonder? I was astonished to hear my mother claim once, with such self-assurance as verged on blasphemy, "I have no sin; if there is a God, I have no reason to fear." I had lived barely half as m u c h as she, and did not dare to represent redemption to myself. T h e r e is a sin even in the fact that I cannot remember the third declension when I want to. This imperfection is not venial, just as it is not a small sin to sleep when a decision to stay awake has been taken. On such peccadilloes we gamble our lives away, and life is not an indifferent occurrence. Why do I not remember everything? Why?

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1 5 2 . As much unremembering, as denial. Listening to Death contains references to Sumer and Egypt, to the Greeks and the Romans, to China, India, Japan, the Australians, and Europe. Why is Africa not present in my inquiries, why was I only too glad to leave pre-Columbia to palaeoastronautics? Why did I renounce my childhood when I began my long and unfinished initiation into culture? Now, you see, I am setting out again for yet another realm, although this time I am sure that I shall not, once I am there (but will I ever be?), burn the ships which have taken me over the waters. It is in the very pattern of this last departure that the antecedent is preserved. I am convinced that there is at least one fountainhead in my childhood that has not yet exposed its gushing mouth. To remember is to actualise the first creation: I ignore my cosmogony and suffer because of it. To memory—the light; to death—the ransom. Africa and pre-Columbia, however, have something to do with that first touch which I once had with the equivocal universe of revelation. It is clear to me that I am not yet ready to understand the first origin. I do understand the second, which I invented when I was fifteen in order to defeat the dereliction in which I was struggling. Yet why I lived the demise of my childhood in the form of a crisis, and why its universe is still opaque to me, and refuses itself to my memory, that I do not know. 1 5 3 . Written marks of my passage only exist, tenuously, starting with 1973 (with December, 1972, to be exact). I was fifteen at the time. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, I had gone through the crisis of voluntary abolition of my childhood's universe. Some time ago grandfather still kept a poem of mine which I had dedicated to him when I was fourteen. It was entitled " T h e Sun". In the sun the spirits of the dead gather, when they have been purged. Within the crust of fire there is the spiritual centre of the world, which gives life to the entire universe. T h e sun was once the central symbol of the vanished continent of MU, from which survived the pyramids of Egypt and Columbia. There will come a time when the spirit of fire, materialised in the rays of the sun, will settle into the dust of the earth and the dust will start to burn. In this fire, the true daughter of G o n d wana will be born by condensation, when Antarctica has floated upwards to the equator and restored the primordial southern continent. Next, the third remnant of the continent of M U will come into the open from the subterranes of the Himalayas when the pressure exerted on Asia by the continental block of India becomes so great that the sacred peak of

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the tallest mountain in the world shall reach into the heavens. Then will our race be extinguished and its place taken by a mulatto race: harmonious people, tall and lithe, capable of knowing things only by concentrating on them, endowed with all the faculties which the white race has been refining or preparing in the long historical anamnesis that she alone, of all the others, has been fit to carry through. This race of fire and water will signify the true return into the world of the soul of life, which the long yet necessary reign of the virile principle of activity had banished before the last ice age. From the white north the last Purusha will come, unearthed from the entrails of the Himalayas and nourished with the unthinkably rich dream of our nostalgic civilisation. From the black south the last daughter of Gondwana will come, brought back from the long all-encompassing forgetting which is like sleep and in which we still live, in spite of the darkness utterly devoid of dreams. The principle of the dreamer will be joined with the law of the one who does not know the light (because he is from it). The one who remembers by knowing will at last be redeemed from the one who knows by remembering. The former has been inventing things relying on his intelligence; once he invents a thing, he lives it out, again and again, because he is in a state of frenzy: this has been Europe's destiny. The latter has been remembering what he once lived, and has been able to remember everything, because he has lived everything: still, whoever has seen everything and its contrary cannot know what frenzy is, and this is the reason why he has remained withdrawn: this has been Asia's destiny. These two, together, make up the North. Yet there is another, different, destiny, that of the South: here M U is resuscitated through Gondwana, and Africa is saved in this way also, thanks to the maid descended from the sun. Africa is the darkness. Pre-Columbia is the presumption. We know everything, except for them. This may be because the future is now being born out of them, and the offspring cannot be known until the birth is over. The ignored term is MU: it will be the one thanks to which the Southern Hemisphere will turn to the Lodestar. The sun will unravel and the heat will stop. The present structure will perish, after it has first doomed itself to perdition. For nothing which has not renounced itself first will be renounced. From the sun the spirits of the dead will come out and with them the tapas that they have accumulated. T h e n the whole world will be one blaze. Time, too, will be like a soft breeze in spring when the air is sifted clean through the wet of rain and is infused with the fresh smell of branches, inside which, young and raw, the pallid sap of origins is throbbing.

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1 5 4 . In 213 B. C., Qin Shi Huangdi ordered that the Writings should be burned. In the 15th century A. D., the Lamaist sect which seized power in Tibet destroyed the whole corpus of canonical writings gathered by the former rulers. T h e Serapeum, too, was destroyed twice, the second time more thoroughly than the first: "If all these books contain what the Koran contains, they are useless and must be destroyed; if they say something other than it, they are harmful and must be destroyed." From the grips of too constraining a tradition, one liberates oneself either by destroying, or by forgetting. Qin Shi Huangdi wanted to found the future and so he annulled the past. There is a counterpart to his deed in the decision which the Spaniards took when they set off for the conquest of Mexico: Burn the ships! T h e Lamaists wanted to enforce a kind of legitimacy built on the strategy of the unique: they would destroy the Writings, but their own they would keep. As for the destroyer of the Library of Alexandria, what is there to be said? It is but one of the many cases when history uses imbeciles to demonstrate enigmatic theses. Its syllogism has something implacable and apt to give you the shivers. All three examples, although different in their scope, stem from the same pattern: in order for the future to exist, the past has to die. There is a famous case, that of the Australian tribe in which, at the death of any member of the community, one word is obliterated from the language. A language reduced because those who speak it cannot defeat death is quite enough to leave you dreaming... 1 5 5 . T h e poem that my grandfather preserved (probably lost, too, after he died) shows an early inclination for writing. This is not so important, but the decision which I took then, at fourteen, to burn all my writings, is. T h e motive I had then, that everything I had written was without value, is irrelevant. After all, there is no neophyte who does not sin with his excess of zeal: I had discovered the world of values and had no more urgent desire than to be invested with their dignity. Nothing paradoxical about this upstart bent! One fact is significant, however: I did go through an age structurally akin to what had driven Qin Shi Huangdi to make his enigmatic gesture. Now I still cut myself loose from what I write, without exception, but the intention of destruction no longer lurks about to tempt me, and in doing that there is no Narcissism (nor any kind of scribbler's craze). It is significant, too, that the age of the burnt offering does not reiterate itself (at least for the time being). Eugenio d'Ors used to burn a freshly written page at the close

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of each year: this was a way of invoking fertility—immolating that thing whose fertility you strive for. My gesture had nothing of this apotropaic waste, of this only too prudent sacrifice. T h e decision of completely erasing an archive—which has alone witnessed a past that unaided memory (as seen) is helpless with—stems f r o m a kind of despair cognate to that of the conquistadors burning their ships upon their landing in America: we either conquer, or we die. 1 5 6 . I do not believe that the decisions of the fourteen-year-old individual were, essentially, conscious ones. I knew what I was doing, naturally; but I ignored the motives. T h a t in the N e w World of values I planned to conquer is clear; but the reason why I had to conquer without return is unclear (or not wholly clear) to me even now. W h a t was there that I had to leave behind at any cost, which means, without leaving anything for me to look back on? To think now of Eurydice being led out of hell would be hackneyed nonsense. Indeed, we do nothing by mistake, or by chance; everything has a meaning—we would be amazed to see how bright it looms, this meaning, when the eyes able to make it out have grown mature, in the long recrimination which forgetting makes to the conscious being. I am convinced that the reason why I have forgotten my childhood—the same with the reason why I burned all my writings at fourteen and remained naked of my past in the face of a future that I planned to erect with my will, at my discretion—is the still secret fountainhead of the age towards which I am heading now, after the age of thirty. My future age will rediscover childhood, or will not be at all. 1 5 7 . Matters precipitated, or they settled, I do not know which. T h e whole m o n t h of January of the year 1979 was dedicated to writing the essay on Judas' predetermination (Book VIIB, pp. 108v-l 15). After The Feeling of Autumn, Lyrical Essay on Formation, The Apology oj Mediocrity and The Moral Syllogism, this was my first essay where the inspiration of fervour was sustained by the breadth of information and where the structure of demonstration was coherent. I was almost twenty-two years old. It was late. 1 5 8 . In March I sketched chapters for an essay called "What is m o d ern tragedy?" {idem, pp. 116-7v), where I wanted to take apart the hotchpotch of inadequacies which, in the m o d e r n world, has led to the hackneyed idea that suffering is noble and happiness vulgar, that the

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individual is naturally divided, that the meaninglessness of life has as a unique meaning the chance of being looked at by an artist and preserved in a work of art, that only those authors who have built up their work on a growing anxiety are truly great and significant. My argument, of course, was targeted not at Kafka, Musil, Beckett, etc., but at that direction of the modern spirit which valorises dereliction from the aesthetic point of view and will not go beyond it, but simply rest there, in the state of no exit. I have always wondered at the slightly inane cheerfulness with which the 20th century has embraced its state of undeliveranee. T h e very idea of founding "modern tragedy" on the Greek tragedy, which is something altogether different, seems to me deleterious and servile. What the new epoch has called "the nobility of anguish" is but an idle enslavement and a blind acceptance of the chains. Certainly, what I did in The Moral Syllogism, following a suggestion of Blaga's, was to cast light on the "pathologic" way in which the Russian cast of mind would blend a crisis of the heart with a sophist solution of the mind. Words of reasoning endorsed by states foreign to the demonstration did not come as a novelty in Europe: the most notorious instance, for a work of thinking, will probably be the way in which, in The Science of Logic, Hegel made use of the deductive operator "must". "Quality must be included in the determination of nothingness", "in-oneself must now be determined as for-oneself", etc. (italics mine). Only with the Russians, however, did this "decentering" of thinking through enthusiasms alien to it reach its limit and its enormity. T h e vaguely aberrant thinking of Tolstoy (I think not only of the mode of reasoning, but also of its content) already awakens our anxieties, and with good reason. With Lenin, however, who was a thinker of a different structure, the arbitrariness of thought did not take long to become deed, or, more precisely, crematoria for slaughter in the hands of fanaticised mobs. T h e peril of Slav thinking lies in disguising an eruptive and resentful sensibility in the shape of thinking that is European only in content. Still, contents, for thinking, are indifferent. My attraction for the "thinking" of the late Tolstoy I cannot disown, however (cf. Book III, p. 71 et seqq.). In essence, the fount of his thinking is just. However, it is known that justice does not as yet make truth, and that being just stems from the absence of an instinctive sense of what is right. T h e reason why I have made these raids into The Moral Syllogism is that when it comes to all those flights of fancy on the "nobility of anguish", things, although very simple, are always counterfeited, and people are always too ready to turn a blind eye to an extreme case

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such as that of the late Tolstoy, w h o p r o p o u n d e d that a Shakespeare or a Beethoven should be r u b b e d out of the authentic—useful culture— which is n o t n o r m a l . As concerns m a n , things which are true are always simple, too: you have to accept the law of "give and take" ("Die, too, my friend, and b e silent", Iliad, X X I , 106). You have to realise that moral suffering p u t on display is inferior to chaste physical suffering, which is always worthy of respect, that to have quality is to perceive evil as vulgarity ( M o n t h e r lant), that the absence of quality in the heart triggers a general disqualification of the person as a whole, that only those things are valuable which make your being m o r e intense, and that, f r o m the point of view of m a n , t r u t h admits of a single operative definition: t r u t h is all that increases m e (Goethe). T h e r e is n o thing of greatness which is n o t also severe, and mockery is an attitude vulgar in essence. T h e urge is always the following: D o not sully by familiarity what is greater t h a n you: learn h o w to distinguish what is truly great f r o m what is only powerful and will die. D o n o t pray to the gods of time, and let your dialogue be carried with the gods, n o t the f o o t m e n , whatever your age (Noica). If after you have b e c o m e truly good, which m e a n s self-reliant (authentic) and chaste (the contrary of filth), there is still vigour left in you, dedicate yourself to culture ( C o n f u c i u s , Annalects I, vi). In this sense, yet only in this one, Tolstoy is right: culture is not the aim of culture, culture is the mode of being h u m a n . T h e rest is presumption, imposture of strength, or degradation into talent. 1 5 9 . I have read N a e Ionescu wishing gave us the great ones of our m o d e r n Vulcanescu 3 6 , C o n s t a n t i n N o i c a , Emil Cioran, who is still alive, they have all the Penates of my house.

to reconstruct the school which culture: Mircea Eliade, Mircea Cioran. With the exception of b e e n p u t a m o n g the Lares and

1 6 0 . T h a t year P o u n d was entered a m o n g my current references. At a b o u t the s a m e time I did my first truly t r a n s f o r m i n g r e a d i n g f r o m Heidegger. It was the 1 9 5 1 - 1 9 5 2 winter semester, w h i c h h a d b e e n

3 6 T h e m o s t brilliant m i n d of the inter-war generation of writers and thinkers ( w h o s e m e m bers were, a m o n g others, M . Eliade, E. M . Cioran, E. I o n e s c o , and C. N o i c a ) , a universal and e n c y c l o p a e d i c erudite, a field sociologist, a professor of ethics, an expert in administration and f i n a n c e . H e d i e d in a c o m m u n i s t p r i s o n s , at only f o r t y - n i n e years o l d , after seven years of hard penal servitude (translator's note).

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taught at Freiberg-am-Brisgau and printed under the title Qu 'appelle-ton penser? (French translation: Becker & Granel, 1967). T h e sentence that Heidegger wishes to explain in that course of lectures (part one) is the following: "What most upsets thinking in our age is the fact that we do not yet think" (Book VII, p. 15). I do not insist on that. I will only say that what upsets thinking is what daunts us, whereas what bears responsibility for the absence of thinking is the fact that what is to be thought has been withdrawing from within our horizon for a long time now. T h e idea that the object of thinking is not passive is what most provoked my thinking. All that Marxist balderdash about the identity between subject and object in history could not possibly accept such an idea, although it did rely on it, because it was dishonest. After all, Stalin himself has talked about it in terms which, given a sufficient quantity of leniency, might be considered correct (at a school for the handicapped), while Engels has offered a rigidly scientist interpretation to this truth which Marx before him had borrowed from Hegel in an adulterated state. I have shown earlier in what sense Marx can be viewed as situated in a degraded understanding of the whole philosophical tradition preceding him. Hegel himself had felt tempted to interpret Aufheben from the angle of spiritual progress in history, the thesis which characterises his thinking. Besides, as a physicist, I knew that the unity and coherence of physics are given precisely by the fact that the fundamental concepts of physics are constant in time. Indeed, if the constant of gravity were dependent in any way on time, predictions about the past would take a wholly different form from the ones now considered normal, and the image of the world of the past would be incalculably 3 7 modified. D o consider also the situation when the time-dependence of the gravitational constant is not in the form of a function: the image of the past of the cosmos would not even be imaginable. In such a perspective, the idea of describing The First Three Minutes of the Universe (Steven Weinberg) would be meaningless. Nevertheless, such a thought must be familiar to thinking if we want to understand the reason why it cannot even be thought. Sunday, July 7th, 1984, between 1 and 1.10 p.m., I had a dream which made my position in these matters clear to myself.

37 "Incalculable" here means calculable according to laws utterly different from those o n whose basis we have determined, for instance, the position of the Lodestar at the time when the pyramid of Khufu was erected (author's note).

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1 6 1 . I was at work. I still had an hour and a half to go until my time was up. I had nothing to do. Out of the blue, I became insuperably drowsy: I was seized with drowsiness the way one sometimes is with sickness, when pain stabs one all of a sudden. It simply knocked me down. I hid myself behind some boxes and laid my head on the table. That was all that it took. I fell asleep as soon as my eyes were shut. At that moment, I began to hear Anaxagoras' voice. I knew that it was Anaxagoras yet could not see him (not that it would have made any difference; I know nothing of what the venerable sage looked like anyway). As soon as I woke up, dazed, but only too lucid, I noted down everything which I had heard. Here is what Anaxagoras said to me: 1 6 2 . "It is a mistake to think that my theory of Nous as disseminated among material elements is absurd, and that it is but a construct of intelligence. Intelligence is necessary, which makes the range of the 'gratuitous' lie unimaginably narrow, inasmuch as intelligence can only make a judgement through the medium of what exists and its mode of existence—hence also its form, which is its necessity—is reality itself. In other words, an arbitrary lie is, in fact, the singular which does not exist, of which you can have no knowledge, whereas a consistent lie is reality itself, which is to say, is truth. Granted that intelligence is necessary, it follows that it cannot signify what is arbitrary. However, the way in which you estimate (and understand) the effort of thinking exerted by the centuries before you is less true, which means less objective, than you think. Nei-King, the traditional Chinese medical text dating from 2 7 0 0 B. C., the age of the yellow emperor Huang T i , holds that the energies which circulate unceasingly through the body come from the cosmos and from the earth, whence they enter the body in the form of air and of nourishment. Ancient Indians also held that the breath of life, the prana, would enter the body through the main gate on top of the head, called Sahasrara, and then go through another six gates, called chakras (frontal, palatine, cervical, umbilical, penial and supraanal). The long energy, for example, is to the Chinese the energy of nutrition, coming from the air inhaled and from food. This energy circulates along the main meridians after a fixed schedule, a rhythmical one: the cycle has been known as the energetic pendulum. Data of this kind are not metaphors. Even someone as late as Plato, in Phaidon, claimed that there were people who inhaled not air, but ether, which was purer than air. All those traditions (Plato himself spoke in the name of a tradition that he no longer understood) were once vitally at work, although that may

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be a difficult thing to become convinced of if there is no piety in you. Still, do consider the moment when the Upanishads began to speak of rhythmical breathing (after 600 B. C.) and bear in mind the moment when such practices were completely codified (the 2nd century B. C.). The regulation of breathing originally came as an eleventh-hour attempt to preserve something which had begun to disappear long before: that something was spirituality from the air, which I have called Nous fused with air, which the Chinese had called nourishing energy and which the Indians would call prana (with them, rhythmical breathing has had no other name than pranayama, the mastering of breath). Through a certain way of breathing, one aimed to take in the largest quantity of spiritual matter, of Nous, that one could. It is almost impossible for your kind of intelligence to admit that spirit is an entity, because it is not verifiable as such; and so you give such conceptions names such as prescientific bungles or fantasies of the infantile mind: yet they are, or rather were, rigorously exact at one time. That there was once an age when air was ether is beyond the reach of your intelligence. And yet it is so simple: it is enough to admit that styles are not only bodies of reaction, but also (and especially) penetrations into the ontologic object, which is changing. Yet this would mean for you admitting that the constants of physics are relative to time, which seems aberrant to you. In reality, the concept of reality with which your physics furnishes you is fundamentally static: you can describe kinetics but not the living dynamics of matter. The perspective which you have on the constants of nature is quite 'local', temporally speaking: the structure of the world, for you, is of the essence of stone. Still, it is dynamic in every essential way: that is the reason why your physics is on its way to become false. For everything changes, in the world as well as in history, and everything is true, when it is spoken (or it turns out to be true). It is hard to explain this last assertion to you, because the angle of your intelligence is unique while truth is a totality, which is to say, a whole seen from all possible angles at once. I shall give you an example, instead. A century ago (in your temporal frame), you became aware that history is a succession of styles and that this succession is not an evolution but rather reflects the relation which humanity has entertained with divinity. However, it is not of this relation that I want to speak to you now, but of the way in which you have conceived the style of culture, as a body of reaction. It is certainly true that style is the form which generates the totality of statements: style is not the expression, but what generates it. Then, you became convinced that history

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meant that something is changed in man. As a result, the study of style has been reduced to the study of what that something is. T h a t man changes is true, of course, yet this is due to the fact that his ontological setting—which is that of the world—transforms. Why is that? Man is because there exists such a thing as time. In other words, the grounds for man's metamorphosis are to be sought in the re-setting of the world, which itself is, in fact, a cosmos incessantly remade, reiterated in innumerable creations. Because of that, the problem of style can also be posed in another way: there is a body of reaction of man observing the world as object: what is transformed in culture is culture itself, what is transformed in history is history itself. There is style not only because at a given moment there is a body of reaction, but also, and this is most important, because at that moment there is a coherent object. For style is form and form is the object, which cannot be expressed. Your learned men have ranked among poetical ingenuities Thales' assertion that the world, as a whole, is inspirited and imbued with divinity. There you have settled yourselves in the unilateral version of intelligence, and it has deluded you. For errors, like pain, come from comparing. However, Thales' assertion was rigorously exact, for the moment when it was made (or rather, even at that moment, his saying aimed to preserve in spoken form a state of things already withdrawing from among the objects of the world). It is false to say that for Thales the world was full of gods, the real truth is this: when Thales pronounced that the world was teeming with gods, the world was indeed teeming with gods. Thales spoke the truth because he was compelled to speak it and when I say that everything which has been spoken in history is true I have in mind those who have confessed about the truth." 1 6 3 . "Everything is true, when spoken in history, at the moment when it is spoken: hence the unity of style which each cultural epoch enjoys: it comes from the fact that it has given expression to a single object, now extinct, or metamorphosed. In the times of which Homer sang, gods would indeed intervene in battles between men, and the world was inspirited, filled with gods. And again, in the times of modern science, the world is just as science sees it: desecrated, vacant of man, on the verge of exploding. Man creates reality, because he sees it as it is; that is his will, induced by the divine. Your physics has not yielded you the truth about nature in its eternal generality, as you have thought, only the truth about nature in the last three centuries, a version of nature from which gods have chosen to withdraw, whose only unruly ruler stays the "de-

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centred" man, a cultural, sexed, and mortal being. Today you are more mortal than people used to be in past ages, as death is only the result of your indifference in the face of immortality. It was Goethe who once gave expression to the truth which ought to have awakened you: "We die only if we want to die"; and you want to. That means that the last Western civilisation has consecrated its vital forces to the instincts of death, in which it has seen the truth. This has been its truth, and for that truth will it be held accountable on Judgement Day, according to the order of the times. T h e theory of the cycles of civilisations, formulated, on our continent, by Hesiod and, in the East, by the Hindus, is now being put into practice through you and your disbelief, which is what has led you to your doom. It is only natural for you to be oblivious of how you have been living in kali-yuga for a long time now, because this is the epoch when spiritual life is at its lowest ebb—spirit does not conceive itself as spirit but as mere convention, or else, as a social value. Your typical version of spirituality is a scandal for its own self: illegitimacy which knows itself to be illegitimate and is felt as intolerable imposture. As has always proved true, you, too, are dying of what you have best in yourselves, and this 'best' is what was worst in the history which came before you, spawned you, and whose end and limit you are now" (Book XX, pp. 429-432). 1 6 4 . T h e intensity of that dream was so great that its contours lingered for a long time, engraved, chaotically in my memory. I have to say that the years mentioned in it (in what chronology of historical periods were they counted?), the proper names, and the references to works were all "dictated". Of course, they were reminiscences, in the sense spoken of by Plato. Many of the assertions made in that exhortation could not possibly belong to a Greek; no Greek could have uttered statements which so transparently belong to the climate of thinking of a Wittgenstein, Eliade, Spengler, etc. About the origin of that dream I do not wish to make any speculation. Its only significance lies in the fact that it was given to me. It is all pretence, after all, because in the dream I might have done nothing but summon the readings which were troubling my unconscious. In what order, however, and in connection to what thought? Everything could have been taken from myself, except the very coherence of the thought which came out, which was not my own until the time when it became mine, through dreaming. My spiritual makeup is fundamentally rationalist and, at the same time, although from a distinct vein, mystic as a frame. I uncondition-

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ally believe in the reflexes of instinct and, of two solutions, I invariably choose that of the heart. At the same time I can only assimilate what is rational. To put it differently, my organism is always likely to ruminate at leisure the food which is offered; the mandibles, with their inexorable millstone grind, are intelligence and spirit. This peculiar source of brightness I shall never renounce. T h a t is the reason why one does best if one keeps silent about enigmas of this sort. You must live t h e m and, by living, transform them into what you are. I live with the "mystic" in myself on the best of terms; the latter can say the same: he cohabits excellently with the impenitent rationalist who admires Maxwell and who is always a good sport when there is occasion for a refreshing sneer at that most intelligent of the scoffers, Voltaire. 1 6 5 . I believe that it was in 1979 when the fact that I was n o t p u b lishing first stung me. I must recall things past again. I was in the 10th form when Tribuna agreed to publish three of the poems which I had sent there earlier. What was, indeed, sensational was that the magazine even paid me for them—three hundred lei, with which I bought myself expensive books of philosophy second-hand: a splendid French edition of Schopenhauer translated by J. A. Cantacuzène and dedicated to Titu Maiorescu (!) 38 , Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, the centennial edition, and an edition of Bergson 's Essai sur les données immédiates..., one of its n u m e r o u s reprints. T h a t was the first time when I ever felt tempted to publish anything, and also the last. At first, I would abstain because I was exacting with myself, and the chief incentive for having such scruples was my friend Câlin Mihâilescu, always a stern judge of my performances. Later on, after the mutation effected in me in the aftermath of the army, I looked u p o n the issue with distrust and waved it away as the province of vain scribblers and of collaborators. Since free expression has been forbidden to our generation, as a whole, publishing on my own, separate from the spirit of our freedom, has been painful for me even to consider. As I am a pedant, I would certainly delight to see my books illuminated in print. Until that happens, all I do, as you well know, is "edit" incunabula. In such circumstances, writing in silence, in my case, has had to become an endurance test of the spirit.

3 8 T i t u M a i o r e s c u ( 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 1 7 ) , t h e m o s t i n f l u e n t i a l critic of l a t e - 1 9 t h - c e n t u r y

Romania,

t h e o r e t i c i a n of l i t e r a t u r e , p r o m o t e r of s o m e g r e a t literary classics a n d , in later life, a p o l i t ical figure ( p r i m e m i n i s t e r in 1 9 1 2 ) (translator's note).

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1 6 6 . Nineteen seventy-nine was the year when my bond of friendship with D o r u Kaytar reached its zenith. We wade plans to go and see Augustin Doinaç 3 9 or Alexandru Paleologu 40 . We were admired spirits feeling that their efforts might beget a new generation the more likely, in the way descendants are, to take after their grandparents than after their parents (we were, of course, thinking of Noica, Eliade, Vulcànescu, Ionesco and Cioran.) Our wish did not come to fruition in fact. Instead, I began to write a series of weekly articles, which I entitled " T h e Paper Drawer Chronicle" and "published" in Intellectual Work Weekly (the title of the magazine directed by Camil Petrescu). Sheer fantasy, of course. T h a t was the way in which many of the essays written in 1979 were b o r n (Essays I, pp. 174-239), from everyday incidents, readings, or reactions. T h e discipline imposed by this honorary collaboration with a prestigious weekly was fertile. As any prolonged coercion, that, too, was a school of freedom. 1 6 7 . In October and November I wrote my essay on Dante and the lampoon dialogue What is to be done?, in which I ranted against the marriage between Marxianism and the new theology of the sacred. 1 6 8 . At first, what I wanted was to write a history of modern poetics, whose points of reference ought to have been: 1) the cast of mind in Provençal poetry, 2) the current of reaction set up by Vita Nova, 3) the haiku mentality and its avatars, 4) the symbolist aporia (Mallarmé), 5) Lautréamont's reaction and, finally, 6) the integral configuring of the world in poetry of the Cantos type (Pound). Today, from the whole project remain only a few roughs, such as: a meditation on haiku poetry and the spirituality of the Haijins; a description of the symbolist heresy and a brief tackling of Lautréamont's Letters', a few pages on Pound, not remotely sufficient. My attention, instead, was fully engaged by Dante's position regarding not just the Provençals, but also the poetry of II dolce stil nuovo. I was concerned only with the Dante before The Divine Comedy, that Dante who had described his anagoge in La Vita Nova, that Dante who had made up a cult—for the first time a spiritual one—of what in the case of the Provençals had, perhaps, been but an idealisa-

39 L e a r n e d c o n t e m p o r a r y poet, an erudite translator f r o m Holderlin (Opera omnia), (Faun) and Nietzsche (Also Sprach Zarathustra)

{translator's

Goethe

note).

40 Multifaceted R o m a n i a n intellectual, aristocratic and refined, a u t h o r of essays and m e m oirs (translator's

note).

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tion of sexual love (Nietzsche, Aurora, 508). Studying the evident rift in the work of Guillaume IX of Aquitaine and observing the oddity of the way in which his posterity aligned themselves to his unprecedented model of eroticism, I was led to the conclusion that the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th saw in Europe a mutation of mentality which would eventually give birth to what we have been in the habit of calling "love" (I had not yet read L'Amour et l'Occident at the time, and my emotion was whole). T h e Franciscans, the exalted cult of Mary, the Albigenses, Fra Dolcino, all stem from a common root whose final point, ages later, may be seen typified in the stock vocabulary of love which Frédéric Moreau uses to give a shape to how he relates to Marie Arnaut. In relation to this current, of which he is an integral part, Dante has played the role of a demonstrative theology. II dolce stil nuovo is an important moment in the founding of this dogmatic theology. The style of my essay was nourished by the Hegelianism of a de Sanctis as well as by the abstract-conceptual arborescence involuntarily acquired from my prolonged inuring to Lukâcs. It is significant to say one thing: as I was studying the material which I wanted to incorporate in the essay, I came for the first time in contact with a living mentality which expressed itself through words I felt unable to understand, other than diminished by comparison with the implicit richness of the content within whose horizon they had been uttered. Here, as in other places, I rendered Anaxagoras to be right, in advance. 1 6 9 . I ended my year carried away by a feeling of triumph. T h e secret discontent which, more than anything else, gnawed my insides was that I did not seem to finish anything, ever. I would study, gather material, make notes, meditate, make sketches and, as soon as the idea was grasped and sufficient arguments were gathered, I would stop. What sense was there in writing down what had already been thought (I believed!) to the last consequence, when I would never publish anyway? Now, however, as I was writing my Dante essay, the ebullition of discovery was felicitously in harmony with the zeal of writing. I never came back to rework the first draft, which, therefore, remained my original. T h e issue of rewriting/refashioning, however, is essential. To think is not to style, and what I am to this day unable to do is to give a "better" wording to the "original" formulation, but then, that is not even true. To rewrite means to write something else, not at all the same thing, with better phrasing. Truth lies in what is lived, and in the increase of what you are, at that particular time, in nunc stans. That is perhaps the

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reason why I speak of "first times" so often in this essay. All that I have ever done I did only once, the first time. The essence of what is authentic (and from it value as well) is for me defined as that which appears always for the first time. The fresh eye, the wakeful conscience, the matutinal limpidity of intelligence, all exist only as a single gift, given only once. Kung-sun Lung said: each thing is alone and true. If what I do, no matter how I may be doing it, is original, it is by necessity invested with value. That is because there is, in people, something more powerful than their works, and that is what creates them (Notebook XII, p. 8). T h e same thing is to be found in the well-known urge which, according to Augustine, summarises the moral of Christians: dilige et quod vis, fac (Tractatus in Ep. Johannis ad Parthos VII, 8). Indeed: love and do what you want. Yet, first of all, love. Therefore, the only warrant of our truthfulness is the fact that we live. Unamuno had already reversed Descartes' warrant into: homo sum, ergo cogito. Being a man means becoming settled in a way of being in the world which implies the work, yet not as purpose, but as modality. Just as God is the warrant for the truthfulness of our thinking, / am the warrant of the work by means of which I think myself, as a being having the destiny of a creature. If we leave big words aside, no author ever redeems himself through his work, but becomes himself only to the extent in which he surpasses it at every step of the way. In relation to what is not he, or to what has ceased to be he, man builds himself retroactively and obliquely. In the end, all forms of objectification are jails in which we suffocate. In spite of the fact that the work, inasmuch as it has been the intensely sought definition, should come as a setting free, as soon as the creation is over the spirit seeks to set itself free again. Radu Petrescu's dictum— work is not freedom from darkness, it is freedom from the light—is still something beyond our reach. I remember the beavers of which Cervantes says in Don Quixote that they have the habit of eating their testicles when they feel they are being chased. 41 Just think about it, they are said to be saving their young from a potential regime of terror and 41 In reality, all that Cervantes did was r e p r o d u c e the version of medieval bestiaries, which had nothing to do with empirical observation. Medieval people, w h o were not seeking for the empirical t r u t h , but for the symbol, would infer existence f r o m signification (the f u n c tional structure of their reasoning being the ontological argument). I n d e e d , t h e legend of the h u n t e d beaver who eats his testicles (we, after observing empirical beavers, know that the beaver's testicles are internal!) is the consequence of the fact that medieval people were a priori convinced of the ontological unity between the name and its reality a n d , in all probability, obtained " b e a v e r " — R o m . castor—from

"castrate"... (author's note).

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servitude! After all, when he creates, any authentic artist destroys his own offspring. 1 7 0 . When did I first discover that the work of art which has reached its goal has, in the radical sense, no posterity? When I was in high school I used to believe with such fervour in the salvation brought about (or mediated) by posterity... To grow old means also this one soul-rending thing: nothing is from that time on more precious than what you have lived, and loved; still, whenever you relive anything, you are forced to recognise the flimsiness of your motives. No man thinks kindly of the reasons why he loved when he was in his teens; yet no one will immolate the love for which he once burnt in the name of the mockery brought by circumstance or by age. There is something glamorous and unfading in everything which was once ours in the form of love. The moment that you understand that there is nothing degrading in a love which has brought you to your knees, something has already been born in you which could never be wrested from you. Torture, the decrepitude of old age, violent death, or even senility, they are all helpless to annihilate the fundamental dignity of the man who has been loved, and who has given love. As for the work of art, I have spoken much about it already. The essential is to live it. Living is creating. The finitude of perfection is not worth anything when the life which has taken shape in it is no more. The meaning of the work lies in reaching the actuality of the present. Posterity is a mistaken and fake wager. It is mistaken because it stems from a problem ill posed; it is false because posterity misdirects the question of the artist's redemption, which is the only important one. A life is too high a price to squander on unhappiness. The work which does not bring joy to its creator is a waste. For this reason, if one is to speak of genuine artists, I do not believe in the vulgar cliché which professes the unhappiness of the artist of genius. The definition of the artist of genius is undoubtedly this: the human being who has come to rediscover the deepest fount of happiness. It is strange to recognise how hard it is for the simple truth of life to emerge from the jumble of half-witted affectations and the vulgar paint of the recent world. In the world in which I first opened my eyes, the problem of happiness would be seen either as an indecent matter (or even an obscene one), or as an obsession which only weak and unstable natures could nurture. Still, the only problem which has meaning remains precisely that of finding the means for happiness. To find the well of pure joy, to be lucid in the

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midst of general chaos, to see what is and to proclaim what you see, to feel the fundamental earnestness of life and to make it visible without effort, without peevish grimaces, here are but a few simple grounds for the kind of happiness which makes no allowance for dignity or greatness. Yet, in order to understand the sense of happiness, one must first discover the value of the present. Once one has grasped the value of the present, one is struck by its permanent actuality, which is, in fact, eternity. For what does posterity mean when faced with the intensity of the present? 1 7 1 . Let us see how things are. Our present is not yet nunc stans. Inasmuch as it resides in the instant, it is ungraspable. We are not contemporary with our present, because it is not we who live in it, but something other than us, an impersonal power, which lives in us. If we were really living, we would be eternal. We are being lived instead, and for that we die. Being lived is equal to being drained, consumed, used up, returned to the condition of mere objects. T h e everyday present in which we live, the "habitual" one, is, in fact, the most recent past. T h e everyday present is the immediate past, although the mode in which it is naturally expressed is the past imperfect 4 2 . When it is actually thought, it has already become the past tense proper. T h e latter is the mode of finite remembering. Imperfection is the mode of failure. We can only be aware of things which elude us. Awareness implies losing, and losing implies failing. Awareness is the nostalgic trace of one's failure. And now to time. Happiness has to do enigmatically with time. T h e charm which there is about time has to do with the heart-rending beauty of illusion. Evil, too, has much to do with the presence of illusion, that kind of illusion which well knows what it is, and yet endeavours to appear as the contrary of what it is. If illusions vanish, essence will crumble also. There is illusion which is glory, and illusion which destroys. T h e rare victories that we score against time do not mean that time is abolished, it is only subdued, to us. To subdue time is to become aware of it living you. When you become aware, you simply superimpose the recent past, not yet dead, over the living present. It is as if you were reliving the 4 2 T o some extent, an equivalent to it is the English past continuous: I was thinking... lator's

note).

(trans-

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past. Reliving makes everything to be lived at once, which means that you experience the whole from which the illusion of finitude has been suppressed. T h a t is happiness. Happiness does not have eternity as a direct result; instead, eternity makes happiness possible. Eternity means the suppression of finitude, for death is its abyss. In the guise of nostalgia, happiness m e a n s precisely this: you are aware that you live the very thing which is slipping through your fingers. You know that you are losing it, and lose it you do: but yet you hold its reins for the very last time. After the last time there comes silence. In this is happiness, which is different from pleasure. T h e perception forced by pleasure on happiness is gross; you want it again. In pleasure you are not serene, you are subjugated. Happiness gives you serenity, because in it the m o d e of losing is joined with the mode of possessing to excess. Le temps déborde. You have what you lose, because you always have what you have given. Pleasure dilates intenseness, happiness sharpens it. T h e present becomes actual in happiness. T h a t is all. 1 7 2 . Happiness involves every time a revelation of that which is eternal. T h e mode of eternity most at hand is probably that of circularity (is this due to our Greek and Latin heritage?). Nietzsche's case is well known. However, the state about which I am talking can be experimented on in actual fact. Let me remind you that I had, in that late September of 1978, the immediate perception of Greek choruses, induced through the form of their proper material settings—the natural amphitheatres. T h a t vivid revelation allowed me to understand the meaning of the Panic h o u r which, eleven or twelve years earlier, I had lived in, in roughly the same season, in the countryside. It was in the countryside again, precisely one year after that concrete revelation of cosmic religiosity, that I came to be struck by another insight into the ageless Greek essence; this time, it was the return of the pagan feast. 1 7 3 . T r u t h is simple, and the miraculous always wears humble attire. As everywhere in the countryside, unclean matter is given back to the earth in a tiny timber outhouse built in the more remote parts of the yard. Its place is changed periodically. T h a t year, in order to reach it, you had to cross a certain section of the vineyard. You had to walk on a narrow, well-trodden path of fertile earth, sheltered, to the left, by tall vine props which brought tendrils up into your face and, to the right, by a thicket of aromatic bushes, prickly and green which, when struck,

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would burst into odours shrill as screams. It was just before noon. T h e sweet heat of a u t u m n had already descended fluidly u p o n the green leaves and m a d e them limp. Some gossamer-like spider's thread stuck to my hair. T h e same hand which swept them off also plucked some tendrils and crushed them between the fingers. T h e y smelt green and fresh. Have you ever noticed that blood makes no noise when it flows? Still, no one can say that he or she does not feel his blood flowing: being alive is a feeling both stringent and ineffable. What I felt then was much the same thing: I was surrounded by a presence which, although undefined by the objects at hand, was flowing over my body in a way which was almost palpable. I felt—if it should be at all possible for anyone to imagine how this could be—my skin caressed by a smell entering me through the pores. M y senses had all become hungry nostrils, for what bewildered me about that invisible presence was of a fragrant nature. And the smell m a d e music. Its rhythm was highly precise: it called for a music-score. Hardly realising what I was doing, I began to h u m the words of an ode, or of a hymn. It was really a chorus—at least a chorus as the ancients would have it. For a spell of time, that syncretic perception was indistinct; then I began to hear the syllables of hens, the hissing of geese, the rustle of leaves, the buzz and drone of insects, the asthmatic breath of the earth, and that sound like cellophane brushed over glass made by the water flowing over stones. It was like a recording which is very suddenly played m u c h louder. Sounds invaded me, I could hear dozens of familiar noises, but their acuteness and intensity were now totally entrancing. T h e n I identified the smell. You must know that I have picked grapes many times and the smells of grapes are well known to me. T h e smell which had caressed my flesh, enthralling and fresh, came from the pulp of a small black wine grape; it was the smell which it will exude when you have loosened it from its skin. Simple! Why had I felt astonishment at that, of all things? I stood watching the vine and its props, which were crooked, dry and thorny. I looked at the dry crust of earth and could feel the dark moisture u n d e r it, w a r m like a breath on the cheek; it was bustling with the fertile life of the eyeless creatures: earthworms with their mucous tegument crossed by throbbing rings, and the oblong ants, their wings like the seed of the acacia tree, mingling with the white maggots which live in rot, all of t h e m in a frenetic and widespread search. T h e plash below the well bucket was being sucked by the earth, down below, as by fever-chapped lips. Carried about by the hot currents of noon, black midges were struggling in the air with invisible yet shiny wings. A heavy and ravenous bumble-bee was

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in pursuit of some lazy, easy-going piece of flesh, perfect to plunge its thirst into. A hen was staring at me intently, its neck awry and a sparkle in its worried d u m b eye. I could not have enough of all that profusion of detail, so foreign, so utterly unconnected with my redemption. Still I could not make a move: I was enslaved to a petrifying spell and to a denial. I was like the stones scattered haphazardly in a field—yet I knew that to feel yourself a stone was unnatural. I think now of the crickets which, traditionally, people place in the mouths of their dead kin. Did I then have a thought to spare on the quaintness of the hen's look, which was, indeed, the look of a lost saurian? With its neck askance, like the cranes which Taoists believe to live for a thousand years, the only sign of life which told against its stoniness was the small vulva of the ear, which was throbbing. H o w does a m a n look at a hen which is staring at him in wonder? Its reptilian destiny drifted among the dim lights of the eye. What destiny unfulfilled was drifting in my sight looking at the hen? 1 7 4 . What was it which really happened there? A simple thing: I had an extremely vivid experience of the immediate presence of nature. T h e word "nature" denotes a very rich, and confused, experience. N a t u r e is that activity of the senses devoid of orientation. Nature is the perplexity of awareness faced with the autonomous life of perceptions. W h e n you perceive, you do so in an organised way: in fact, one discerns rather than perceives. Imagine an experience of the senses which would know of no hierarchy other than the intensity of perception. Those would be the m o m e n t s of a truly inspirited world, and yet its spirit would not be logos and it would not be nous either. Awareness would not be forfeited, and yet it would become unable to command the whole pattern of internal motions which we call inner life. It would be a simple spectator, a foreign one, to experiences which would be foreign to it. Years later, seeking to make sense of that strange m o m e n t , I came to the conclusion that what I had lived then had been an experience of the sacred in its full immanence. To make my thought clear to myself, let us admit that singers have a more profound perception of the musical text, which is due to the specific rhythm which the breath takes during singing: a kind of unconscious pranayama, modulated by the inward dimension of the musical piece. To make music with one's breath is an immediate way of living what one expresses: next to a sensitivity for music, it involves the sensitivity of the body, which, in the joy of singing, feels the harmonic rhythms of an "attuned" physiology. After all, you

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must not forget that "aesthetics" comes from the Greek word aio9r|m^, which means perception. "Transcendental aesthetics", to Kant, is simply transcendental perception, nothing else than what the pranayama of musical breathing achieves when a musical piece is vocally interpreted: an inward perception of music which involves the rhythms of physiology and, starting from this a priori frame, makes the intimate signifying of any other musical piece possible. Such an ecstatic experience, even if it were by the sense of smell (my genius is in the nostrils, as Nietzsche would say) allowed me to open myself to the horizons which our senses, commonly speaking, only close. What I felt was as if I would feel inside myself. I sensed the world as we perceive our interiority; I could not hear with my ear, but rather with my throat. My entire physiology was working to the rhythms of the living flux of the world around, just as the wind of the singer is regulated by the rhythm which music impresses on breathing. What I perceived was like the score for the musician. The objects which I perceived were the notes, and the ensemble of perception made up the composition on which the man of words that I am had already rounded his lips to hum a hymn. The words, pervaded by that outlandish music which came from the unspoilt freshness of life, had been given to me by an unknown god. To that unknown god I dedicated them, too, when it was my turn. 1 7 5 . You will remember Paul's beautiful words: "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I onto you." (Acts 17: 22 et seq.). The tone of the voice which had possessed me was still with me for a few days after the event. In a day and a half I wrote a poem in six parts, totalling 250 lines, which I later rewrote as two different pieces. I called it 'Apv(0CTT({) 0e(£>, because to Him did my words return, whence they came. 1 7 6 . The song which I wrote is a panegyric: it was born of the knowledge that we are gradually becoming detached from a certain world, a world of wonder, which deserves all the regrets we are capable of. I daresay that there I solemnised a departure in which the soul which was banished saw merely the fortuity of the violation. I was speaking of the most intelligent civilisation which humankind has yet known; the richest, the most lucid, the most synthetic which can possibly exist: never before has the world known such profusion of ingenuity, of diversity, of

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spirit, and such fervour, for evil as well as for good purposes. All forms in which what is human finds expression have been carried by us to the extreme. From constraint we have known how to invent freedom, from mockery—melancholy, while from gaiety we have slipped, without resentment, into resignation. How could I describe the feeling which stirred me? I was overwhelmed by the fact that, before us, the world only existed in the form of a fragment. It was the West which made the discovery of the oneness of the world. Western people conquered the world, and the world proved insufficient for them: what they wanted was to know it. They dug all the historical civilisations which had preceded them out of their oblivion and void and gave them back, not to the museum, but to the living spirit, the same which now, at each and every moment, might be enacting either its salvation or its extinction. Everything which was wonderful, daring, infused with madness and reckless defiance—even as this propensity for danger could have meant the folly or the temptation of annihilation—everything which once was thinking, craft, art, experimental science or theory, everything was understood by the Western world as an utmost imperative, from which sprang the most astonishing developments which man and his hands have ever experienced, starting with the Magdalenian age. The West has known everything, and its contrary, and has practised them both, innocent and serene. No earlier civilisation could have claimed itself the legitimate heir of all the others, both predecessor and contemporary. It has bestowed the light of self-awareness upon cultures subsisting in ignorance of themselves and has placed them in front of mirrors, for them to see what they are truly like. It has conquered and granted freedom, it has observed the virile rule of "give and take" which Achilles practised and about which Bertrand de Born wrote poetry. It has invented sciences and has successfully concluded unresolved dilemmas where other, less generous, cultures have found dead ends. There must be what we might term artisanal facets where other cultures have reached heights far beyond our own: yet in civilisation as a whole, as well as in the global sense of signifying contents, none can stand next to us. All have merely invented and typified contents: the West alone, in its unsurpassed generosity, has known how to infer forms from the multiplicity of contents, and, from forms, to infer the most general frames for any meaning concerning existence. The truth of tomorrow might well not be Western: the framework in which it will work, through branches of knowledge, and also the form of apprehension, will certainly be so. To appropriate the tone of a famous apophthegm, I shall say that the 21st

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century will either be Western in spirit, or will not be at all. As old as the cultures which preceded it, the West—the only one to have proved worthy to know them and restore them to life—has conquered everything and surrendered to every temptation, prodigally and nonchalantly, and now it stands alone and faces itself, one who alone has been the winner, forced in the end to learn all about suffering. Its suffering is of the most soul-rending kind, it is suffering for what is. For generosity is always self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice is something that the West has never turned away from. Now we are cutting ourselves loose from the spiritual climate of the Western world, torn from the flesh of our own sensibility. No death is easy, no ageing without regret. For well over a thousand years, the world has been Western, as this has been the most decisive way of partaking in the act of being human: I am Western and nothing human is alien to me. Today we can see that the world is taking off for other horizons: no matter how imposing the venerable old man may be, he will nevertheless be killed just as kings are killed in some primitive cultures, in the prime of life: the new world gushes out from the torn stomach of the moribund. I myself feel torn between two paths: born under one law, to another

bound...

111. What defines our world more than anything else, nowadays, is the passion for preservation: our own richness already compels us to an excess of nuances: we are ready to say that everyone is right. With generosity you win, if you have the faith: with generosity you lose, if you do not have it. We are, today, banished from history by the risks which our exception has taken. Towards the end Napoleon's victories became more and more difficult: as he kept defeating them, his adversaries had, in the end, learnt from him how to fight. The passion of history is a symptom of old societies: the young ones will burn their past, because they know that they can reinvent it at any time. If we refer to its soul, our art is one which yearns: it knows all about nostalgia, and, in truth, no one can redefine sensibility today without turning to nostalgia. Since we used to be everything in the past, today we love our predecessors with the only religiosity of which we are still capable, that of history. We love our past with desperation, which is a sign that we are dying. How could I not despise the bastard of tomorrow in the name of the wonderful moribund of today? We already know the answer about the value of children: the old ones are of greater worth (Odyssey, II: 376 et seqq.). As always, the young world is barbaric, the one which perishes deserves all our regrets. We, people at the crossroads of centuries, are

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o u r s e l v e s m u c h to b e pitied. A l t h o u g h c o m p u l s o r y , o u r sacrifice is d o u bly useless: firstly, for t h e o n e s w h o die a n d w h o are, n e v e r t h e l e s s , foreign t o u s , i n a s m u c h as w e c a n w e e p f o r t h e m ; t h e n also f o r t h e o n e s w h o c o m e b u t w i t h w h o m we have n o t h i n g in c o m m o n a n d w h o m we c a n n o t u n d e r s t a n d . T h a t is why we k e e p w i s h i n g for a w o r l d full of clemency, in which, like in that arcane and g r u d g i n g conclusion of Antiquity, o u r voice c o u l d rise to the L o r d o u r G o d w h o m we d o n o t k n o w : L i s t e n t h e n to m y r e v e r e n t voice A n d a s e r e n e a n d w o r t h y setting give to m y life! 0Orphic Hymns, XII 9 et seq.) 1 7 8 . As I d i s c o v e r e d t h e s h a m e l e s s i n n o c e n c e of life (of i n n o c e n c e G i r a u d o u x h a d this decisive w o r d t o say: " T h e i n n o c e n c e of a living t h i n g m e a n s t h e a b s o l u t e a d a p t a t i o n to t h e w o r l d in w h i c h it lives"), of t h a t life w h i c h c o u l d n e v e r b e c o m e c u l t u r e , a n d w h e n c e o u r d e a t h is s u r e t o c o m e , I was s t r u c k by w h a t I m i g h t call t h e i n d i f f e r e n c e of the f r a m e for t h e p i c t u r e . It is b a n a l to c o m p a r e o u r e n d w i t h t h a t of t h e w o n d e r f u l G r e e k a n d R o m a n A n t i q u i t y , w h i c h we all n e v e r fail t o love. It is b a n a l , i n d e e d : e x c e p t t h a t I u s e d to live it in m y very o w n flesh. I i m a g i n e d t h e p o s t - h i s t o r y of o u r w o r l d as a kind of a s y l u m for v e n e r a b l e o l d p e o p l e . . . T h e r e w e shall satisfy o u r idle taste for r e a d i n g : this m u s t have b e e n the last place w h e r e F i c h t e ever read. G o n e are the days of Discourses to the German People, of Untimely Meditations, of The WellTempered, Clavier, g o n e are t h e t i m e s of Voltaire, of i n t e l l i g e n t s c h o l a s t i c i s m , of t h e illiterate C h a r l e s s h o w i n g t h e g r e a t e s t d e f e r e n c e t o t h e l e a r n e d A l c u i n , of p o w e r c o n v i n c e d t h a t n o t h i n g c o u l d b e r e f u s e d to m a n , p r o v i d e d t h a t h e h a s a c h i e v e d his h u m a n i t y . . . N o m a t t e r w h a t t r a i n of t h o u g h t I m a y follow, it will always e n d in t h e d i s c o n s o l a t e cry: " O y o u w e r e so b e a u t i f u l ! O I h a v e l o v e d y o u so m u c h ! " ( N i e t z s c h e , 1903, X, 233). 1 7 9 . T h e song which I knew t h e n was an Ecclesiastes, b u t one in which vanity n a t u r a l l y t r a n s m u t e d i n t o a feeling of a u t u m n , t h e final s e a s o n , i m m e a s u r a b l y sweet, w h e n all is still in its full, m a t u r e s t r e n g t h , in t h e p u r e s t a n d m o s t b e a u t i f u l s h a p e , for t h e last t i m e (Orphic Hymns, X X I X 1 2 - 1 5 ) . A l a t e w e d d i n g is c e l e b r a t e d w i t h o u t h o p e a n d yet w i t h t h e u n d i m i n i s h e d n o s t a l g i c u p h e a v a l of a p r e c a r i o u s soul w h o k n o w s t h a t she will die a n d k n o w s h e r d e a t h useless. W h a t I m e a n t to s u g g e s t was t h e feeling that t h o s e sacrificed for the g o d s experience in a w o r l d w h o s e

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very hopes abandon them. T h e sense of the poem which I wrote then is the following: from what was once the promise of a wedding, the gentlest and most generous of all that has been given man—Blaga, in his own decline, would say, " I know that I shall leave life with misgivings and torn by great regret, the regret for not believing in the Resurrection o f the D e a d and in the Last Judgement"—destiny has moved on unawares—while we were engrossed in our folly—to killing and terror, which it has consummated in the name of the wedding which once it promised us. T h e meaning of time is an inversion, and a suspended apologue. Just as today we do not know the name of the G o d to whom people once entrusted the village soul of man, tomorrow will not know the name of the God whom our city soul, exiled and precarious, ignores with nostalgia and also, to be sure, with quiet desperation. Autumn is sung in the poem because it will be in its sweet warm air that we shall all pass away. Not even a certitude, this bare presentment might mean that passing away would be helpless if nostalgia, the pain of returning, did not presuppose a silent dignity, before which we kneel. F o r , after all, the law o f dignity remains the following: you can only be alone in silence, or else, at the end, when there is no other posterity except yourself. And you, too, my dear, you too will surely fail to survive this, no matter where you might be at that time. 1 8 0 . I must remind you that I began the year 1 9 7 9 in a dispute with Jesus, on Judas' side. Even if Agnosto Theo is replete with Greece (Euripides' choruses, the Orphic Hymns, the votive and funerary epigrams from Anthologia Graeca, Ovid's, Metamorphoses, etc.), its presence is more of a finale, the way it also was in Cochirleni: the clamour of Dionysus' cortege leaving Antonius' camp before the battle of Actium, fading away in the Alexandrian night; and also the wailing cry which sailors could hear around the year zero ( 7 5 3 A . U . C . ) , " K i n g Pan is dead!". As I wrote on, I felt myself trodden by two paths. Sir Fulke Greville has put it very aptly, " B o r n under one law, to another b o u n d " . . . I began my year rejecting Jesus' justice. I ended it accepting His grace... I remember Flaubert's words, in one of his volumes of Correspondence, " T h e old gods dead and Jesus not yet acknowledged, there was a span, between Cicero and M a r c u s Aurelius, when m a n alone existed." As I was living the end of Antiquity, I felt how Jesus was gradually acknowledged. Seneca ignored Him, although he was already filled with the new spirit which was shattering the old world. My belief is that the span had not been void of gods, but only of the name able to name

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them. In my p o e m there is the end, and the respect for those who pass away; there is also the stillness, and it does not come from some resigned wisdom, but from the serenity which we all feel bound to when the immediate presence of divinity is certified. Are there no gods? But how I feel them every day, when I am not impure! Even so, I believe in the figure of Christ, and I also believe that we cannot achieve anything simply with our own unaided powers. Except for the void, everything is grace... 1 8 1 . It is significant to me that I began the year 1980 with readings from the Gospels, and made notes on them. I even inquired for a Greek copy, in order to do literal translations. At the same time, and with equal fervour, I relished things such as the following, when I would come across them in my readings: Je vais au hasard, mais mes pas me ramènent toujours, immanquablement, sans que je le veuille, au quartier des prostituées: il doit y avoir de la métaphysique là dedans (Montherlant, Un Voyageur solitaire est un diable, 1961, p. 154). Indeed so. I read Montherlant in full, with exactly the same devout attention which I lavished on reading The Phylokalias in its entirety. My soul has been formed, in the order of the ages, by Pavese, Malraux and Montherlant more than by my own parents. Each of them I have read in full, and I know more about each than I know about the life of my father, which has remained a secret to me. Their photographs as well as their books are always close to me. When I die, the last thing to linger in my memory shall be the love with which I have loved them and which has formed me. On the Day of Judgement I shall confess about each of them (although I do not wish to meet them again, as Zwingli wished to meet Socrates, in the world where my flesh will be no more). Will I find mercy f r o m them after I am dead? They say that those who have loved us will intercede for us, in proportion to our love. I know all too well that we are found deserving only thanks to what we have deserved from those loves sent by accident! Still, I also know that a man, each and every single man, can be executed in just a few words; that it is so easy to judge, and so difficult to live, and that a condemnation is so swift when c o m pared to how long, and how hard to understand, a life is... 1 8 2 . After a seminar of q u a n t u m physics in which I insisted on the significance of certain relations, one of my colleagues snapped at me with the intention of offending: "Science is made with equations, not with culture; with those methods of yours you are bound to stay a mere encyclopaedist." On March 2nd, 1980, I wrote, "Philosophy is always

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necessary in order to preserve in the act the whole space of unspecialised dignity of which man is capable" (Book IX, p. 33). 1 8 3 . What has always troubled me, in 1980 amounting to a near crisis, has been the lack of strength which I discover in essences. Goodness turns the other cheek and tries to convince; instead, sardonic or ironic (I do not know which), evil is content to win. The interdictions to which goodness willingly subjects itself, when it sets out to act, make action useless, because they sap its efficiency. Promptness is part of efficiency and goodness is never prompt, although it may come, now and again, in season. Of the same order is the contingency which dooms inferiority. I noticed at an early age that I could be successful. However, what I could gain against failure only increased the shadow which possessing the means of power would throw on the soul. Let it be clearly understood: when you gain, it is never the profound side of you which gains but when you lose, the loss is always measured in your depth. There is an asymmetry here which upsets thinking: why is it that when we gain, we gain in garb, and when we lose, we lose in the flesh? Essence cannot be elucidated with arguments, no more the validity of the inner life. I can prove nothing of my depth. Who can find arguments for his love? When I shine, it is the means which shine in me. Unveiled, no one is worth a thing. "If the essential cannot be proved, it means that the fundamental act is faith" {idem, p. 30). 1 8 4 . A life should be an ascent towards the light. Is it, instead, a befriending with the shadows? I was once a child, and I played. Then an adolescent, and I loved. Then I read. I wrote. I painted. I worked. I loved. Then I loved no more. I had friends. I was loved. Hastily, then lingering, all in play. There is still time. In reality, no matter how long you may live, you have already lived. One day, a mouse tempts you down the stairs. You follow it down (perhaps you bring it food). You fall down: you are alone, and ill; and the mirror is broken. 1 8 5 . In May I wrote my first longer piece of fiction: an adolescent is in love with a woman who is close to the threshold of old age, and he is loved by her. The woman dies: the youth is always alone. Everything had lacked a future in that love, and yet never for an instant had the futurelessness of death come into the picture. Mrs. Baraschi had died in the winter following my sixteenth birthday, beautiful and dignified as a queen, inspired by a vertiginous charm, as strange as the serene

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enigmatic smile which she took from death into my short story, seven years later. 1 8 6 . I read a lot, yet without a system. In October I wrote a satirical piece against vulgar and servile piety (versus Karnabatt, the author of a book of crude adoration dedicated to St Francis) and this refreshed me (for a spell). T h e n there was Vasile Parvan—I took pains to read the whole corpus of his work. In November I spent pleasant hours with Virginia Woolf, with her last (marvellous) book: Between the Acts. Detailed notes from Martha Bibescu's books. Finally, December was wholly dedicated to a passionate study of Conversations with Eckermann. 1 8 7 . Why on earth did I, from April 1979 until August 5th, 1980, keep a book entitled Journal of Fidelity? I turn over its leaves: failures, exertions, illuminations, outbursts, elliptic and trifling definitions, and all for what? In 1982, September and October, I see that I suffered a relapse with only two entries, which I do not have the patience to go through now. There follows one last entry dated December, 1984: "One way or another, whether or not death is involved, all that we do ought to be decisive, and without room for any getaway. Yet I do whatever comes handiest, which means that I follow my natural inclinations. I have always lived through the clash with truth sheltered by every comfort, and truth itself I have shunned. In all my acts, from the personal to the public, I am a failure. I am a failure in my love, and a failure in my writing. In excess as well as in lowliness, I am a failure. For I am nothing which might satisfy me, and that is not because my wishes exceed my means, but because I cannot for an instant bring myself to have wishes attuned to my inner reality, which does not let me know anything of her (except that she is discontented). I do not know who I am. Yet I know that who I am now is not the real myself: if he should ever reveal himself, he would certainly bring to me the fullness of life, faith, hope, and love" (Book XIII, p. 12). Only a few days later, summ o n e d by the signs of which I speak in Spiritual Exercises I, I was to plunge into the distress of my second interim crisis. 1 8 8 . T h e same man who, in 1980, could think that a god was a m a n defeated did try his hardest to triumph over his failures. He wrote essays, conceived a treatise on ontology (The Will Toward Manifestation), and attempted to save himself through poetry. He would tell himself as he wrote: everything that has already passed behind me, provided that

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I have done it with intensity and burning inwardly, will redeem me. It is quite likely that I have never been closer to writing as prayer than in that year: I wrote as believers pray, on my knees. On my knees means devout (was I meek, then?). Still, I may be wrong. When did I believe that? Then, or now? There are years whose only merit lies in the fact that they manage to render any solutions of continuity futile. In 1980 I was getting ready. For what? We live like blind people, and we help others as the lame help the blind. 1 8 9 . All years are stupid. In time, they become interesting. Yet who spurs me on, and for what? I spur myself on, for nothing. When I think of all this meaning that I am scraping together from that which has none... Finally, the year 1981 came. And I did not know how, or why. 1 9 0 . You have to live, if you happen to be alive. I am myself, after all, a part in the evolution of the lemonade. 1 9 1 . While the months that end the year appear to have been auspicious to me in terms of essay writing, the initial month, already for some years, was invariably, yet without the slightest premeditation, dedicated to sacred readings: I began 1981 with the study of loan Damaschin's Dogmatics. I drafted my diploma paper (high-powered lasers by mode locking). I read from Goethe, Italian Journey. I read Borges, in French. And then the monumental Gibbon, The Decline and. Fall of the Roman Empire, until the end of February. As my readings were getting more numerous and my books were difficult to handle, I was tempted to write my reading files directly on the typewriter. As soon as 250 files (pages) were put together, I b o u n d them between covers of hard cardboard. I invented then two types of dossier-books: the "reading files" books and the "notes" books. T h e latter are notes which I got into the habit of throwing at random on paper, on various occasions, with the intention of coming back to them, when time allowed. I have bound ten such volumes until today (since 1981), totalling over 2,500 pages. T h e new style made my work a lot easier, and also obliged m e to carry on my filed readings only at my desk. At first (for four years), this ascetic discipline of the "chair" did not inconvenience me, and was even an extra incentive to my zeal. Besides, each volume had a table of contents which made access to the quotation that I needed quite smooth. In this way my "mobile" memory became, quite suddenly, much roomier. T h e years 1980-1986 are years of unflagging study. This became evi-

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dent to me when I went through the bibliography for this essay. T h e average n u m b e r of files for the years 1974-1979 amounted to about 230 pages per year. Starting with 1981, the average rose suddenly to 460. T h e same, but better still, is the case with the average number of pages of "creation" (poetry, essay, prose, translations) which I would write over a year. For the period '74-'79 the number was approximately 100 pages per year, whilst in ' 8 0 - ' 8 6 it was approximately 300. T h e headway made after the caesura of 1980 is significant. My inner order increased, too (it is true, in fact, that only thanks to this was I able to make the quantitative leap): that was roughly the time when I started to "function" as a field of legions attacking in fully developed formation. I not only filed my "study" readings but noted down the order in which they were made, and I sought to read thematically, with purpose. In '81 I recorded 90 such "organised" readings (leaving out those which were read without files, perused, or only consulted); in '82 there are 111, and so on. My performance was not only about the quality of "erudition" (1 shall say at once what I understand by erudition) but also about eliminating all the slack time from a life which was spent between laboratory (and the related mathematical calculations), factory (later, that is, from the autumn of 1982), and library. Before becoming ecstasy, asceticism means discipline. I found in doing whatever comes hardest a delight from which I tried to expunge superiority (which, of course, did not exist). As for the erudition which I was striving to attain, it meant the following: the precision of quotation (and of the context) and the capacity of evoking quickly, from memory, the sum of references which apply to a given field. This faculty, the propriety of knowledge, my father possessed to an extreme, and exquisite, degree. N o t so well endowed, I had to satisfy the want by a technique using effort and discipline, an enslaving one. 1 9 2 . Starting with that year, the year of the leap, my readings become so numerous that to rehearse them would be meaningless. Just as, when we grow up, our person loses importance proportionately as our point of view begins to matter, our readings also recede into the background and leave room for experiences which I like to call spiritual. F r o m this point onwards, I shall no longer speak of what I wrote, what I thought, or what I read, but only of three types of fundamental experience: 1) writing a journal, 2) composing the poem Listening to Death, and 3) discovering history (January 13th, 1984).

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1 9 3 . First of all an explanation: in the first stage, I only wrote journals in the years '72-73 (Journal I), '74 (Journal IV & V, covering the whole year), '75 (for two months), and '77 (two weeks). T h e journal of '74 is the most extensive. The scruple of observing the days is respected, but, still, one must not forget that the person who wrote it was inhibited by the whole literature of confession of which Malraux used to say, "J'ai vécu jusqu'à trente ans parmi des hommes qu'obsédait la sincérité" (Antimémoires, I, p. 13). T h e most extended journal belongs to an age which sacrificed the most passionate thoughts to the Pavese of II mestiere di vivere. It seems obvious to me now that I wrote journals in emulation, as others whistle songs in vogue without thinking about it, or smile in a certain way. To be honest, I had scarcely anything to note down. I lived thoughts whose life did not have a body. W h o would fall in love with a woman who is incapable of loving? Generosity is self-sacrifice, to be sure, and yet love, above all, is the hunger to be loved. In the second place, the only journal which emerged from living was the one, so average in its hesitations, written in ' 7 2 - ' 7 3 : an improper journal. T h a t I came to rewrite in November, 1986, under the title of To Love. Its initial impropriety has to do with its manner. I do not believe that what is characteristic of diary writing meant anything to me when I was fifteen years old. I have no idea whether I had read any of the great examples of the genre by then. To keep a diary stems from a split conscience, or one in the process of becoming reunited. T h e driving force of a diary such as Maiorescu's escapes my sphere of preoccupations, and also, to the same extent, the political and the domestic kinds (such as my grandfather used to keep on the pages of his Bible: births, baptisms, weddings and funerals; he observed the scruple of an incipient genealogy). My journal was about a need, and was a part of its non-fulfilment. My inadequacy in redeeming myself is the most pregnant tone in it. I have said that the first authentic diary which I ever wrote was an improper one. Indeed, it was not a journal of the moment, but one of memory. T h e one thing from which I had found myself unable to free myself, at that time that was my present, had been a past which was truly deceased and yet one which I had been unable to digest. T h e mere passage had not consumed the ember, and the ashes would blaze up from time to time, burning me. So, I proceeded to put it on paper in the way country-folk would drone (one of the species of) incantation against the evil eye: the objects which caused the illness are named and the act of naming exorcises the sick person. It was then that I discovered the apotropaic function of rendering something conscious; I was, however, not con-

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scious of my discovery. I wrote to free myself f r o m a w r e t c h e d love, in which I was loved and yet, at the same time, rejected. W h a t I did not u n d e r s t a n d was h a u n t i n g m e like a ghost. Writing m e a n t the act of setting what h a d b e e n lived free f r o m its impurities and the past f r o m its malefic miasma. It is suggestive that I c o n q u e r e d the suffering caused by u n h a p p i n e s s by resorting to the activity of intelligence. It was only m u c h later that I was to find out, via Montherlant, that the unintelligent act par excellence was suffering (not physical suffering, of course). 1 9 4 . I wrote then in order to set the shadows free f r o m the darkness w h i c h was in t h e m . N e v e r since t h e n have I c o m e b a c k to t h a t past which had b e e n my obsession, and that was because I h a d c o n q u e r e d it. T h e first journal was a battle with my past state of non-deliverance. It was n o t an act of grasping the presence of the present, b u t a quarrel with a r e s e n t m e n t which had been left u n c o n s u m m a t e d . 1 9 5 . W h e n they did not seek to disguise their parroting (or, of course, its "emulation"!) the other journals which I have enumerated above seek to be a training p r o g r a m m e , of the kind: "I a m to follow the following exercise of detachment: a) I am to avoid mere prattle, b) I am to extend my h o u r s of study, c) I am to remain indifferent to praise and c o n t e n t in the face of outrage, d) I am to say what I think, at the m o m e n t w h e n I think it, e) I am to discard resentment for what I would have liked to do, and did not do", etc. T h e extent to which those "Stoic lists" did anything for m e is difficult to assess. It is certain that, in p a r t , the efforts f o r m e d me, but I cannot tell whether it was through their linear quality, or it was in an oblique way. T h e issue, after all, is n o t so i m p o r t a n t . W h a t you are also comes f r o m what you have never m a n a g e d to be, to a degree which it is h a r d to define. Everything shares in what we are. T h e dominant note of a personality is given by the whole body of defeats which it has imposed u p o n itself, or which it has gone t h r o u g h . O n e of the cardinal virtues is n o t to conquer, because this can be d o n e by n o m a t t e r what means, b u t to lose by throttling your vainglory (which in m o m e n t s such as these p o u n d s away vehemently, nestling its recrimin a t o r y justice in every sophism). 1 9 6 . As is only natural, I was not quite swept off my feet by the thought of writing journals. Still, the ones which I have p u t together f r o m 1975 onwards have had at least this one merit: they have b r o u g h t into relief the total antipathy which I feel for putting the entrails of the soul o n

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display in the market square. I had said no to the introspection based on incrimination, on the cult of the hidden thought, on repression and on the inglorious game with motivations which heighten after first going t h r o u g h debasement. T h e Russian therapeutics of the soul, where a w o m a n loves one m a n but sleeps with another, whilst he detests her yet seeks her presence like a slave fascinated by his servitude, trying to rape her and then praying to her as if to an icon, and where they both behave like some energumens escaped from the straitjacket and end up in bewildered prostration in front of T h e Evangels—well, I confess that this practice of interiority awakes in me nothing but disgust. What I can sense there is a soul eager to be a slave, unforgivably fascinated by ethics which debase, and practising a logic in which one forever needs to affirm that white is black. I am fascinated by limpid things, and light I find to be the most enigmatic fact. T h a t is instinct. Arguments for it I was to pick up, later, from the cult of the simple essential deed which one acquires in The Paterikon or in The Life of St Francis (Bonaventura's). Apart from the moments of his life, which are parables, a m a n has nothing more to say about himself. 1 9 7 . T h e journal is born from an urgency for what one has to become, otherwise all is in vain. When, on January 6th, 1981,1 took the decision to keep a strict, day-by-day diary, I was, in fact, making a twofold discovery: except for my study, and my writing (in this order), I had ceased to m e a n anything for myself: without a biography, I recognised with a shock that I no longer knew how to live; my m e m o r y was full of books, and empty of myself; do not be deluded by the fact that now I K N O W how to remember, and that I have so many memories as if I had lived a thousand years; what I am telling you is the stark truth: all that I could r e m e m b e r were the books which I had read, or the things which I had invented. Still, somebody without a memory has no hold on the present; I had become a cultural fiction: I was no longer alive. T h e second thing which I discovered is summed up in this remark, "To live, here is a way of being incomplete" (Journal, IV, p. 1). Heresy! However, in that phrase lay my whole cast of mind. It is, however, a fact that I began to keep a journal in order to revive my past and rediscover what it meant to be present. I know very well that a m a n in himself is a failure, and that he is worth something only through what he becomes, what he is. If he is not a bridge beyond himself, towards something higher (and I do not necessarily mean angels), man is but a fall and leaves behind a vapid taste. In the same way, culture has no m e a n -

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ing except seen as a school of change. Culture has to summon, to make you live the risk of an exception. Although, for man, the "typical" exception is the aporia of his own presence. Being a m a n is not a comfortable condition, any more than it is a privilege without dangers. T h e comfort in which one is settled by the thought that one is descended from the apes is a deleterious one. Who has not yet remarked that the expression of an intelligent m a n differs from that of a m a n distracted, and that the pupil who has acquired the gift of reading has an eloquent solidity in the light of his eyes, which he did not have before being acquainted with his primer? T h e cultivated m a n has to be a " m u t a n t " through whom values would be m a d e flesh, and flesh would naturally give birth to values. Culture has to become nature once more for the m a n in whom the true nature is astray, or else all is vain. M a n is a way: if all that he is, is all that he can become, he has already faded. Vanity designates what we call the reasons why life deserves to be lived. This is all too stupid a way of seeing things, because life does not need the props of justification in order to make sense. T h e fact of being alive is not vanity, but glory, and wisdom unfathomable. Any old m a n would know that the time which undermines us increases in us, with advancing age, a substance which is purer and more dazzling than the gold which Chinese alchemists ate in order to become immortal. T h e simple fact of growing old is worthy of respect, because the m a n in w h o m life has long ripened, by the grace of fate, is like the fruits of autumn: nothing can stand beside them. M a n surpasses himself by living, into something m o r e precious than living. W h a t is this "most precious thing"? Only the wise m e n know it, and those who have known how to grow old. 1 9 8 . T h e journal which I began in 1981 (and which I kept up, in the same book, volumes 31 and 32, until 1985) began to look like a true diary. Against the flow, it wished to retain; against the scattering of personality, it offered a unity of reaction which needed, sooner or later, through frequent visitations, to turn back to the inner dimension. It was then that, practising that hygienic habit of noting down the day-to-day void, I trained myself to be renitent to the attacks of the negligence of expression, which appear when one does not write for "art", and which are but fits of mediocrity. M o n t h e r l a n t saw in risking one's life every fifteen days excellent hygiene for the soul. M o r e modest, subjecting oneself to the effort of daily thinking that what deserves no thought is surely a good accommodation, whilst still alive, with the overpowering transcendence of the starry canopy of heaven.

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Let me make myself clear: just as I am using these words here, at this moment, I am already converting them into something derisive. What deserves no thought is, after all, the very content of our day-to-day life, the way in which we live it or allow ourselves be pulled along by it. T h e thought that solely to higher life belong auditions from Bach—or providing (do note the collectivist barbarity of the word: I use it on purpose) this or that cultural activity—is utterly philistine. T h e province of life is life itself, before anything else, and whoever needs cultural buttresses to "bolster" it will quickly lose the dignity of verticality in solitude. Or else, he might keep it, thanks only to the gluteus maximus. At the beginning, I kept notes to aid my memory. Little by little, I began to write so that I might forget, and my doing so gave me the strange feeling that my lips were already feeling the taste of eternity. From everyday trifles we create our living, and life means precisely this: that, as we keep accustoming ourselves to them, we die. There is something profound beyond imagination (of the layman!) in living the "quotidianness" of life. I have something to confess to you now: whilst I was struggling to recover my personal memory, I discovered the fragrance of the present. 1 9 9 . T h e sign of that fulfilment came to me one January morning in the year 1982. I was in the kitchen, slicing bread. Quite suddenly, I was overcome by the feeling that what I was doing was exceptionally full and rich. Well, what was I doing? I knew perfectly well that all that I was doing was slicing bread, and yet I felt that there was perfection in my gesture, and it amazed me. I put the knife down and sat down to eat. I ate. T h e same feeling, in full. It was as if I was able to see myself from outside, and that what I saw was perfect. In Siddharta, H e r m a n Hesse imagines a situation of this type: amongst robes which are alike, one wearer has to be singled out, and that wearer is Buddha. Neither of the two strangers knows him. Well, the criterion of recognition is precisely this: Buddha is identified as that monk whose gestures are perfect. This is also the criterion for coming close to Al-Mu'tasim: perfection is persuasive, those who linger around it are touched with it and they unwittingly preserve fragments of perfect gestures; thanks to that, the fount of perfection can be located by going in the direction of those people who possess more fragments of that kind, guiding oneself according to the principle that, whoever is closer to perfection possesses its attributes to a higher degree. T h e same thought lies behind Blaga's divine differentials, which, he has said, man holds to the highest degree, by necessity incomplete (in relation to the Great Anonym).

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Like any revelation of perfection grafted on an imperfect stock, the sense of the richness which the present m o m e n t possesses—which had so unexpectedly struck me that morning—left me after merely a few hours. I feel b o u n d to tell you that no happiness can be compared to that of plenary living. C o n t e n t is secondary, here the mode of living is what matters. To be sure, this will remind you of that "come in, there are gods here, too" (Heraclitus, reported by Aristotle). T h e everyday is humble only for our sense-lessness. In fact, what we live is a continuous miracle, equalled only by the fact that we live in truth. Ever since I experienced that sensation (which did not come back), I have lived keeping my attention awake: I would say that I have attained a feeling of piety for the fact that I am alive. I am worth nothing in this valorisation. Grace is in us every second: we do not have to save time for it. 2 0 0 . What I discovered when writing the journal of the years ' 8 1 - ' 8 4 was the fact that death could be defeated through such means as intelligence has. I refer here to the death of the soul (not in a theological sense): or else, to that opaqueness which habit secretes in each one of us, if we are careless in our living. Besides, I entered there things whose importance remained unknown to me at the m o m e n t of writing: that is what makes the journal precious for retroactive knowledge. Like a basso continuo, the life which was becoming concentrated in the light of awareness was—without my finding out about it—permanently accompanied (and undermined, also) by the grounds of the crisis which was to break out on the very first day of 1985. I was given then three signs of death. I took it to be my death and decided to write one page confessing what I had been each day, until God would take me to Him. This was a considerable effort, because it often happens that days slip by into the void, and the void is difficult to apprehend. This journal (VI, volume 48 of my writings) could have had but one title: Spiritual Exercises. Indeed, with humility and, to some extent, without regret, I was preparing for my death. I did not intend to draw the balance of my career as a "writer", I wished instead to enlighten my quality as witness. I did not bear witness for my offspring, since the n a m e that my father entrusted to me, at birth, shall die once I am dead, but for the being to whose care I was committed, the moment in which I discovered lucidity. Here I must tell you that I have no doubt whatsoever concerning my destiny: it has been permanently led. This is the reason why the struggle to become worthy of living consisted, for me, in assuming the position (the vocation) of a witness. I naturally accepted death, because I knew that being a witness is

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essentially the same as being a martyr. There are joys which it is honest from one's part to embrace together with their contrary, which cannot be redeemed. My background as a physicist and my particular passion for the epistles of the Apostle Paul put me in the position of accepting to much clamour the profound asymmetry of the world: cum enim infirmor, tuncpotens sum. That being the case, I sought to find in the prelude to death the certitude of what God might have wished to make of me. That precise thing, however, I knew nothing about. I wrote because I was in waiting, and because I ignored the end of it. I wrote because I wanted to end it all (I had been given signs, had I not!), and because the cipher which I had been still remained a mystery to me. I wrote to save the spirit floundering inside me from all that mire, well knowing that I was doing it for the last time. My testimony was not a confession at all, as there was nothing to confess to, except for the things which were already written down. I know that before God I am bound to appear with all my words, and that it will not be I defending them, but they themselves bearing witness about me. Instead, I witnessed about the present, or else, about a death whom I knew to be lurking about. 2 0 1 . You will understand that I never spoke to anyone about how I felt. Those who love us, above all, are to be spared the improprieties of our torments. That was my reason in the letter in which I expressed the wish to be cremated: Igne Natura Renovatur Integra. Meanwhile, it was the eve of my birthday when father was taken to hospital for a routine surgical operation: just one of the several which he had needed to undergo in three years. The odds decreed that, after five months of agony (read "struggle") in the proximity of death, my father should pass away. However, until almost the very end, I had stood entrenched in my belief that the disease eating him up was not going to curtail his living days; thinking nothing of his first coma, I thought that I felt in my bones that his leaving hospital was a matter of days. I am sure that I did not let myself be fooled by hope (the courage of puny souls), but the love I bore him was simply so potent that death, by contrast, looked improbable. One day in June, I understood that the death signs which had come to me were, in reality, announcing my father's death, and that now he was going to die. Everything had been false about my expectation: someone else was the one chosen for the part, and it was someone before whom I had been feeling guilty. I stopped writing my Spiritual Exercises when I felt it for a fact that my father's life could not be saved and that the death of which I had been given signs was his (alas, not mine).

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I know now what pain is: it is the desire to be annihilated. What could a dying man be thinking of those who survive him, dearly loved though they may be? My father did not get to live through the exile of old age, although he was one who would have deserved it, fully. I am in all respects embarrassingly inferior to him, an unworthy scion, a dunderhead almost. I am the parody of a destiny which the gods had decreed that my father should not live. I feel a keen guilt to think how he loved me. Good God!—how little is left of life when the people whom we have loved all pass away into the timelessness of death... This love I had for my father, I seemed to know so surely that it could save him from death, yet it turned out all too helpless in the end. Should we be truly loved, I know that we would never die. I did not know how to love him, nor did all the people who had ever cared for him. To be redeemed is to become worthy of God's love, because, if you have it, you can no longer fall under the heel of death. As for mortals, nobody knows how to love fully, save for those who give us birth. I will now speak of my father. 2 0 2 . I was with him, in the hospital, the whole night between July 24th and 25th. of (he died on the 27th, at twenty minutes past seven). His words: "Romi...it's terrible...it's a terrible thing to be born." "I am under a vow" (he looks at his watch: 11.20 p. m.) ..."it's not yet time." He weeps now, his face composed, his eyes closed. From time to time, he covers his face with his left hand, the way the Romans used to hide the face of death under the toga: "It's awful to be so indebted to your mother." On the 25 th, in the afternoon, he wanted to know from my sister where I was. When the answer came, he said, "Tell him not to come any longer: I died yesterday." He asked mother for a knife; I came in and heard him groan, "I want to die". He checked himself when he realised that he was not alone. He called my sister and told her in an urgent but halting voice: "Bobi, it's because of these...because of...these...because of these...", looking at the nurse who had just administered him an injection. Wishing to get round an embarrassing moment, Bobi told him that she understood; father went: "Then repeat"... That night he wept and called for me three times. "I'm here, dad!": "All right, Romi, off you go...!" The last time it happened it was in the morning, when I told him that I would leave. I kissed him, asked if he was in pain at all and he shook his head: "No", with the same discretion which he had always adopted about his disease and, likewise, against other people's compassion: he would not suffer anyone to be under

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any debt to him (even if merely one of regret). He smiled at me. That moment I recalled the light that had shown on his face the previous night, when I had spoken to him as he was hiding his tears: "I love you so much, daddy", and when he had replied: "I know, Romi, ...that's why...it's so difficult...so difficult." I had stroked him with a hand which was not allowed to be any less than sure, and whispered the word "maestro" in his ear, the cheerful, though respectful, name which I would call him by in his good days. As I was heading for the door he gazed at me, his eyes wide open, invaded by a green warm light like that of ripe grapes, and he loved me for the whole eternity in which he was going to be away from me. That was the last lucid look which he, the loving father in love with the creature that was his by birth, had for me. Good God, I had not believed even for a second that my father would die and now, when this unlikely thing was happening, I kept thinking wildly and desperately of the day when I was going to find him well, and talk with him about returning home. During the whole cycle of his agony, I helped his death along, and had no qualms about it. I have lately come to realise the true meaning of "father is no more". When one faces death or has been left desolate by it, religion is just as useless a comfort as any. After he died, I promised myself to read only St Paul's Corinthians for forty days. I did not keep my promise. He who knows death knows well that remedies, for the heart, are deeply inadequate. Death is not curable; it is not a malady of the intellect and definitely not one of the soul: the soul, or our immateriality, has no part in this. Words do not lose their substance against the raw facts, only when set against the facts' irremissible nature. Death is when one is cut off from being here, it is the implausible negation of the being that is. When a man dies angels are left out of existence, that is certain. But then what happens to God, I ask myself? What baffles the thought which thinks of dying is how it says no to that most natural feeling that life is eternal. A living person belongs "here", even if nobody knows exactly what this "here" means. Instead of that, there is a complete experience of "being here" which renders all definition futile. Yet a dead person is one who was here a moment ago and all of a sudden is gone: he or she becomes absent in the abyss of an instant which, although lived, cannot be grasped, for it has no duration. The real instant in which the death of a man occurs is a thing beyond all understanding. In fact, the instant does not even exist, but has already been sucked into the abyss of finitude. What exists, however, is the corpse, which has the same annoying power, in reverse, as that which transmits in the sophist reply received by Zeno of Elea to

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his argument about the impossibility of movement: the antagonist did nothing but rose and walked. The corpse exists, and yet the instant of death does not. How can this be? Now let me remember. He had regained consciousness a moment earlier (still, how much time was that, in actual fact?), but he could no longer speak. He nodded when a question was addressed, meaning that he understood. (But what did he understand, in reality?) A body is never close enough for us to get hold of it. The last powers of understanding which my dying father possessed allowed him to recognise the room in which his first wife, Odarca, had died thirty-five years ago, but for whose death I would not have been born. His last comeback should have been the supreme anointment (except that my father did not believe in God). In real fact, it was only the last recognition: as painful and clumsy an understanding as ever the living condition allows. Did he know that he was dying? He had known it two days before his agonies began, and he had used Coleone's imprecatory words to declare what life is. What exactly he had in mind when he uttered his "curse" I do not know. Still, only a little while before he had pronounced almost to a word what one reads in Theognis, fragment 452, which I am convinced he did not know. Bitter regrets were tearing him apart. Or was it the sign of a different kind of judgement, holding differently weighed scales in front of the dead and of the living? My father seemed to counter the Horatian non omnis moriar with the pre-Socratic mors omnia finit. B u t t h a t is van-

ity! What he had made clear in that full and irrevocable way of the dying, by "cursing", was that he knew he would be just a corpse before long, and that death was it. Those who survive are left to carry on with their lives, cloaked to the point of total fogginess in the enigma which precludes them from seeing. It is still possible that, in uttering those words, father was bewailing the painful impact with a force which I was unable to see then at work, and which he himself had ignored with determination up until that moment; now he was humbled by it, cried, rejected it, and swore. As one is a man once only, one has to be a man to the end. Was he right both ways? As long as we are alive, our consciousness forever walls us off from that outside force which is our destiny: when we are dying, the first centre of our being comes back to us, and thus restores to the present a horizon which, up until this time, has been probed only with changing odds and an uncertain will. Until this moment, the present has always left us behind—we have been nothing but chance effects and sources of error for it—we have not deserved to know anything of it. Now, it is growing ever more impatient with us.

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As his soul was living through its last form as a dying man, my father made out the room which had been his and Odarca's in his youth, my painting on the wall and the little angel candlestick with two lights in it, which he had brought back from Vienna at the end of his exile. The two lights were burning, and his eyes were drawn to them. At that point he smiled and nodded that he knew, yes, he was home (he had wished to die in his own bed!). His eyes followed the length of the room to the west, where the dawn was creeping in from beyond the window, coming to him from the west, the sunset, his. "As a dead man do I set into the earth and rise towards the sun", I was to write, later. What sun was there when the world in which we had lived was already dead and the sunset, so pure in former times, was now one and the same with the dust? He then turned to look more closely at us, and looked at his daughters. I believe that he smiled one more time. At last, he drew his chin down to his chest, as was his habit when he tried to sneeze quietly, and he hiccoughed (Lord, it was without any effort, it was more like a prayer!); he did so three times in a row, briskly, his body relaxing. Then suddenly he became quiet, turning round into death. I once asked my sister Lydia how she had known him to be dead. "The stillness", she answered me. But then, what stillness was there in a body which had been agonising for several months and whose features were marked by the effort of death and its futility? He had been dying a little with every torment which wrung cries of pain out of him at times, which he would suppress as soon as he was conscious again, with that bashfulness and discretion which were in his nature more deeply rooted even than his discursive intelligence, which was not, as anyone who has known him may vouch, ordinary. 2 0 3 . His mouth had been left open like a wound drained of blood. They called me to tie a scarf round his head, lest that unpleasant rictus which death had carved from his face, and which spelt suffering, should become worse. We, the family, were all agreed that a twisted mouth was preferable to one half-open, with its silent gasp. I did not look again at his face very soon, which was then, quite independent of us, embarking on its first day of life as a corpse. But the amazing thing had already happened. When, half an hour later, I came back to wash his body, I was able to see a distinct smile on his now fully relaxed, ungrimacing face (whom was he smiling at?). The amazing shape of the smile on what was now a firmly closed mouth took us aback and threw us on our knees. From death, my father was

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smiling a slightly embarrassed smile, yet one altogether calm, conciliatory, easy-going, full of concern lest we should be inconvenienced. His face looked pleased despite the embarrassed self-effacement which came from his bashfulness. "I have died and I now am causing you trouble": he seemed to be telling us that it would not last long. 2 0 4 . I washed him. Then I dressed him, and his awkward body would hang unnaturally, like a doll swinging askew in the inexperienced hands of a child. Somebody else was steering my hands which felt the slain body of my father for the first time. His flesh was as smooth as tight rubber and the moisture which would not enter his pores was like grease on oilcloth. Dead for such a short time, and so far removed from life already! His lenient smile—his for one last time—was saying to us, "What you are doing to me is alright, do not put yourselves out", and he was looking us in the eye with a stare which no longer started from the bulb, and which could no longer carry any light back into it. Did he still feel the pains that my clumsy hands took trying not to humiliate him? He had always smiled at me and his love for me had been shattering, not impotent like my own. I do remember the light which shone in his eyes when, already more than half unconscious, he recognised me in the hospital room. I also remember his hand, tumefied by the catheter, groping for mine—his urged forth by a love which was a torture to him, mine alive and shaking, with tears standing suppressed in the muscles which dared not twitch. It was then that I told him how much I loved him, and he agreed. He knew! Later, when I left in the morning, he raised his arm as a good-bye to me, repeating the gesture which I had sketched when he left our place on March 17th, when he had his coffee in our kitchen in Mo§ilor Road (that was one spot that he remembered warmly and wished to come back to). T h a t was the last sign by whose means his love was able to shine out, unmaimed by disease. T h e n he died, and I swore to read only St Paul, and I did not keep my vow although I did not break it either. Whenever I think of my father now, I think of all the things that would have pleased him to do and he can no longer do, and also of those I do not know yet but which would have pleased him nonetheless. What do I really know about my father? I know more about Malraux or Montherlant than I do about him. There is, however, something which I alone possess and which no biographer, no matter how erudite, could ever grasp: I have the knowledge of his immediate presence, which endures in my living flesh, living the same ineradicable life as my flesh does. I do not feel the same about Malraux,

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whose biography is so familiar to me. Because of my father's discreet and rather secretive nature, my knowledge of his world is poor, and even where I know something, it is made up of jumbled and uncertain shards; what I do feel, however, is the fragrance, overwhelming for me, of his immediate nature, something which had remained unknown to the man who had spoken so beautifully about his life at the funeral. That knowledge, which is the last body of his earthly being, now disappeared, will itself pass into nothingness. Then his second body, the memory, will follow, killed by idleness or death. It is all the same. We die both when our body dies and when we can no longer account for what the soul has experienced through this body. God will be the ransom of amnesiacs, and also more. 2 0 5 . I have been hoping to fight despair with these words: the words that I am writing. 2 0 6 . In time, I have forgotten him. Everything wears itself out in us: love and forgetfulness alike. It is as if all that is pure becomes degraded when we touch it, that we in time bring out the putrid entrails of everything. Yet what is truly important here is not forgetfulness itself, but the fact that I eventually grew inured to the thought that he was dead. Suffering never redeems mediocrity, which is the same as becoming used to that which deserves nothing but disgust and revolt from our part ("Yet against death I will cry out, I will cry out against death")- "He loved you so", everyone keeps saying to me. But then, did not I love him, too? I feel as though I could howl (and cry instead). Where is his love, which has been torn away from me, and where is my love, already infiltrated by the flimsy remedies of the void? Now and again I do feel, intently, that happiness alone might restore him to my senses. (Oh, but I wish he were alive, and that I need not remember him so vividly, alas!) In truth, nobody lies when he or she says, "I am soon to die." Mediocrity is the only obstacle in the path of love. We ought to be truly magnanimous through our lives, yet the demon of futility prevents us from loving. What happens next is that we fall into a vicious circle: love is denied us, resentment gains ground against the purity in us, and then it gets the better of it. What we do, in our turn, is abandon love and expect pleasure to procure for us the one thing which the trial of happiness would have never brought us to: a suspended sentence to the guilty verdict. In the end we do just what everybody else does and one of the several reasons why that happens is that, at core, we are nothing

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but what we do not hate that we are, although we well should: we, that is, we are just your everyday kind of people. No doubt that, seen in such a light, mankind does not deserve to be saved—I no more than it shall be saved, which is only fair. Ever since I stopped feeling immortal, truth is not enough to nurture me any longer... 2 0 7 . What I discovered in writing the journal of the years 1985-86 was that death in the strong sense cannot be overcome by such means as intelligence has. The death of my father immediately reduced my lust for study to nothing. Derision took hold of me, irrevocably. That did not happen because my own, soon-to-come death was to render all the pains of incomplete knowledge pointless anyway, but because I lacked the crucial knowledge of saving the people whom I loved. My father's death made me suffer as much as anyone. None of the many books crammed in my head were of any use to me at all. My flesh was hurt, and the pain stayed there. The hope that those words on paper might overcome despair remained as vain as d'Ors was inconsequential in his late confession to Marcel Sendrail at Caseron del Sacramento, when he said that one had to believe in hope above anything else. Death demands each day its daily portion of our soul. My father's death tore me apart. The crisis which could already be glimpsed in the journal of '81-'84 now broke out with paralysing acuity. Not many people will confess to having heard the trumpets of the Angels of Doom. I will say only this much: I open at random a notebook dating from before my father's death and read about my day's work: it contained L'homme précaire et la littérature (Malraux), Leftism (Lenin), Hilbert spaces and the Heavyside distribution. In a notebook dating from the beginning of 1986,1 merely entered, "I watched the sky." I was twenty-eight. The crisis which would devastate me utterly for two years was free to creep in from that point on. 2 0 8 . When I started to keep a journal on a neat, day-by-day basis, it was in 1981 and I felt that my memory was all that I was left which could give my existence its grounds. A failure to retrieve my memories would have meant that everything was lost, but retrieve them I did. What was lost now, instead, were my grounds. The principle on which, before my father's death, I knew I could rely at any moment of my life was the following: dereliction can be defeated through study and creation, and human beings are infinitely less important than one's inner self-surpassing. Well, creation could no longer fight dereliction now,

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because all effort was bound to slip away from its purpose, and into hapless vanity. Yet, as I was contemplating my own disintegration, I felt an unquenchable thirst for the nearness of human beings: I wanted to be saved through love. "Happiness is a state which coincides with the margins of our ego", as Ortega y Gasset has put it. I had already reached the margins of my ego in my despair and my helplessness. What I wanted now was to be happy, in a way in which I had never been before. Everything mattered little to me when set against my thirst to be saved through the love of living beings. I am grateful for the love which I received. 2 0 9 . Nineteen eighy-six was the year in which I wrote the journal entitled Light Is in Things and under Their Skin (Journal VII). It was also the year when I wrote the cycle of The Nights (36 poems) and rewrote the first journal, To Love. The whole year was simply a long exertion to love and to make myself loved, which failed pitifully in the end, in personal ruin and in rejection. What had happened before, when I was fifteen, happened once again: I was rejected by somebody only to be embraced by somebody else, who gave me just the kind of love I had craved for. Not only the wisdom, but also the madness of the past is bound to burst out in the offspring. Did that mean that I had not yet absorbed my past? Or could it be that the structures which my life can, in principle, engender had already taken visible shape? T h e most important thing that I learnt is that ages are not homogeneous and that years spontaneously aggregate as structures. Until the age of thirteen, my years were "homogeneous". Between thirteen and fifteen, I went through the first interim epoch: childhood was disowned in its natural and ingenuous essence and replaced by an epoch of fractures, questionings, and self-abstraction, one which replaced the passion for being alive with the urge for drugs, vice, and excitation. The crisis was made the worse by that love quandary in which I was the rejected one, and then it was consumed, if only by leaving it behind, in another love which offered itself to me although I did not seek it. I was no more than fifteen and I was ripe for the age which was to turn away from dissipation: I was all set now for the epoch of valuecentred consciousness. In the period between fifteen and twenty-eight, my time was still "homogeneous" but yet it was different from both childhood and from the first interim. This large structure, which was one of awareness and of character built with effort and rational thinking, spanned several sub-

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structures, which were as follows: a) between fifteen and twenty (terminus ad quern: the army), an age which put its full trust in the values of culture, of personal genius, and in the consolations of posterity (which I saw as the ultimate and irrefutable justice); b) between twenty and twnety-four (1981), the age when I lived two things at once: there were the side-effects of a lingering world in which I no longer believed, but it was one with my flesh and blood, having been f o r m e d by its values and exigencies; there was also another world which was mysteriously being born, one which might be characterised resorting to the words spoken by Ortega y Gasset, "Life is what is individual." I was discovering at my own expense that, at least in the world of living creatures, if individuality was amiss, everything was amiss. After the revelation of culture came that of life, c) Between twenty-four and twenty-eight (terminus ad quern: my father's death) was the age when I had the revelation of history and of the voices of those who had died in its ongoing turmoil, which a well-trained inner ear would be able to descry and retrieve the message: now was the time of the decisive experience which writing the poem Listening to Death meant for me. Just as I was going about such pursuits, I realised that my whole being was lessened in the absence of concrete, flesh and blood, h u m a n beings in my life; the hunger for them would make up the dominant theme of the second interim, from twenty-eight to thirty. This was the age when, for the first time, I became receptive both to the mystery of living beings, in w h o m I now seek my salvation, and to their beauty, which is well worth delighting in until one ends up in flames. It has never failed since to bring me to my knees. T h e second interim has already been preparing a different structure of age, into which I am now stepping and cannot possibly say anything about, as yet. Consequently, there have been two caesurae in my life so far, corresponding to the two interims. There have also been two dominant structures, spanning thirteen years each. I shall speak about the substructures of my first age (nought to thirteen years old) in my book Ab Initio, for which I am already gathering material (notes which I collect after anamnesis sessions). I have overlooked experiences of love in this essay which you have before you, and I did so on purpose, as here I have only wished to lay bare the "theory", In the journals, which I shall rewrite in time, as I did in the case of To Love, such experiences, which have been most significant ones, shall most definitely find a place. Last of all, if God will give me more days to live, I will probably write a full spiritual biography, telling the story of a formation, by necessity, incomplete.

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2 1 0 . In 1985,1 had no idea that I was entering the interim of the second caesura. Did I not ignore the same thing also when I turned thirteen and resentfully abandoned my childhood, when I threw myself with greed and anxiety into the excesses of a hippie life which turned away from all that I had lived before, totally, and threw anathema over the familiar world around me? My longing for concrete matter was behind both caesurae, which caused them to be drives towards full obliteration: between thirteen and fifteen, I did away not only with my recent past but also with the very fundamentals of my life up to that point; between twenty-eight and thirty I lived through the crisis which dissolved the personality model which I had built since I was fifteen. The crisis of the first interim showed itself by means of a love conundrum in which I was accepted and, after that, rejected. The consummation of this failure made up the main matter for reflection in my first diary. I then settled myself in my second personality structure in full awareness, burning all that I had written until then. The second interim made itself known in the same way as the first, and had the same results; the tandem of the two women was present once more, identical to the point of hallucination, with the same import and working on me in just the same way: loved at first, I was then rejected and eventually "saved" by the woman whom I did not love. Whilst the advent of the second structure of ages was brought to awareness through a sacrificial burning, the presentiment of the third (already started) change took the shape of a passion to preserve: I catalogued and bound within strong covers all the writings of my second age. This was surely a slightly senile fancy, if I consider that, in that same period, I proceeded gingerly to itemise all the books in my library; this fervid love for order was doubtless screening an unconsummated rage of disorder. I believe that the symmetry which, as previously shown, has been underlying my formation is not invented, but emerges neatly from my actions. This precise thing is, therefore, remarkable, that there is in my life a will of sense, which now finally ends up as a conscious will for sense—the same conscious will which has settled me "with a direction" in my complacent, slightly ironical, and smiling, destiny. 2 1 1 . I have said above that a general will of sense, which is in the "cosmos", ends up identifying itself with the will for one, which is, this time, a conscious one. You have probably noticed that I am particularly open to the kind of reasoning which deduces an objective state of the ontology of the subject out of a certain stage of consciousness. After all, we

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are no more than ordinary, foul flesh but for the thinking which we have done; and if our thoughts do not become objective realities, we still remain nothing but foul flesh. If, on the contrary, our thoughts have had that bright intenseness which constrains even the flesh which is touched by them to receive them, and then transmute alchemically to become itself thought, which is to say, a body of light, if this has happened, we can say that our life has been transfigured and that we are now of a better stock: we know how to distil a substance fit for angels out of what God has left us ab origine. T h e privileged position held by conscience has been outstandingly, yet enigmatically, underlined in Bardo Todol, T h e Book of the Dead. In the bardo state, the dead person goes through the states which correspond to all the six elements, save for the last, and subtlest of them all, the ether. As an aggregate of "matter", the ether is personified by Vairochana, the one "who makes all things visible in their form". He does not appear to those in the bardo state, because the faculty of awareness, to which ether corresponds in the esoteric order of the strata of consciousness, is not developed in ordinary humankind to such an extent as to become manifest. This is the reason why the ontological leap is always spoken of as a process of becoming aware: only what has already been done away with will come out into the strong light of awareness. To be done away with means here to be lost or returned back to the flesh. I will talk more about this law, which I have called realisatio, when the time is ripe to speak of the event of January 13th, 1984. 2 1 2 . There is yet another remarkable symmetry which I would insist on. T h e crises which marked the interims gave rise to the overpowering need to write journals. T h e scrupulous recording of what has happened to one on a daily basis has stemmed from an urge to confess and has translated a state of active misapprehension. Living in a state of crisis conspicuously means living as a subject to history and not rising above it. But if one lives the crisis whilst paying heed inwardly to its fantasies, with one's spirit confiscated by it and the eyes keeping watch for the significance which lurks beyond it, this means that one is transcending it already. F r o m here the call (vocatus) towards confession arises. T h e first journal, which, after I transcribed it, became To Love, was begun the moment when it became urgent to elucidate the erotic failure which had shown both the outbreak and the consumption of my crisis, as has been said already. This was the winter of '12-13, when I was fifteen years old. My second attempt to write a journal (Notebook I)

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t u r n e d out to b e mere fiction, as a result of my incapacity to render the lived matter with any objectivity (which is, generally speaking, a flaw in the way one assumes things, a n d , hence, u n d e r s t a n d s t h e m ) ; the lived m a t t e r itself was still too new for m e to be able to contemplate with a look which was not oblique. T h e three other diaries which followed were also rather retrospective in scope: they all took pains to purge the guilty d o m a i n of consciousness f r o m the disabling experience which experience itself had n o t m a n a g e d to take in and then digest. I a m a m a n with a certain pride, that is t r u e . However, I d o n o t believe that the m o s t i m p o r t a n t thing in the picture was the rejection of m y love (although the h u m a n being w h o rejects your love rejects your whole h u m a n i t y with it, or else, your right to live): the crisis itself appears to have b e e n the self-disabling experience of which I have spoken. To be unloved signals a certain lack of quality. In this sense, to be rejected in love has the role of a refusal to be offered the confirmation without which no model of personality can endure (provided that recrimination and resentment would have n o part to play in it). Yet, in a sense, the same thing is h a p p e n i n g now, again: my feelings of uncertainty and the n e e d to be u n d e r s t o o d awaken in m e the urge to write diaries. As I have shown, I also m a d e some attempts at diary-writing between '81 and '84 (Journals IV and V), whose purpose was to d a m the overwhelming tendency to forget what was sweeping over me, and also to p u t some order into my daily working plans (something especially t r u e a b o u t Journal V). Yet all of t h e m were plainly meaningless, as I did n o t write t h e m u n d e r impulse of any kind (apart f r o m one which surreptitiously a n n o u n c e d itself at the time in the f o r m of an erotic/affective anorexia). You know their history: at the beginning of 1985 I took the decision to write one page per day (which will later be refashioned as the first volu m e of my Spiritual Exercises); at the end of this self-imposed drill my father died. T h e crisis of the second interim broke out a r o u n d the same time, which was, strangely enough, an age of diaries (the first interim would quite possibly have b e e n such a time, too, had I been a writer of greater skill); I then wrote the Spiritual Exercises (Journal VI), Light Is in Things and under Their Skin (Journal VII) and Anarh (Journal VIII). All of these are journals in the true sense of the w o r d , which m e a n s that they all revolve r o u n d problematic experiences and acute solutions requiring careful thinking and close attention. T h e weight of a journal is to be f o u n d in its inner trepidation. Between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, I did not understand and did not fully acquiesce in the things which were h a p p e n i n g to me; I was carried away by the very principle

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which had negated me, and I would let it h a p p e n . T h e paradigm which my personality had fed u p o n was itself changing. In a sense, this felt as if I was in a slave market: it was not I who was changing, s o m e b o d y else, a stranger, was selling me. To w h o m was I to be sold? I was t o r t u r e d by a lack of certainty like the p r e s e n t m e n t of an irreversible loss: I felt that the best in m e was leaving my p e r s o n to die away, undeservedly. I felt that the type of personality that I h a d taken such p a i n s to build (the personality of awareness) was being killed whilst still alive, just as my father had died whilst he still had life left in him. All of us will most certainly take one tearing regret to our graves. Such is the well-known cruelty of life, to which n o r e d e m p t i o n , so far, has f o u n d an end. It is A n a n d a stiffening in f r o n t of the eighty-year-old B u d d h a (see Maha parannibbanasutta, III, 40). Even if we were ranked a m o n g the gods, we would still hang for ever u p o n the love which the beings would deny us. 2 1 3 . T h e journal which I have been writing since S e p t e m b e r , 1986, entitled Anarh, and which I shall p u t an e n d to on D e c e m b e r 31st, 1987, was written, in spite of my will, in the shape of a broken mosaic. I can now look with d e t a c h m e n t u p o n its fissures of growth but, whilst I was still at work, its shaky joints m a d e m e bitter towards it and I felt overwhelmed. Its register abruptly changes four times in accordance with the distinct states of personality which are given voice there: in n o n e of t h e m was I able to settle for any length of time. Still, I u n d e r s t a n d only now the p r o f o u n d connection between my first a t t e m p t at writing a journal and this journal which may well be the last: I d o n o t know whether I will ever again have the inner calling to write another. Only now do I see the ages following one another, and u n d e r s t a n d their rotation (whilst also grasping their precession). Anarh is the journal of a progressive liberation f r o m conditioning, which has b e e n at once blind and vehement, deriving f r o m contorted, u n r e d e e m e d experiences. Even if I have led an inadvertent life d u r i n g this second interim, the surplus of consciousness b r o u g h t by age was not without its use: I have m a n aged to u n d e r s t a n d in less than two years things which I did not u n d e r stand in fifteen. I r e m e m b e r N a e Ionescu' words that there are things close to you which you have to fail to u n d e r s t a n d for a very long time, in order to u n d e r s t a n d t h e m in the end. Life itself, any life, is not just an unfinished apologue b u t also an ambiguous and misleading challenge. T h e only moral is not to lose hope. O n e has to fail to u n d e r s t a n d , in order to u n d e r s t a n d better in the end. O n e has to live even when o n e is rejected, in order never to die again in the way in which one has quite

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likely died m o r e t h a n once already, until now, b u r n e d by one's error and by the mysterious thirst for falsification. 2 1 4 . It is clear to me that these three Journals (VI-VIII) make a whole, i n a s m u c h as they all belong to a temporary space of crisis, which they m a k e visible, to which they give a voice, and which they finally decant. It might n o t be simple chance that, initially, Anarh was gathered, page by page, in a folder on whose cover the neat h a n d of an accountant had written "Deficit Reports", at some obscure m o m e n t between the two wars. Indeed, I wrote Spiritual Exercises while I was waiting for my death, hoping that I would save myself through them, but instead they prepared the g r o u n d for m y father's death; then I loved, and wrote Light Is in Things and under Their Skin, and, finally, I ceased to love and tried on several skins in Anarh without feeling that any of t h e m belonged to me. T h e circle is now closing, although my senses are still convalescent, and it h u r t s m e . I t h o u g h t a b o u t e n d i n g Anarh with the kind of spiritual exercise which I practised at the beginning of 1985: that is, to write every day one page a b o u t the person that I am b u t will never c o m e back to. 2 1 5 . E a c h p e r s o n is the same age as the knowledge that h e or she has invented. I a m too young to be sure whether or n o t age is indeed d e t e r m i n e d by one's memories. M y father, w h e n he died, felt young, whilst I, f o r o n e , have lost that e m p o w e r i n g feeling ever since I was twenty-five. I have not felt innocent anymore since my father's death. Every love t o r n to pieces increases one's feeling of guilt. Love may be stronger t h a n d e a t h , yet it is n o t sure that it opposes it. Love strips you bare every time, it does n o t m a t t e r whether it was requited love or not. 2 1 6 . I have come to look u p o n my past with a kind of clarity which is a little disquieting. If I am right in the clarifications which I have m a d e , it m e a n s that I a m only left with a rather exiguous, dry substance. If I a m w r o n g , t h e n all is fine and there are still chances of a f u t u r e . Yet, even if the reasoning in this picture corresponds to the truth, everything is not yet lost (destiny closes as it is understood): I am left with my childh o o d , which still carries unlimited possibilities, for I a m ignorant of all of m y origins which are not invented. D o you n o t think that the rational rigour w h i c h I p u t into ordering my ages is similar to the gesture of b u r n i n g m y writings, which m a r k e d the start of a new age, at fifteen? U n d e r s t a n d i n g a n d cataloguing everything as if o n e is dealing with a finite whole is obviously a way to destroy, as one can n o longer r e t u r n

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to t h e places w h i c h o n e has c o n s u m e d a n d left n o r e m a i n d e r b e h i n d . I imagine myself leaving for new places like the Spanish conquistadors: leaving all the smoking ships b e h i n d , yet keeping everything in me, in my desire to conquer. 2 1 7 . I am sure that death is, in essence, only a consent to die. I do not really know what "to die" means. But I know what to be dying is. Every person has a grounding principle that gives life to him or her. This principle is never visible in everyday life, as consciousness only touches those areas in the h u m a n being which can be b r o u g h t to light in what, for it, are safe terms. We c a n n o t be o u r own masters; o u r essential lack of w i s d o m makes us ungovernable. T h e principle m e n t i o n e d above is, on the contrary, always "conscious": it holds the light and is its source. It is also aware of all the aspects of our "vitality". As long as it does not consent to o u r death, we do not die. We only die when this principle orders the cells which m a k e us up, "die, now". N o cell in our body would take the decision otherwise, on its own. I know nothing about the reason why this h a p p e n s , b u t that such an order exists is plain to me. In the same way, diseases are decisions to fall ill. In our world, consenting is essential. We maintain the link with the world of the f u n d a m e n t a l t h r o u g h our faith alone, which is our inner certitude. T h o s e w h o do not die are those w h o have been able to establish conscious links with their inner principle. T h e c h a n g e of subject has everything to d o with P l o t i n u s ' w o r d s at the time of his death, "I try to uplift my own divinity to the divinity of the whole." 2 1 8 . I have already said that I d o n o t k n o w the exact t i m e w h e n I b e c a m e a reader of the Bible. By 1979 I was already familiar with large p a r t s of this incredible, enthralling book. In 1981, for instance, I was able to distinguish between prophets by the rhythm of the exhortation alone. T h i s is a fairly i m p o r t a n t detail. Indeed, s o m e t i m e in January, 1981, I read Cantemir's Hieroglyphic History a n d was impressed by the flavour of certain words of wisdom in current use at the time. T h e y were, however, cast in the m o u l d of an old language which was ritualistic and unyielding: I cannot tell what dignity they possessed which m a d e them attain the spiritual height of the Psalms. O n May 3rd, 1981, as I was still u n d e r their spell, I wrote a p o e m of fifty verses which was blatantly inspired by the Old Testament, although its content (in a dogmatic sense) was, in fact, related to T h e Book of Revelation. I gave it the title "A Sealed F o u n t a i n h e a d " using a verse f r o m T h e Song of Songs,

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(4: 12). I did not dwell on it and went on to other things, just like Dante heeding Virgil's advice: Non raggioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa (Inf. 111,51). 2 1 9 . I had some old, vague memories lingering at the back of my mind: "As on a maiden's face the blushes slowly fade when shame dies out" (Paradise, XVIII, 64 et seq.). You will remember that Agnosto Theo was also obsessed with a violent and bloody wedding in its epigraph, which in our talk I related to the image of the Danaides. Still, with Dante, the voice of the depths could no longer be disguised. A young girl prepares herself for her wedding. She is shy and her coyness gives her that ancient wisdom, which works for women as their deepest instinct: she withdraws what makes her charming, and charms through what she has hidden. T h e bed is untouched and the wedding about to burst out in merrymaking. Her garment opens and shows her tender leg. Everybody is waiting for the much-awaited one. He exists even in the wish of the girl who is calling him: he is behind the door. (You will remember here the parable of the foolish virgins in Matthew, 25, and also Christ's words, "I am the Door", John, 10: 9). It is night and she stands in full moonlight. T h e light of the moon is cold, yet the girl finds the moon's frigidity full of heat. T h e rays of the moon are like ravenous tongues. An erotic violation is already underway in this waiting, which is no longer chaste. T h e cold light of the moon searches the untouched body for places which will never belong to the husband and which the law has placed next to this woman. Why is that so? Every enunciation is a tamed denunciation. Just as the outstretched hand of the young girl, already provoked by the lunar cycle of femininity, is seeking her lover, the lover is being taken into the Elysian Fields. According to a mythology expounded by Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride, the souls on their way to the sun halt on the moon to cleanse themselves of carnal touches: they leave the place as immaculate, aerial spirits. Popular piety takes delight in drawings of the moon as an old man with a lantern carrying a wicker basket. This is the full-fledged narrative: a girl is waiting for her lover during their wedding night; he will not come and will slip away from her arms, into death; the moon sanctifies this unfulfilled wedding while celebrating its own immodest one. T h e narrator's voice is the one recounting the story; its object is the world in which the girl lives her trauma. Yet the poem begins with the author's voice which subjectively (lyrically, that is) brings about his "obsession" and torment: what is there about the enigmatic object of the narrator's epic voice? T h e elucidation made

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by the author advances the narrative. His clarifying things—for himself, as it were—is closely related to the development of narrative itself, meaning that the object of his obsession is expressed in the terms of an unfinished apologue. T h e second stage is the coming of the "scholiast": I give this n a m e to the narrator who comments not only the narrative itself, but also the subjective and problematic experiences communicated by the author. The "scholiast" is as "objective" as a monk in his scriptorium. His time is that of the utterance itself, which is revealed from the following: the author's voice "lives" and the narrator resorts to the narrative present tense to pose the world as an uninterrupted story; the projection of the author's voice on the narrative voice constructs the story as an apologue without a fable. T h e voice of the "scholiast" embeds into a "historical" commentary the voices which make up the substance of the world which he perceives from a distance, or else, from the pages of the book which contains the palimpsest. I have used the metaphor of the scriptorium to define the scholiast's voice because the world on which he comments is a plane one and must be read accordingly. T h e scholiast's role is to read the various layers of writing simultaneously, not by arranging them hierarchically. T h e Book of Revelation is transcribed over Cicero's writings and on top of it comes Timaios' treatise about the isosceles triangle (now lost). T h e correct reading is that done by the scholiast and amounts to a fragment from "Scipio's Dream", read as a sequel to the fragment "I was on the island named Patmos", which is "argumented" with an enigmatic reference to the letter % that—according to Justin's commentaries on Plato—represents the symbol of the Son of God; the two circles coming after the initial letter in Christ's name can be figured as a section containing an isosceles triangle—which, according to Timaios, makes up the golden section, if you consider its proportions. T h e scheme of the fifty verses which I wrote then, on May 3rd, 1981 is as follows: the author suggests a non-solution, which he is possessed by; the narrator presents it as part of an interrupted narrative (without a key); the author now inhabits the object presented by the narrator as being its very non-solution (severely modified this time); the scholiast reads both voices in the manner of various other texts which he does not n a m e but which can be guessed by some typical referents: they are the key (an aleatory key, as the scholiast, who ignores both the hierarchy as an attribute of truth and the very fact of narrating, does not have it either), the key comprising the two voices which complete and answer each other. T h e author now reaffirms the reader's experience which

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does not match any of the texts preceding it; the scholiast now suggests other keys which do not fit either, and so on. What conclusion can one draw from all these? T h e essence of literature is a state of active misunderstanding, which has become a contemplative act. Nothing more than you already know can be learned when you write. T h e only thing is that in writing you release one kind of ignorance and embrace another, which is even vaster and more mysterious but which has already absorbed you (through writing), with your life, also. It is a kind of ignorance which has, in addition, the quaint virtue of releasing one from all unresolved matters and their unredeemed state. In other words, one discovers in writing a territory in which ignorance receives spiritual powers. How is that? Writing is alchemy. 2 2 0 . I soon forgot about my exigent, severe inspiration as I began to brood on the charm manifested by the licentious epigrams in Anthologia Graeca: I had been collecting scandalous notes for the volume Chalaos and Other Poems all summer, trying to understand the inner mechanisms of the ancients' pederasty. On the August 25th and 26th, 1981, I suddenly gave up my frivolous interests as I felt an urge to compose some hymnal rhythms on a recriminatory eulogy. It was an imprecation in liturgical form, if such a thing can be imagined. This abrupt, unpredicted inspiration came as a total surprise to me as is easy to see from the fact that, in the days following the writing of the two hymns, I gave up the erotic epigrams (Anthologia Graeca, V) to reread T h e Book of Job. I returned to the pleasurable frivolities of easy love after September 15th. Nevertheless, something had happened in the meantime: at the beginning of October, I composed a poem in which I tried to express through the famous sarcasm dors-tu content, Voltaire?, the enigmatic nature of the following situations: 1) Nanni Grosso (a sculptor) could not confess before dying because of the crucifix being improperly carved; 2) on his death bed, Malherbe reproached one of his servants with a language mistake (a solecism); 3) Grandet's last pious effort was a false one since he was attracted not by the crucifix itself but by the gold from which it was made. What is the import of all those things? T h e fact that I could see a paradigmatic unity at work in separate historic facts: both Malherbe and Nanni Grosso obviously shared the same structure. I started noticing repetitions and identities which seemed to annihilate time. I reread Fioretti and Cantico del Sol intending to write a p o e m in honour of St Francis' anniversary (1182-1982). On October 9th, 1981, I, wholly

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unexpectedly, wrote a genuine psalm which echoed the sensorial quality of Franciscan tones. It was not merely a poem; what happened in fact was that I experienced a total "state" of psalm-praying. T h e enstasy reappeared on October 12th with yet another psalm, "What I sense to be my body is the restlessness in me" (Poems II, pp. 452-9), and then reached its peak the next day, when I, amazingly and unexpectedly, found again the voice of the young girl from May 3rd, 1981. 2 2 1 . The story of Jephthah's daughter (Judges, 11: 29-40) is sad. In exchange for delivering the children of Amon into his hands, Jephthah vows to offer God as a burnt offering the first living thing which will come out of his house in Mizpeh, to attend him upon his happy homecoming (11: 31). And home he returns indeed, in glory, having subdued the children of Amon, and his own daughter comes to meet him, and she his only child (11: 34). In a frightful distraction, Jephthah determines to do as he has vowed (it is written in Leviticus 27: 29 that "None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death"). The girl gives herself for that burnt offering and asks her father for two months of freedom, to go up and down the mountains, and bewail her virginity, with her fellows (11: 37). Jephthah consents. For two months the girl bewails her virginity in the mountains. The girls, her fellows, are with her, to soothe her. The two months come to an end and she returns to be sacrificed. She never knew a man (11: 39). From that time on the daughters of Israel go into the mountains to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite, for four days a year (11: 40). In an amorous key, this tragic story (which is somewhat like the legend of Master Manole 43 ) admits of the following enigmatic commentary from The Song of Solomon 8: 8-9, "We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for? If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar." We shall remember what is the intrinsic destination of cadet sisters: Amnon sleeps with his sister Tamar, out of an overpowering passion, and then abandons her (II Samuel, 13). Assimilating the sister with the bride is 43 One of the quintessential myths of the Romanians, a story of building (a monastery) through human sacrifice, the one chosen by fate being the master builder's wife, Ana (translator's

note).

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not merely equivocated in II Samuel: 13, but declared in The Song of Solomon 4: 12. 2 2 2 . At the root of the fascination which incest has had for me there lies no suppressed desire for sexual intercourse with my mother. I do believe, instead, that incest is one of the esoteric paradigms of Eros (in the widest sense), just as auto-eroticism is the psychological model of the modern (post-Rousseau) sensibility. In that startling voice which spoke to me on October 13th, 1981, what was in the background of the wedding which came to be postponed by death was nothing but incest. A sister loves her brother with such feelings as a lover has, and is loved in the same way (The Song of Solomon, 8: 1). Yet their cleanliness is beyond question. The tone, naturally, is that of the biblical epithalamion: the arguments, however, are taken from The Great Hymn toAton (Akhnaton) and from Cantico del Sol (St Francis). For whoever is alive to this triple reference, when he or she comes to read what I wrote, the feeling is bizarre: an event radically confined to the world of inner sensibility (which is not permitted projection: when we love, incest is metamorphosed, directed as it is at the femininity of our own body, which is that of the soul, if we are men) is here envisaged through the agency of words belonging to disparate epochs, which are such as to require with intensity the dismantling of any solution of continuity: they are the 14th and 9th centuries B. C., and the 12th century A. D. The likeness is striking, although the referential object is a paradoxical one: the incestuous hero. Here only the space of the parable is the scholiast's. I was compelled to resort to a gnomic kind of sententiousness in order to convey the space of moral strictness and austerity in which I thought that it was only right to set the love of the young siblings. Apart from that, the poem was structured on a dramatic pattern, as was only natural: the two voices of the lovers intertwine with delicate spoken touches which literally express the impossible touch of the bodies consumed by their thirst. This had to be since this wedding, too, is profaned by blood, which is other than the lustral blood of maidenhood. Both are not lost at once, and chastity we regain after each carnal act, if we but loved in truth. 2 2 3 . I was never able to give a title to this poem since my soul did not understand its nature. Writing it, I discovered that a wound is a feminine term and that to wound someone is, symbolically, to open up a

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uterus in that someone. T h e grave is a uterus, the corpse fecundates it. Where do all such things come from? I read in November a few books on the religions of the Palaeolithic (and Enuma Elish, too), looking for origins. Blood and ritual sacrifice are invariably present here. So is loving, a far cry from our civilised love-making: for the ancient people, loving was another name for abusing, for the act of loving was one and the same with that of ploughing the sod. T h e wound being feminine, I found that the hunter's adage, "Fondle them and snatch t h e m " could also be understood as an erotic strategy with an underlying ontological meaning which would be difficult to grasp. T h a t there is a profound affinity between the blows which two fighters would deal each other and those of two lovers seems to me to need no extra argument. Yet, what this means precisely, for the ontology of the subject, I do not know. I sought to shed light on this enigma by reading books on primal religions written by erudite people and also by writing poetry. Already I dimly began to glimpse that the voices which took possession of me so peremptorily did not direct me to the psalms, but to something m u c h deeper which came from the dawn of history. I see myself, on one of the last evenings of that year, alone by the light of the lamp, peering at the enlarged prints of the frescoes of Altamira and Lascaux. At long last, here was no longer sheer "aesthetics", as there was no pleasure in the receiver, about which such a fuss has been made, and all for nothing. Art brings within your reach an enigma which the words of a dialogue are unable even to voice. Its sense is that of an edification, which is to say, a lifting of the soul from the state of the sterile to that of active perplexity, that state which strives to illumine its own horizon. It is difficult to put into words a state which is rather like a bright halo of inward certitude; it is not the consequence of some process of reasoning, but, if it manages to shine through, it alone makes rational thinking possible. W h e n dreams, prophets and h u m a n beings remain silent at Saul's questions, and when God leaves him barren, for H e has turned His face from him, he still has one more chance left (a sacrilege): he turns to an old woman at Endor, who knows how to summon the dead (I Samuel, 28: 7). 2 2 4 . Well, what happened was that for the whole year of 1982 I remained aloof from the consequences of the state to which I had come in writing those two "pieces of poetry": I dedicated the year almost entirely to the study of Anthologia Palatina, in the two translations by Felix Deheque (1863) and Maurice Rat (dating from the inter-war period).

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T h e r e was only one exception: on September 16th, in one single burst, I wrote two poems inspired by the previous two. One was to embody in the economy of the greater poem the threnos of the girl for her dead lover, and the other, which was to comprise its ending, would be centred on the exultant enemy in Isaiah, 26: 19, Daniel, 12: 2, Psalms,. 40: 3, and Revelation, 5: 9, with the promise, which was so vivid to me, "Behold, I come quickly" (Revelation, 3: 11; 22: 7, Judges, 6: 16, etc.)—Ego ero tecum (Poetry III, p. 566 et seqq.). I wrote them, however, and was none the wiser: for, just as the voice which gave birth to them ebbed away from me, my concern with their signification vanished too. I was being visited by a foreign voice, and that was the end of it. In the meanwhile, I translated Strato's Mottca riaiôiic^ (Book XII of Anthologia Graeca) from Dehèque's coy Latin. I would stress that, at the very same time, I harboured an interest in paedophilic love and one for the Introduction a la vie dévote a n d f o r St B e r n a r d ' s

Letters.

2 2 5 . At the end of 1982,1 realised that the four fits of inspiration (on May 3rd, October 13th, and two on September 13th, 1982) which, apparently unconnected, had taken possession of me and at such wide intervals, all stemmed from a common experience of the soul. Indeed, on December 25th, 1982,1 wrote two despondent psalms, followed by a third on January 1st, 1983, and they were something truly different from the four poems which, for want of a better significance, I had called prayer psalms. Now I knew what a devotional psalm, written by me, looked like, and that what I had written before had to be something else. What was it? T h e state which had dominated me was well expressed in that happy title which I had given the fragment dating from May 3rd: a sealed fountainhead. Indeed, the fountainhead which I was, in truth, so alive to, and to which I ought to have felt a devotion, was sealed for me, despite my efforts. Sealed means forbidden, but also: under the seal of mystery. In the face of faith I felt the same rending and ambiguous unhappiness which M a d a m e de Sevigné felt in front of that old and pious priest whom she had as her guest and about whom she confessed t o a f r i e n d , C'est un saint et je suis pas sainte: voilà le malheur. T o h a v e

seen the full splendour of the colours of this glorious world and yet to remain blind, do you know what this means? I remembered, with pain, Alecu Russo's 44 resigned words, "The melancholy of the Bible lies above 44 R o m a n i a n writer ( 1 8 1 9 - 1 8 5 9 ) and p r o m o t e r of the revolutionary ideas of 1848 (translator's note).

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the nation..." (Memoirs, V). I took then the decision that these four fragments had to be developed according to a plan which was to express modern dereliction in relation to the world of transcendence. With this in mind, I went back to the eschatological sections of the Bible in search of universal images of doom. Surreptitiously, I nourished this apocalyptic cataloguing with images which would evidence the other sense of the word, which is quite forgotten today, alas, "revelation": as I played out the apocalypse, my soul found its lost comfort in images of redemption. The title of the poem I was writing was decided from the outset: A Sealed Fountainhead. I added to it a subtitle: "A commentary on the Book of the Revelation." I wrote the epigraph thinking of Wittgenstein's e n i g m a t i c w o r d s , Das Ratsel gibt es nicht (Tractatus,

6: 5) a n d of t h e s e

wordings of John: 1) I have to go away, in order to return (cf. 16: 7) and 2) When I return, there will be no questions left to be asked (cf. 16: 23). From January to August 1983 I worked only on this poem. 2 2 6 . As I wrote on, I discovered the depth of the adventure on which I had embarked. I was under the belief that my constant referent ought to be the Bible. In reality, as I wrote the poem, layers of memory which I believed to be long since erased awoke in me. Ludicrous details, such as Laisne's disinterment in 1711 (Port-Royal) and his corpse being thrown to the dogs, the scandalous way in which Tulia and Maura rode the statue of the goddess Pudicitia and urinated over it (Juvenalis, VI), or St Francis gathering a piece of manuscript from the dust and the words which he spoke then to his disciples, all these things projected themselves so vividly and demanded to be joined to other reminiscences, also surfacing now, by some enigmatic means, from Shakespeare, Suetonius, Luther (De servo arbitrio, a book which I detest), Dante, Horatio, Lucan, Pound, Procopius of Caesarea, Nietzsche, Euripides, D. H. Lawrence, Marcus Aurelius, the gentlemen of Port-Royal, Evagrius Ponticus, Hippolytus of Rome, Jacob of Sarug, Ignatius of Antioch, and so on. I do not want to bore you listing them. I cull at random, from the text, the allusions which I can still make out. This is significant: the fact that anamnesis was not "erudite" but summoned, so to speak. The details were resuscitated by a context and, but for them, the context would not have been resurrected. I realised that my sensibility spontaneously worked with the layers of several mentalities: Rome (1st century B. C. and 2nd A. D.), the patristic age (the 2nd to 8th centuries), Justinianean Byzantium, Elizabethan England, Luther (in a polemic key), Port-Royal and the 20th century. I do not insist now on Homer, on the

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Greek tragic authors and on the Bible, which are permanent references. Gradually I discovered that my voice was erased and became more and more "objective". I no longer experienced subjective states, but historical mentalities, and I appropriated them as moments in a progression which I could only call "epic". This is what astounded me: I had started from a personal feeling, which was, in actual fact, what a modern could experience of a remote transcendence. I had, in other words, tried to confront the world from which the gods were missing with the world which had surfeited in their images, once restlessly alive and breeding among them. In fact, that was only the background. What came out, however, was a kind of narrative, in which narrated facts were disparate events of a chronicle, which was within my reach and which seemed to make up an apologue without an ending. I was fascinated by how all things were becoming organised of their own accord, in spite of the clear disparity of their contents. On August 16th, 1983,1 wrote the final line of the sixth part of the poem (I hoped that the recurrence of number 6 might signify creation interrupted, in other words, the quality this epic had, that of an unfinished apologue). On September 18th, 1983, I finished transcribing it, in the countryside, under the inquiring eye of my grandmother, to whom I had imparted that I had written an epic poem ("How do you mean, precious?") about how the modern world has lost God ("It's true that God has gone from you, totally sickened he was with your unbelief"). On the front page it was written: A SEALED FOUNTAINHEAD (An essay on Civilisation in the 20th Century. A Commentary on the Books of the Apocalypse.) May 3rd, 1981/Sept. 18th, 1983 —an Epic Poem— I was content. I had written 1,006 glorious verses, which expressed (without translating) the most momentous religious experience through which I had yet lived. My devotion was not increased: instead, my piety had become vaster. Without choosing between the two meanings of the word "sealed", my sensibility was no longer at odds: it lived in both of them, at the same time. 2 2 7 . Until the end of that year I wrote no more poetry, but yet the state from which the poem had been born remained very much alive in me. All that I read seemed to be nothing but a comment or a post festum

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argument. I made notes, with a mind to provide—like T. S. Eliot with his Waste Land—an erudite commentary which might point out the keys for reading and might account for the sources. Above all, I was afraid lest I should be accused of plagiarism, as my poem was crammed with "references". Nonetheless, I knew that at least the "epic" and the sensibility could not have been taken from elsewhere: the scenario was mine without a doubt, and I alone could explain it. As soon as I was done with it, I gave A Sealed Fountainhead to Calin Mihailescu, to read. His report was favourable: he also satisfied me that any idea of plagiarism would not stand, because the disguised quotations were either glaring to the eye, in which case the thought of literary theft would be out of the question, or they were so enmeshed in the substance of the text, or couched in such personal phrasings (at times by defalcations of meaning), that then their filiation was not at all evident. He tried to give me heart by citing the example of Moliere's borrowings, of which so much fuss was made at the time. In his ironic fashion, Calin was suggesting that I should go over the text again, something which I did at once. As a matter of fact, until its final version, which dates from 1986, A Sealed Fountainhead was ceaselessly rewritten, with maniacal pedantry. Still, the way in which I finally came to regard the significance of the poem as a whole (which happened towards the end of 1985), implied alterations in the original structure, as conceived in September, 1983. 2 2 8 . There are two reasons why A Sealed Fountainhead became something other than it was conceived to be in the first draft of September, 1983: 1) the fountainhead from which that poem rose would not be dammed: anything which I wrote was indelibly imprinted by the same inspiration which created it; 2) at the beginning of 1984 I understood a number of things which changed its perspective completely and so subsequently modified its structure in a radical way. What had happened? 2 2 9 . In my journal of 1984 there is the following entry: "January 13th, Friday, 5.30 p.m.: Today, in a whole panoramic vision, I discovered the principle of the succession of civilisations: I understood the unity of the 5,000 years of spiritual history, the epoch of written culture and of the monuments, the epoch in which magic and the magic myth become, first, religion and then myth, the epoch which does away with the religious spirit and which shall redeem itself through it alone, in the end, the epoch in which the faculty called consciousness is discovered, refined, and brought to its full fruition in the form of individual

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consciousness, the epoch which we would normally call the West: probably 1150-1950" (Journal, IV, p. 143 et seqq.). T h e note is rather curt : however, what I had seen was not. I frequently speak of "revelations" in this essay. This is a little ridiculous, if we think that, before November 23rd, 1654 no one had "noted" revelations, and that, after Pascal, everyone has them. Still, this is the way things happen, despite the repetition, which never fails to be mediocre: words are not as strong as images. T h e definition of "revelation" is elementary: a state of inner boundlessness, which is almost invariably translated in terms of light, concentrated on a certain content. By dint of this brightness, the content becomes "true", or else the expression of an unconditioned certitude. As far as I can tell, revelations are of two types: (1) of rank and (2) of accretion. (1) T h e former type is transcendent in relation to prior experience: it is an enigmatic way of receiving a priori synthetic knowledge. This knowledge is not warranted by our past of exertions to cognise and they seem to be presented from above. (2) T h e revelation of accretion is characterised by the Pascalian phrase, "You would not have sought me had you not found me already": it is the decanting of a way of cognition which escaped all those previously available. T h e latter type is typical of problem solving. An exemplary situation is provided by D a n Barbilian's 4 5 late notes on the margin of some problems there were propounded in The Journal of Mathematics, an issue dating from 1911 (Manuscript Pages, 1981, pp. 67, 107, 132, 234 and 302). In those pages, Barbilian brought arguments to support the notion that a demonstration was solely a criterion for accepting truth, not one for establishing its foundation. In other words, mathematical truth can be demonstrated (verified) by anyone: yet it can be found only by mathematicians. Or else, truth is not reached by demonstration, because the truth of a thought is not the consequence of the demonstration; instead, only trust in its validity is verified through the demonstration. Truth is belief in the truth of what is thought. T h e mode in which it is thought is not the demonstration, but what I have called, above, the revelation of accretion: it is not the demonstration which validates the truth (the reciprocal is true), but faith in the validity of the intuition which has brought it to light. T r u t h in the inner state of certitude. "Once I knew the nature of the locus it was easy for me to find the geometric argument" (idem, p. 67). 45 R o m a n i a n mathematician and modernist hermetic poet, known mostly under his p e n n a m e of Ion B a r b u ( 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 6 1 ) (translator's note).

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It is u n d e r s t o o d that this "revelation" does n o t come f r o m the void: it is p r e p a r e d by the p a t e n t and detailed knowledge of the field in which it exercises itself. Evidently, it is n o t lazy intelligence (read: cognition). T h e equivocal n a m e which I have given it only concerns the m o d e in which we acquire our information. T h e d e m o n s t r a t i o n verifies a t r u t h which precedes it: it is only rational language which allows a coherent potential for validation to be recognised. T h e m o d e in which we "discover" anything is utterly alien to logical d e m o n s t r a t i o n . It is t r u e that, in order to gain a revelation of accretion one has to go t h r o u g h m a n y struggles beforehand, and in one direction only: the direction of what you have discovered. W h a t it is, is an unconscious reorganisation of the substance of knowledge, which presents itself, at a certain point, as an outpouring: for cognition is always illumination, even at its m o s t banal (banality refers here to content alone, because f o r m , or, otherwise, the actual illumination, is always bright, incomparable, intense, and imperative). In this sense, Pascal's revelation of N o v e m b e r 2 3 r d is o n e of accretion: it expresses the fact of regaining that point of u n d e r s t a n d i n g which has long been groped for, hazily, in the idea (the apologetic plan) of his Pensées. T h e revelation of rank is, instead, fully "irrational": it circulates content which, before the revelation occurred, was n o t even an object of interest for cognition. Apparently, they are o u t p o u r i n g s f r o m the void. I know nothing of their "rational" nature. I only take n o t e of their existence. Well, what have I got to say of my case? 2 3 0 . I revise my notes. Of history I already knew many things: chronology, the succession of civilisations, geographical location, n a m e s of rulers a n d of gods, cultural history, etc. T h e m o s t i m p o r t a n t thing I knew, however, was this: I knew that it existed. How? By virtue of the air which I breathed. As the books which I read were speaking of it, it seemed to m e that history h a d always existed, and that w h a t A p p i a n u n d e r s t o o d by history was m u c h the same thing as what Ranke thought of what Appian had u n d e r s t o o d . I had regarding history what is usually called a naive understanding. This, after all, was the epoch's, and I could n o t surpass it in intelligence. T h e groundwork was given: the way it h a d b e e n assimilated, it could n o t lead to anything other t h a n a revelation of accretion. A n d this duly came: the "revelation" of J a n u a r y 13th certainly involved a strong accretive factor. In this way, it suddenly b e c a m e clear to m e (again: all that b e c a m e clear to m e can be regarded as having been unclear to m e before, although I h a d had s o m e knowledge of it, in a confused form) that there was a connection between history a n d

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d o c u m e n t , a n d that history begins just as soon as writing begins. W h a t is m o r e , there are n o "vertical" m o n u m e n t s except in those civilisations which have known writing, or there is no stone laid u p o n a stone except w h e r e there is also an inscription. T h e unity of d e p t h between all the civilisations in the M e d i t e r r a n e a n area, y compris those in the Fertile C r e s c e n t , s u d d e n l y stood out brightly in my awareness; I u n d e r s t o o d that between S u m e r and the last Western civilisation there is a direct link. However, I do n o t intend to dwell on a listing which would quickly b e c o m e otiose: the catalogue of the "items of i n f o r m a t i o n " which I received t h e n is extensively set out in Book X I X (NOTES: history, 1), pages 91 to 107 et passim. T h e information was, if anything, a particular f o r m taken by a m a t t e r which, within rather hazy b o u n d s , I h a d mastered already. T h a t this was not entirely the truth will be clear f r o m the following: my first t h o u g h t after the "revelation" was to verify the correctness of the knowledge I had been given. For more than a year I went through an entire historical library f r o m this sole perspective: I verified what I had already found. T h e truly extraordinary thing is that I did not have to bring in o n e single a m e n d m e n t , everything fell into place. All that I had f o u n d out was already well known, if one looked at the material of facts f r o m a certain angle: that particular m o d e of reading had been, t h r o u g h illumination, presented to me. 2 3 1 . T h e r e are things, however, with which, judging in all strictness, we could not possibly credit accretion. For instance, the concept of consciousness/awareness was completely foreign to me, not to m e n t i o n its application to history, of which n o question could be raised. A p i q u a n t detail is the following: in order to find out w h a t exactly consciousness was, starting f r o m January 13th, I had to consult m a n y books of medicine, psychology, cultural sociology and, finally, metaphysics (the 19th century). In that way I could verify the precision of connotations which h a d remained vague in my mind. However, applying this concept to history was completely outside my earlier interests. T h e thesis with which I was "inspired" is the following: the cultural unity which brings together S u m e r and the West in a single unit is a unity by virtue of the discovery, refinement and instantiation of consciousness, a faculty tightly connected with the phonetic alphabet and the scientific spirit (the m o d ern one, i.e., post-Galileo), and one that has remained virtually unknown to other m a j o r cultures: China, India, the p r e - C o l u m b i a n world, Africa. I must tell you that, by that date, I h a d read neither Spengler n o r Toynbee. I was, nevertheless, acquainted with ideas which, f r o m partial esti-

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mations, prophesied the decline and fall of the West, based on the hackneyed motif that we are Alexandrian. I, evidently, because of the prestige (which I took for granted), acquiesced in those vaticinations. Besides, my cultural milieu (Kaytar, Marinescu, Rotaru, etc.), with not a little servility, scoffed at Western culture. Young intellectuals of today (among whom I do not know whether I ranked in reality) live in Western culture as if in an error of history, as if in a gauche preamble to India or Japan. Voltaire is judged by criteria which are those of Zen patriarchs, yet in the absence of any Zen practice, based on the mere prestige, which is, whatever one might say to the contrary, simply fashion. N o t to be a god and to judge like one is a deleterious imposture. For it is not enough to have the criteria of the god, one has also to have his stance. However, what dated from before January 13th was my instinctive renitence to the contagion represented by the cultural model of the East. I found out, however, that the centre of the world's future was indeed the West, through its singular capacity to understand and appropriate everything. Moreover, the only place in the world where the faculty of consciousness was developed—a faculty which enables the perception of historicity and of otherness, and in which it has reached its climax, and its liquidation—is the West. T h e future of the world goes through the West because the future destiny of humankind has everything to do with the change of the subject. It was here, and here only, that this urgency, the change of the subject, was felt (and theorised). 2 3 2 . Here one has to take into account the extraordinary posterity of the demonstration by which Kant proved the intrinsic limitation of the transcendental subject. This success is, certainly, valid first of all for the G e r m a n world. T h e limitation once named, it is suddenly discovered to exist in actual fact. Let us keep in mind that, for H u m e , the limitation of the subject falls, before all else, under scepticism, or else, under a position that is essentially gnosiological. Besides, being a sceptic is of the same order as having taste, in aesthetics: it means, therefore, a situation in the subjectivity of judgement. Instead, for Kant, Hume's gnosiological observation (grounded, in Kant's case, on much vaster fundamentals, in Newtonian physics) is ontologically confirmed. W h a t used to be the relation of cognising intelligence with the world becomes now a universal anatomy of the subject. Schelling had already propounded a subject extended to the lived totality of objects, which, transcendentally speaking, transcended the helpless state in which Kant had left the antinomies of reason. Yet how does this come about? Schelling, in fact,

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remains inside Kant, by trying to go around him. He is the one who has first resorted to the buried prestige of cultural exoticism and ushered into philosophical speculation spiritual attitudes which belong, by right, to the archaic world: myth, participation, the passional sense which he grants to the aesthetic act, his almost frantic notion of beauty and cosmos (taken as one), all these stem from the translation of Fichte's I, already monstrously vast, into the dearly dreamt vastness of a primordial I, to which Kant's limiting categories no longer apply. Do note that, unlike K a n t , Schelling is visibly attracted to the d r e a m t side of the world, at the expense of the experimental one. When he talks about science, Schelling would m u c h rather ignore the kind which was being built in the wake of Newton, and constantly brings up a kind of u n a n imist mystical doctrine, where the subject discovered (in the world) what he was capable of living to greater intensity (in himself). Schelling's position stems from an infantile regression to the suspended world of non-contradiction, which is significant because his message ostensibly spells out the return to that form of the subject which is apt to rediscover the primordial. What is more, Schelling is fully situated in the arbitrary liberty of Fichte's type: the free act is inferred not from deliberation, but from non-conditioning. This is the second significant fact: Spinoza's exiguous rationality is finally surpassed in favour of what is, for the time being, a hope: if the sense of the subject is not the world, perhaps his nature is not the pure Fichtean identity, understood in an absolute sense. What if it admits of a temporal sense? This is from where Marx will later depart. 2 3 3 . For the time being, Hegel propounds the unique rational subject of history and its new logic of concept. In spite of his aberrant style, Hegel's thought has exceptional power. We still live today in the power which Hegel brought to the world. T h e significance of his thinking is overwhelming. You must, for this, r e m e m b e r the dream in which Anaxagoras appeared to me. What was there expounded was a doctrine of change: in essence, it was about the truth that the object is always known adequately; the wholeness of the object is given by the succession of partial cognitive acts which it has caused to happen; the object is the temporal succession of its versions of objectness. T h a t the world of knowledge changes—what does that mean? Two things: either ontology is metamorphosed, or the subject keeps growing into something else. Both thoughts are unorthodox. T h e traditional view is that knowledge increases. T h e thought that one talks of a different world, or of a

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different subject, is an abysmal one, because the objective referent of knowledge vanishes: the waters of the river are forever other waters (Heraclitus), and the person who has drunk his third glass of wine is not the same as the one who drank the first two (Moisil). It stands to reason! In spite of the c o m m o n opinion, Hegel crowns the history of philosophy not because his own would be, in the progress of knowledge, the natural consequence of every system preceding it: the reason why this happens is because his is the only possible philosophy if the subject who thinks will do it through the agency of that method which will subsequently change its essence. Just as I had no access to Plato until I knew Letter VII, the meaning of Hegel's statements cannot be correctly appreciated without constant reference to his Logic. Hegel's Logic (in its first version) has nothing in c o m m o n with a regulator of correct reasoning, as is the case of the syllogistic technique. Read correctly, Hegel's Logic is a superb model for transcending the present level of the subject's "reason". Just as in yoga techniques, Hegel offers a step-by-step metamorphosing of the subject. T h e means to which initiation resorts is none other than the present stage of thinking, with its span which is limited in actuality. Each assimilated chapter, each section acquired, are so many steps towards unleashing that reason which Kant had dissociated from the intellect. Hegel's philosophy is the result of applying the reasoning of the altered subject to the world. I cannot go into detail here. T h e fact remains that what in Hegel one already feels to be the end of philosophy (through his philosophy) does not in the least originate in the philosopher's swollen ego, but in the very nature of his discovery: to his, so far unsuccessful, attempts to know the object one must substitute, as a necessary preliminary stage, efforts to modify the present level of understanding at which the subject embraces the world. According to Kant's antinomies, this modification of understanding is conceivable in no other way than through a change in the nature of the subject. Goethe, the pantheist, harboured a natural repulsion for the dialectic method, in which it pleased him to see just some vain acrobatics of the sophist's speculative thinking. Yet his method, too, that of the original p h e n o m e n o n , stemmed f r o m the same crisis of method that Western thinking was going through at its auroral hour. Goethe, too, claimed that special faculties should be forged in order to have authentic access to the nature of the object, which everybody felt around 1800 that the old method of comprehension left in a limbo. Goethe's real natural philosophy will be found again, whatever one might claim, in that offshoot of his thinking evolved by Rudolf Steiner. D o not misunderstand, I do

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not refer to the actual knowledge that Steiner claimed to have founded, b u t solely to the method through which one acquires knowledge by refining supersensory perceptions. T h e watchword had become the change of the subject. 2 3 4 . This situation is without example in other cultures and is typical of the West. It could never have arisen without the development of that faculty of the spirit that I am accustomed to call consciousness and of which I have spoken at length in my essay "CONSCIOUSNESS. T h e History of a Verdict". I have already, and deliberately, compared Hegel's Logic with yoga techniques. I have committed this comparison (which will surely be aberrant in the eyes of scholars) in order to offer myself the opportunity of remarking upon the essential incongruity between the terms. There is a place (I do not have the quote in memory) where Patanjali observes that all this technology of salvation is but a way of compensating for the fall of the present nature of man into the compromise of the dark ages; that rising above the whirls of consciousness can be obtained instantaneously, by means of the grace which natural devotion draws to it. This is the actual significance of that quaint god, Ishvara, who "presents" certain yogi with sam&dhi, in virtue of the devotion which they bear him (Yoga-sutra II, 45). T h e essential point is that the yoga technique is not aimed at changing the subject, only at transcending it. Yoga only counts on a subject in order to un-make it, while Hegel established with the subject that he sought to transform a relation of aufheben (cf. Hegel, The Science of Logic III, 1101: "Note"), which communicates one of the essentials of the Western way of being in the world. 2 3 5 . In Hegel's posterity, there are two notable moments which pointedly bring to the fore the necessity of changing the subject: Nietzsche and Heidegger. It is common knowledge that the former pleaded for going beyond the present man, whom he derisively called the last man, the inventor of "happiness", the man who belittles all that he touches and at whose hands "the desert increases". What is less often quoted is the manner in which Nietzsche thought it fit to change the subject: the singular quality of this remarkable teacher of energy consists in his belief that his will has the capacity of transmuting the psychology of the subject. Once psychology was mutated, Nietzsche believed that ontology would become mutant through a natural process. T h e passage of psychology into ontology, by the agency of (conscious) will, is the essence of the practical method advanced by Nietzsche. Its efficacy can be tested

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by any subject, individually. I defend this affirmation with the experiences which I had personally. I shall not dwell on it. As for Heidegger, it must be said that the mutation which his thinking suffered after 1930 cannot in the least be interpreted as his failure to carry out the second volume of Sein und Zeit, but as something mirroring his own passage from the level of a remarkable thinker to the standing of a "providential" one. (This, in a way, has been Jung's leap, also, from doctor to prophet, to quote Freud.) It has already been noted that the turning (Kehre) that became manifest after 1930, in the course of lectures which he wrote then, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (published only as late as 1943), has suspended the search for an objective concept of essence. Indeed, Heidegger overthrew the problem of finding an essence of truth by asking himself whether, in general, one can still speak of a truth of the essence. The answer which he gave, by abandoning (in part) the conceptual frameworks of Sein und Zeit, expresses the conviction that Heidegger came to, by degrees, that, within the framework of the subject as it is now, no transcending of the inauthentic situation remains possible. His Kehre has the meaning that, if the subject is not changed, there is no meaning in talking about the truth of the essence, because the essence of truth is radically falsified. As a result, truth is given to the restored subject alone, or it does not exist at all. At the time that he wrote Sein und Zeit, Heidegger seemed to share the opinion that heresy and error could be dammed, in the exercise of thinking, by resorting to a conceptual framework capable of highlighting the true situation which the subject has in the world. After all, ten years earlier, and in reference to Marxism, Lukäcs had tried the identical thing in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. After 1930, Heidegger inclined to think what truth lacked was not an adequate language, but rather a subject commensurate with it, which is to say, a subject restored. The obstinate attention he devoted to Nietzsche's philosophy in the '50s appears to be derived from the feeling that the essence of life has been exhausted in present-day man, who is nothing but the gradual fall into the Untermensch, something which Nietzsche had already warned against. You must not forget his obsession, a constant attendant of the last ten years of his life, with the unknown god who was bound to come, an obsession which he couched in this hesitant assertion, often repeated within his circle of friends: nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten. What decisively unites the thinking of Nietzsche and of Heidegger is the imperative which in both confers ascendancy on the feeling of being in waiting. Hölderlin had spoken of "a" God, Nietzsche, too, will speak of "the new God", already betraying

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misgivings about his tarrying on the way. This presentment of change stemmed from a conviction that the essence which has spoken in the m a n of the past, and which has ceased to speak in the man of today, is exhausted. This being a fact, only a power (which "is not God, nor is it a fundament of light", Brief iiber den "Humanismus", 162) capable of engaging the fundament of being could trigger in us the change which might bring us back the fertility of life (which today seems exhausted). 2 3 6 . The brief history which I have sketched shows clearly the increasing urgency of an issue first perceived from a mere gnosiological angle. From the adequacy of knowledge it reached, in as short a time as a hundred and fifty years, the central problem of redemption. To be redeemed still means today to mutate the subject from those Kantian ruts, which Kant had taken to be its natural trenches. T h e problem, however, is a great deal older. Christianism is the first religion whose message was founded on mutating man's natural state through the resurrection of the body on the Day of Judgement. Apocatastasis panton professed by Origen, and the doctrine of the hierarchy of spiritual faculties which T h o m a s Aquinas advanced are the first steps towards revealing the fundamental urge of the Western spirit, the change of the subject. This urge had remained hidden from me until January 13th, 1984, in the afternoon... 2 3 7 . It seems to me that Rudolf Steiner was the one who said that our thoughts are angels and that thinking has "material" consequences in the supersensual world. I do not know what is the objective reality of this affirmation, yet to its "metaphoric" model I subscribe without a second thought. When we think, something is being set in motion in the world. This thought, to the person who has thought it, is like an iceberg: what he or she can see of it is only a small fraction; the rest remains in the world in which the thought moves. It matters little here if this world is Popper's third world, or anything else. T h e bedrock of these submerged islands which are the thoughts make up structures of the world of thinking, where the thoughts succeeding each other deposit themselves in forms which determine the "styles" of thinking. There are two kinds of thinkers: those who see (or build) the icebergs which I have called submerged islands, for the first time; then there are those who make up the coherence structure of thinking, those who lay their thoughts in the honeycomb which the invisible side of thought has been constructing. The same happens in history: one thought is launched

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in the world, and it seems to be alone; then, miraculously, this thought germinates and yields rich and extensive crops. The amplification of electromagnetic radiation in active laser media relies on a situation of coherence established between individual emitters. At a given moment, from motives which remain obscure to us, such a coherence situation is established in people's thoughts as well. No matter how many mistakes Caesar would make, Pompey is condemned to lose, and Caesar to win. Lucan's affirmation, victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni, is only a noble requital of helplessness. No matter what Julian the Apostate might have done, he "had" to die in 363 AD, because otherwise, had he returned from the campaign against the Sasanid Empire, he would have carried out the destruction of the Galileans, just as he had promised; and Christianism had to be victorious. Victorious it was. Marcus Aurelius Antonius was not a Christian, any more than Seneca: still, the sphere of representations of these two people goes towards Christianism, which they strengthen even when fighting against it, just as Celsus did. There are coherence structures of thinking which come at a certain moment to settle the world. At yet another moment, they withdraw. Temporality is a mystery which is not resumed by Augustine's perplexity—he did not know what time was if he tried to define it and he knew, if he did not try. Time is the principle of history, not its consequence. I call history the enigmatic aggregation of coherence structures. 2 3 8 . Chronology is one thing, historicity is another. At the beginning there is the cosmic rhythm, translated first of all in terms of factorial time, indefinitely accumulated and virtually infinite. The time that accumulates is the time that is unravelled: it practically ceases to exist at the very moment in which it takes place. This is the time without memory of the hunters. Then, this time is organised as repetition: the apex of repetition is circularity, with its metaphysical counterpart, the "eternal return". Memory is related to two verbs: founding and remaining. Founding engenders the moment, and remaining the writing, (a) The first chronology is the succession of dynasties. Chronology is the first temporal "alphabet". It highlights the "structure" of time, under its inevitable form of succession. Chronology based on dynasties is like writing based on ideograms or hieroglyphs. This kind of "writing" does not allow thinking to be detached from the means by which it is effected. Chronology based on dynasties does not allow time to be detached from the mode in which its presence is perceived, (a) The second chronology is the

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one based on periodically iterated events (the Jubilees, to the Jews; the Olympics, to the Greeks, etc.). Such events usher in an understanding of time as a succession of uniform entities, (a) The third chronology is the open one, based on the decree of a beginning (ab urbe condita, etc.). It is never independent of chronologies based on reiterations (the year was measured after consular exercises). Annals are the first form of history (I). In the order of historiography, they stand for factorial accumulation. History is perceived as accumulation of events. Its relief is not time, but the deed, (a) The fourth form of chronology is the one based on uniform temporal units: days, months, and years. These units are neutral in relation to the representation of facts. Only this last type of chronology gives temporality a formal support: time is only now understood as the material support of events. Now the second form of history is born, which is edifying history (II). Its purpose is to enlighten posterity (posterity can only be discerned starting from a chronology that is based on uniform temporal units, when it does not exist, only the past exists), to secure fame, to exercise rhetoric, manipulate opinion, etc. Only after the second form of history has come of age do people begin to meditate on the nature of time, freed from the tentacles of the event thanks to the fourth kind of chronology. One example is Augustine. This meditation cannot reach fruition unless two conditions are fulfilled: 1) the continuity of the cultural tradition (corresponding to the age of history-II and chronology-a); and 2) the profound discontinuity between two cultures connected by a catastrophic event. An observation: the discontinuity must not in any way trigger the loss of memory of a common tradition. The two conditions have been fruitfully met only once in the whole of history, in the West: the catastrophic event is the year 476 A. D., continuity has been secured by the Greek and Latin antiquity which survived through the agency of Latin, and the two cultures are that owed to Rome and that owed to the Christian West. It has been remarked that chronology alone does not account for the existence of segments of time which differ in quality. The different qualities of temporality have been called "the will of G o d " (Bossuet), then the progress of mores (Voltaire), etc. Peoples have been called "ideas of God" (Ranke). The level which this type of historiography has reached does not yet include historicity (III). Temporality is understood as manifestation of a force which belongs to either theology or theodicy. After 1800 people begin to rediscover historical civilisations: today, the past of humanity has been pushed back to a point before 50,000 B. C., and that of humanoids to around 2,000,000 B. C. In order to go into

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the f o u r t h stage of historiography (IV), it is necessary that t i m e b e felt as historicity: historical consciousness has to b e b o r n here. T h i s p h e n o m e n o n only h a p p e n e d in the West, b e c a u s e the West alone has b e e n able to see the t e m p o r a l specificity of virtually all the cultures which p r e c e d e d it, a n d resuscitate t h e m . T h e f o u r t h type of history assimilates t i m e with the historicity of cultures, a n d t e m p o r a l i t y with the aggregation of c o h e r e n c e structures. A n e m i n e n t e x a m p l e is Toynbee. A s t r u c ture is aggregate when the coherence state is achieved: the sign by which this is recognised is the style, or else the unit of reaction. H o w do coherence s t r u c t u r e s succeed o n e a n o t h e r ? 2 3 9 . Any coherence structure is characterised by a s u m of f u n d a m e n tal features, which behave, for the individuality of a culture, like a set of obsessive a n d genera! m e t a p h o r s . A culture lives as long as its d o m i n a n t t h e m e s retain their capacity to b e i n t e r p r e t e d in a fertile way. T h e n o t i o n of cultural type, w h i c h has b e e n s u g g e s t e d to m e o n J a n u a r y 13th, has a very general m e a n i n g . T h e r e is the culture of h u n t e r s , with the i n t e r r e g n u m of the g a t h e r e r s , a n d t h e r e is the N e o l i t h i c agrarian c u l t u r e , f o u n d e d o n the village c o m m u n i t y . L a t e r , with writing a n d m o n u m e n t s , u r b a n settlements e m e r g e a r o u n d the city fortress. T h e r e are n o u r b a n communities to which metals were u n k n o w n : it is now that h u m a n s begin to have wars. T h e city makes visible the idea of a universal e m p i r e , which was to prove so fertile: in 2 4 6 0 B. C., it was already ripe. T h e great empires of Egypt a n d Assyria are still to be relegated to the type of city-community. W i t h Alexander the G r e a t , the idea of a universal e m p i r e gains g r o u n d b e y o n d the city a n d extends to the entire o e c u m e n e . W h a t the p e o p l e s in the Fertile C r e s c e n t (or E g y p t ) h a d lacked in o r d e r to m a k e t h e leap f r o m city t o o e c u m e n e h a d b e e n a universal culture a n d a language c a p a b l e of giving universal expression to it. H e l l e n i s m possessed b o t h . T h e passage f r o m city to o e c u m e n e entailed the d i s a p p e a r a n c e of various f o r m s of polytheism, w h i c h h a d already b e e n f o u n d " m a l a d a p t e d " in the polis-type of c o m m u n i t y (polyt h e i s m is p r o p e r to Neolithic agrarian c o m m u n i t i e s ) . T h e N e o l i t h i c agrarian polytheism h a d a d j u s t e d itself to the polis regime helped by the invention of the p a n t h e o n hierarchy a n d by the p h e n o m e n o n t h r o u g h which certain gods, those m o r e intimately c o n n e c t e d with the old N e o lithic agrarian s t r u c t u r e , were b e c o m i n g religiously obsolete. Universal e m p i r e s f a v o u r e d the cult of solar royalty a n d religions of p o w e r , i.e., m o n o t h e i s t ones. Agriculture as well as metal processing w e r e already ceasing to b e fruitful sources of values in the c o m m u n a l mentality. T h e

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dominant occupation of the community stopped having a spiritual signification (this is maintained until today). There are, therefore, to sum up, the following types of culture: 1) 2) 3) 4)

the culture of hunting (interregnum: the gatherers); the Neolithic agrarian culture (the village community); the agrarian and metal processing culture (the city community); the culture of the oecumene, of the universal empires, based on monotheist religions ("trades" lose their capacity to generate spiritual values).

T h e passage from one culture to another is signalled by certain indicators. T h e easiest to perceive is the relation which a culture entertains with transcendence. 2 4 0 . In the beginning there are no gods, only receptacles of sacredness. At the level of the inferior Palaeolithic, there are no attested collections of bones which might authorise the idea of a ritual sacrifice. Later, at the heart of the culture of hunters, suggesting a likely passage from small animal hunting and gathering to large animal hunting, there occurs a scission: on the one hand, totemic societies, with the predominance of the male; on the other, societies which worship the Mother-earth and are matrilocal. This scission could not have occurred prior to Aurignacian cultures, in which the feminine statues of the Mother Goddess are for the first time attested. T h e first receptacles of sacredness denote an undifferentiated, neutral, and probably creative plenitude. T h e absence of sexual characters at the time of the first awareness of the sacred is apparently attestable with archaeological proof. Nevertheless, I do not know whether the first receptacles of divinity owe anything to a model of a celestial god. T h e celestial god became this first receptacle of sacredness the moment he lost his religious actuality. T h e Neolithic agrarian culture represents the triumph of a "feminine" interpretation of creation. As the primordial sacredness of the world became thinner, so the need to give names to those things whose presence was declining became stronger. To my mind, this is the time when the first names of gods appear. N a m i n g stems from an imminent feeling of loss: we n a m e in order to retain; in truth, once named, the thing is removed once and for all. Polytheism is a consequence of the uncontrolled wealth of former receptacles of sacredness. No longer knowing for certain where the sacred had been, the world became overspread with the pullulation of

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the plural gods. The Indigitamenta lists offer a typical example of integral polytheism. Those gods who were born in the wake of their names were one with the creation and were exerting their power from within. In this way, man discovers the frenetic immediacy of life: it is as if people had become fairly accessible to the living forms of divinity—that living quality akin to the inwardness of life, that is, to fecundity, to birth, i.e., to more and more concrete, more immediate, more carnal "religious" experiences. Even so, there is no sign which could be exhausted by its symbol: there is always a remainder of literalness which undermines the power of the symbol to express the sign adequately. In this way, the receptacles were, of course, expressed by the symbols of the gods who were inside creation. Why were they "inside"? Because the receptacles were in the world, not outside it. Nevertheless, the receptacles captured a sacred quality which was blatantly perceived as already lost. Here lies the rest that I was taking about: the receptacles will receive a decisive interpretation for the future destiny of man. First of all, I must clarify one thing, however: the spatial disposition of those receptacles of sacredness was not a priori evident. It ostensibly belonged to the experience of the sacred, which gave them a locale. In the absence of the experience of the sacred, the determination of their locale became arbitrary; which is to say, it was inferred from the confirmation of tradition. One needed a criterion (or several criteria): as is invariably the case, the inward certitude is replaced, when this certitude becomes thinner, by an exterior criterion, or else, a technique. In this way, the first anisotropics of space come into effect: the notion of a centre (axis) of the world, of right and left, of up and down, become established now: and they are so in relation to the invention of criteria which might give a locale to the receptacles of sacredness. These are the places on which temples will later be erected, with spatial symmetries resulting from considerations of determining the locality of the receptacles. The act of founding the spatial anisotropy is simultaneous and contrary to the act through which the world became polytheist. In actuality (and ab initio), the world was inhabited by gods. In potentiality (and later on), their presence was restricted to certain privileged axes of manifestation. In time, the latent will prevail on the actualising drive, just as, in the long term, the decisions of the unconscious surreptitiously prevail over the orientations of awareness—without exception. 2 4 1 . Gods are born when space is no longer isotropic. This observation is a key one, because the symmetry of time will later determine the

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resolving of conscience. Let us merely notice for the time being that the horizontal and the low dimensions are left to define the world and the horizon of the frantic gods (who are inherent in the world), while the high dimension naturally presents itself as appropriate to define the literal remainder of the symbol. T h e receptacle of sacredness is split between the gods of fecundity (of birth) and the gods of creation (celestial, Uranian gods). It is important to understand that they derive from the same original experience of the sacred, only differently interpreted. Polytheism is here to stay, so what remains of the sacred withdraws into the heavens, which is to say, up there. This remainder begets the first relation of transcendence with "divinity". The relation of transcendence is created against what has already been lost, namely, the literal remainder. The Neolithic agrarian culture is the first which had gods, and it had them by relinquishing the unmediated perception of the sacred. In addition, because immediateness has to be preserved at any level, it was preserved as a discovery of the sacredness of life, interpreted as an assertion of vitality. The incertitude which came from losing the first type of sacred experience—that of the receptacles of sacredness—led to the splitting of the sign as symbol and literalness. In a paradoxical manner, although quite typical of the culture which leads from the Neolithic to ourselves, literalness, otherwise nothing other than concrete immediacy, was felt as remoteness, as something which could no longer be understood in and as itself, but only in the (indirect) form of a symbol. The gods of fecundity are creations of the supreme celestial god: still, they intercede in man's understanding of absolute transcendence, as if the creator could no longer be understood except starting from the creature. Transcendence has become the locus of those states which can no longer be experienced in an immediate way, and yet they continue to provide a warranty for salvation at critical moments: "We have sinned, because we have forsaken the LORD, and have served Baalim and Ashtaroth: but now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve thee" (1 Samuel, 12: 10); at the same time, the primitive Oraons say, "We have tried everything, and You are the only one that is left to us to save us" (apud Mircea Eliade, Le Sacre et le Profane, 1965, p. 108 et seq.). Losing contact with the sacredness of receptacles is translated along the following lines: 1) the world becomes inhabited by many gods; 2) space is rendered anisotropic; 3) the celestial god is framed as transcendence; 4) immediacy is identified with polytheism in the world, and remoteness with transcendence. This complex of events can be named,

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for convenience's sake, the "first fall". I have provided here one instance of how the relation with transcendence is modified at the junction between two types of culture—in this particular case, the culture of the hunters and that of the Neolithic agrarian people. What obtained was the very relation with transcendence (in consequence of space losing its homogeneity). 2 4 2 . We have seen that the celestial god is done away with, superseded, made obsolete, all by instituting the relation with transcendence. This figure of succession is a typical one and a fine example of a figure of thought. This is one of the most remarkable results to which I was drawn by the revelation of January 13th, as well as a liminal example of a "revelation of rank" (according to the demarcation operated in paragraph 2 2 9 ) . Another result is that the name of an object is the expression of the remoteness from it. An old Persian story tells of five exquisite daughters of a sultan, to whom their father, loving them dearly, would not give names, lest their beauty should ever become an object for men's words. Indeed, to name means to experience remoteness. Valéry once said that to read means to live wherever the words take us. What does to think mean, then? A thought lives from obliterating the forms of representation. It is sufficient for a thing to be thought in order for it to lose, at once, something of its radiant legitimacy. Love, which is the essence of confirmation, becomes stranded in words. Words excite, love lures. It is a fact that experiences pertain to a different order than do the thoughts kindled by experience. T h e latter always takes shape when the former shrinks; the latter can reign in its full-fledged form only when the former is obliterated. You must increase, but I must decrease (John, 3: 30). Now I shall attempt to make clear what I understand by the relation of transcendence. 2 4 3 . It is an uncontested achievement of phenomenology that transcendence is equated with the constitutive structure of consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is consciousness of something: it is aimed since birth towards an existence which is not itself, yet which is indispensable to its existence. Just as postulating existence is inherent in any predication, consciousness implies the object and the modality of representing it 4 6 . Consciousness is a way of being whose existence posits essence. Something is born in consciousness only when the object on which it 4 6 T h e modality is itself (author's noie).

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has focused is obliterated; it is preserved for the future only as a formal relation. As for awareness, it is certain to mean the consciousness of a being whose essence implies existence 47 . This manifestly sends us to St Anselm's ontological argument. T h e issue of awareness is as follows: its m o d u s operandi is given precisely by the ontological argument. Once it was formulated, in the 11th century, the epoch of the full maturity of consciousness had all the premises required to commence. T h e object is transcendent in relation to consciousness, while consciousness is transcendent in relation to it. Consciousness can only function if the relation of transcendence with the objects exists. On the other hand, the relation of transcendence can be grasped if the faculty which posits the world in the terms of transcendence exists. My assertion is that consciousness begins to manifest itself only after the celestial gods appear. In other words, the transcendence of absolute divinity is equivalent to its withdrawal in man's interiority, in the form of a "space" of illumination, which is that of conscience. In order for the celestial god to exist in man's consciousness, the god has had to disappear, first from the realm of immediate perception, and place himself in its transcendence. Transcendence is consciousness, and consciousness is remoteness. However, to pursue a different train of thought, the withdrawal of the celestial gods from the world has created a precedence of prestige: the heights, the vertical, the elevated continue to express the sacred mode par excellence. After the departure of the Uranian religion the objective idea of transcendence is obtained, which only now, for the first time, can be perceived as a thinkable idea of intelligence, and not as the experience of awe (tremendum). In other words, only since that moment has man become capable of thinking transcendence, and not only of perceiving it. T h e signification of the first fall is the liberation of transcendence, in the form of a thinkable idea. 2 4 4 . Once consciousness is instituted, no experience can perpetuate itself without resorting to the structure of consciousness. It might be said that, although lost, the god rests forever in the form that reproduces him indefinitely in the functioning of our consciousness. T h e force of this action is not to be neglected, because forms are stronger than contents, and a ritual transmits its message even if its theology has been forgotten; it is the forms which make that happen, with efficiency. T h e form of consciousness reproduces the relation of transcendence. 47 Sartre's a r g u m e n t : L'Eire el le Néant, 1968, p. 29 (author's note).

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In this way, in the epoch of the universal empires, when the aspiration towards monism settled in, the only way in which the celestial supreme god could be actualised was in a "conscious" manner. The various kinds of monism resort to an entirely new type of sacred experience, to faith. Faith is the conscious way of taking part in the sacral experience. The relation of transcendence needs to be confirmed: in other words, the form of consciousness needs to be distinguished as its own content. Through faith, this result is confirmed: yes, it is true that the god is in me, and my relation to him is such that I can infer his existence from the essence of the fact that I perceive him. It is easy to recognise here, once more, the ontological argument. 2 4 5 . Once the relation of transcendence has been set free, consciousness can begin to function. The particular manner in which it first comes into the world also dictates its first content. The awareness that I am attracts the consciousness of my fall. After the first fall, man is spiritually blinded, because he retains his grasp of the form of the divine without being able, if only for a single instant, to reach its specific content, which is the presence of the supreme god. Any act of becoming aware involves an absence whose form is indefinitely repeated (this repetition is the content). Insofar as we are endowed with awareness, we are always ready, formally, for a revelation which is constantly refused to us, in its content. Being is equally ungraspable. Any act of predication presupposes it, yet none determines it. Then again, faith is one's awareness of the fact that the act of being conscious implies the presence of the god. Monism involves the devaluation of any religious experience that does not go through faith. In this way, faith also becomes a criterion for the existence of the god, after being a criterion for his truth. Faith can only apply to those gods who share the structure of consciousness, or else, to those gods who come from the remainder which resulted from losing the first type of sacredness. As I have shown, however, the definition of faith also implies its failure (something of which Kirkegaard has spoken, rather prolixly). Being a form applied to form, it is starved of content. Its proper content, however, in experience, does not exist. 2 4 6 . Since our conscious being emerges as something identical not with its content, but with the being which demands the "I" to transcend its own experience, the role of consciousness, in one's interior life, is analogous to the role played by the supreme god in the world. If the god

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creates the world, consciousness begets the object. Monuments, if you think about it, can only be raised consciously. Yet there is one more thing: consciousness transcends the object, and it transcends itself. Only through the agency of consciousness does the " I " find itself as something that is. How does this happen? T h e opposition which causes an object to be perceived is a spatial one, while the opposition which causes interiority to be divided into an " I " and something perceiving the " I " is a temporal one. T h e mode in which, transcendentally speaking, consciousness makes the perception of interiority possible is duration. Janet has made the observation that being conscious means being able to recount your experience. Consciousness is refined through language, whose expression it actually is. At the same time, the civilisations of consciousness are civilisations of writing because the tongues which are not written are not true languages, but rather systems of signalling. T h e oral transmission of culture stems from a type of culture which is not entirely one of consciousness. In paragraph 9 I have used a (risqué) expression, "coincidentia oppositorum in time". What I meant to say by that was that the experience of space is closely connected to sight, which gives it its proportions, and also to touch, which gives it its presence. It is clear that the feeling of time being a presence is given by one's interiority, which is its source (let it be said in passing, I do not in the least believe in the "reality" of time). T h e proportions of time, however, are given by language. Still, there are no fixed proportions in consciousness, because the whirls of consciousness fall in and fall out without respite. Here everything has to start permanently anew, and nothing has that stolidity which admits of simple determinations, which is a property of space. Language is the only regulator of consciousness, and its only source of stability. T h e weakening of one's awareness is always manifested as a drift of language. T h e unequivocal connection which consciousness maintains with time confirms the accuracy of the assertion " t h e first fall is the fall into time." 2 4 7 . Even here there is a remainder, however. It might be called the "back" of consciousness, something which cannot be brought into awareness. It might easily be said that there are two worlds: the world that you see in front of your eyes and the world of interiority. In reality, there is less than one of each. T h e world in front of our eyes is exclusively the world of the five senses. It is a matter of evidence, these days, that the image which we have of the world is strictly dependent on the fact that perception of the electromagnetic spectrum is limited to the visual

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domain. This kind of reasoning can be extended. This is but one side of the world. T h e other side, a still smaller one, of the other world, has only one instrument of investigation available: this is what we might call the "internal sense", that something which allows us to experience the feeling that there is "in us" "an expanse and a progress" (I use the words in their strictly symbolic sense). Consciousness is not the internal sense, that is obvious: it is, rather, the medium through which the internal sense is distinguished from the homogeneity of what constitutes its object, and through which it adjoins, as a computer interface, the input of the external senses totalised by the external director sense. You are familiar with Wittgenstein's assertion that the subject is a limit of the world (Tractatus, 5.632). Whether this should be acceptable or not, it is, through consciousness, the limit of the two worlds to which it has such access as a limited visibility affords it. Consciousness possesses two "innate" laws: proliferation and manifestation. 1) It tends to transform the entire world into an "object" (the law of integral segregation). 2) It tends to transform any object into a relation of objects, which is to say, into a language (the law of functionalisation). T h e law of segregation states that everything must become a sign (or else, an object capable of being submitted to the scrutiny of consciousness). T h e law of functionalisation states that any sign can be represented as signification (symbol, function), which is to say, it can be posed as an object for handling. You will note the symmetry: sign, symbol: the literal level is missing. Like any faculty of the soul founded in the lack of congruity between thinking and existence, consciousness also seeks to bridge the gap by means of meaning. T h e senses do not need a "sense" in order to "understand" the world. For the perception which they make possible, essence is identical with appearance. Hence their unquestionable glory and their wisdom, which is beyond any "ethics". In addition, you have to note this dissymmetry: the sense experiences the certitude of the object as immediate content, whilst consciousness reaches certitude only when the form of perception returns to its own form, or else, when two structures are compared for which content is secondary. T h e sense knows the flesh, consciousness only its smell. T h e situation is a scandalous one, and it is only natural for the body to rebel. T h e remainder rests. What exactly is that remainder? Consciousness is the faculty defined by the fact that its own action highlights, without fail, the nostalgia of origins. Consciousness never has access to the flesh of things, although it extracts its matter f r o m forming hierarchies of senses. It thirsts for the ultimate confirmation

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which means that the body is the only one worthy of love. Never possession, it thirsts for that origin when things could still be possessed. Nostalgia, desire, whatever n a m e we might have for it, consciousness is consciousness of a loss (or of a fall, is it not?). T h a t is the remainder: the untouchable content. 2 4 8 . Simply by manifesting itself in the way it does, consciousness introduces an asymmetry into the passage of time: consciousness instils temporality with the privilege of origins. This is the first feature. Secondly, monist beliefs have forced the actualisation of the supreme god by unmaking polytheist beliefs and employing faith in the way of Occam's razor. As I have argued in paragraph 245, faith cannot create an object for itself, unless it receives it. As a monism, consciousness has been waiting for a god who has not come. This is the second feature. Thirdly, the hunger for content which consciousness knows (the two laws about which I have spoken) has pushed it to make the experience of the world as a whole. Any object already digested has been sealed with the structures proper to it (to consciousness). T h i s urge is what has led to all those analogies between the big-bang theory and archaic cosmologies: there is an identity which makes them both theories of consciousness. T h e same holds true with the striking resemblance between the scholastic spirit and the modern one, both in their extremely pedantic "scientific spirit". Moreover, through indefinite repetitions of its form, consciousness continuously adds to itself, as in a kind of reservoir, the developed structures of the objects on which it has exerted itself. T h e s e structures, historically elaborated, represent the only " c o n t e n t s " of a faculty, par excellence formal. Owing to the fact that every object which has ever been absorbed by consciousness is simply an unreal content, the reservoir of which I have spoken is a reservoir of failures. Here, the whole world capable of bringing itself to a conscious state up to a given m o m e n t is deposited. We could call this reservoir the unconscious, with this one crude meaning: it is the catalogue of the failures which consciousness has known trying to find again, by means of the form which is inherent in it, that origin capable of offering it adequate content. This content is G o d alone. T h e unconscious, therefore, is the third feature. 2 4 9 . To sum up, 1) the asymmetry of time coupled with the nostalgia of origins, 2) the fiasco which faith met with in trying to make the immediacy of the god accessible (let us not forget that it was faith which brought the ban on the sacred immediacy based on the proximity with

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the frantic gods of life), 3) the agglomeration of failures of consciousness—the failure to reach the content of its own form in the reservoir which one calls unconscious, all these have created the premises for what we might call "the second fall". Owing to the reiteration of failures, consciousness has lost its sacred load and has become an instrument in the process of awareness, critical acumen and the faculty for manipulation. Today, it is the main instrument of technology. After the demise of polytheistic beliefs, the turn has come of monist beliefs to die, this day. At its beginnings, consciousness exercised itself with polytheist beliefs: scorched and wrecked, they have become material for the reservoir of failures, for the unconscious. At about the end of the 16th century (in the West), their fiasco triggered the spectacular fall of these structures into the unconscious. The vigil of faith's safety valve once slackened, the representations of the unconscious are now, for the first time, allowed to expand outwardly; that is, the explosion of the aggressive imaginary, so well attested in visual arts. The fact that we find today religious structures perfectly expressed in the contents of the imaginary is due to the circumstance that these failures are patterned after that first remainder which dates from times when the receptacles of sacredness no longer captured the sacred. It is certain that, if our present constitution remains unchanged, a thousand years from now our imaginary of failure will be totally different: the imaginary will swarm with forms reproducing not so much relations of the sacred, as of the lower commonplace: hatred, hunger, sex, fear. We shall be more and more emptied, until emptiness itself is emptied. As stone from stone and upon a stone falling, into the abyss of finitude. 2 5 0 . That things are not exactly this way is shown by the things which I have touched upon in speaking of the change of the subject. There is, in this connection, a state of coherence, which might announce a new aggregation. Do not forget that, for the last 50,000 years or so, when the main racial trunks of today were defined (European, Negroid, Mongoloid), the biology of man has remained essentially unchanged. Until that date, changes had been numerous (speaking in terms of thousands of years, of course). Once biology settled itself, the leap into culture could begin: almost "immediately", parietal art is discovered. Then, the cycle of culture goes on uninterrupted, so that from the year 40,000 B. C. one can speak of a teleological progression of culture (and not merely of civilisation). The first fall sets free the relation of transcendence and brings into usage the faculty which we call conscience. Will the second

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fall, in which we are still living today, set consciousness free? When people have already become conscious that there is such a thing as transcendence, they set it free, positing it as an object of thinking. Today, we are conscious that we live in an epoch of conscience, which means that, in one way, we have already become free of it, or else, that we can think of it as an object distinct from the faculty of cognition. On the other hand, we cannot, as yet, know what the "liberation of consciousness" means, through a mere parallel with the liberation of transcendence. Indeed, the fact that transcendence is the modality of consciousness has been revealed to us at the precise moment in which consciousness is being obliterated, a process which we are living now. In other words, the meaning of the origin is revealed by eschatology alone. Only death is the one which transforms life in destiny, any other moment of interpreting it, as is the one which I am undergoing now in writing this essay, is mere "biography", a breach in the wall when you do not find the door. In order to be able to point out what exactly it is that announces the liberation of consciousness, we should know the "liberation" of that something, which we ignore. There is no question of declaring that there follows a moment of the "unconscious", for the simple reason that transcendence has been the mode of consciousness, and not the content itself, of the change. Indeed, today we seem to be living a moment in which consciousness is expanded to the entire field of the unconscious; still, this could be nothing but a mere "rehearsal". As a result, it is quite possible that the "unconscious" (understood as a repository of structures) could be the mode, but in that case it will have to be obligatorily interpreted as something which serves as a premise for something else, about which we cannot, for the moment (in this life), make any assertion. In case this conjecture is correct, the unconscious can no longer be understood as a mere repository of failures, but it has to be, in a way which I ignore, the very mode of that inner faculty which is being set free by the liberation of consciousness. Will that be a consciousness extended beyond the world of the six senses? From the point of view of actual values, this will be a new "barbarianism": in essence, it will have to resemble the model of man propounded by Nietzsche (although these are simple "cultural" speculations). Whichever the truth, man has become tired of his own biology, and the annoyance which emanates from his culture attests it. Do keep in mind that what we have been used to call a property of man, culture, is an exercise which begins immediately after his biology is stabilised. It might be that the meaning of culture is precisely the refining of that

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biology which was settled at the dawn been preparing the ground for its leap. and in which I have lived, has been the tence: let us call it the culture of the six

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of history, a refining which has The culture that I have known, culture of a certain type of exissenses. However, no matter how

d e e p we m i g h t p l u n g e i n t o it, si loin qu'on se soit avancé, on traîne partout l'indignité d'être homme ( C i o r a n , Ecartèlement, p. 128). A t t h e e n d of this

culture, despite and because of its glory, the present man is the limit which makes it unacceptable. It is man himself who has to be changed, since the present man is unacceptable. 2 5 1 . How can I express what I feel? I shall make use of a story. My father knew the following languages well; Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, German, Polish and French. He had a vague recognition of English and Italian. His maternal languages were Romanian, Ukrainian and German, none more so than another. In George Steiner's book, After Babel, I came across a passage which I read to my father, "If we were lodged inside a single 'language-skin' or amid very few languages, the inevitability of our organic subjection to death might well prove more suffocating than it is" (page 498). I asked my father whether it was true (having had the experience of so many languages, I felt sure that he understood the state that trilingual Steiner referred to). His answer came both simple and enigmatic. "I have no talent for languages and, although I can find my way with ease in all the languages that I know, going into their depths is forbidden to me. I understand the words, yet I do not feel them. For instance, I know as much Russian, apparently, as a Russian: yet behind the language that I speak there is a space (of Russianness?) that I cannot master, and which eludes me despite my best efforts. I have to admit that I do not know what it means to live in a language." This reminds me of another occurrence: at a time when I was taking great pains to learn German and translating from Nietzsche, I stumbled at one point in a text which I then subjected to my father's inspection. My father read the words very carefully a few times over, and then he told me, "I understand the words, but the text is muddled; it seems that the author himself does not know what he is saying. Who wrote it?" Then there was Adelina Piatkovski, a few years later: "Xenophon is a true author, one can learn Greek through him. But Plato...I understand his words: but I cannot tell what he refers to." Now I am in a better position to get across what I mean to say. I concentrate. There are the words, first, the words that I master. Joined end

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to end, they make up thoughts. I know how to handle them, so they are at hand. Then come the "images" behind the thoughts, which are their props. With even greater concentration, of which I am sometimes capable, I can master them, too. The problem is not simple for the reason that, as you know, I am very intelligent: however, there is a limit here. It is not the limit of my intelligence, it is as if I were facing a wall looking for the gate in it. The problem of transcending—I know how to phrase it: you have to find a door in the wall which has none. I am well equipped, and of energy I have enough. Ingenuity, too, I am well endowed with: yet the wall is a wall. It does not have an opening. It is very high. "If I should be more intelligent..." Still, it is decidedly not that, not "if I were more intelligent". I should have to be built differently, to have other opinions, to understand the existence of that wall in a different way. The limitation of which I am speaking pertains to the very nature of the intelligence which I have at my disposal; it is built in such a way as to be unable to solve that problem. Here is where darkness begins: there is a threshold that I have never been able to cross. How is that? It is not the limit of intelligence, starting from which stupidity stretches, without bounds: no, it is not stupidity, it is the barrier. The same roads, only hidden. But for this barrier, the same intelligence which is at my disposal now would become unbound as truly consummate intelligence. The very same, only able to be, through something, integral. Now—it is the same, only amputated. There is something that I miss. What is it? It is probably not the ground substance, only its boundless state. The way I am now, I feel that I am endowed for a much deeper evolution, but this is forbidden me by the partial, crippled, functioning of what I am. There is some kind of wasting that I am going through, and I cannot reach its bottom. There are dark mists which darken the sharpness of my sight. Someone has to drive them away. I have to be able to see better, I have eyes, fairly good eyes, only the light has to be turned on, or the blinkers removed. I have to be changed (or change myself), yet I have to change fully: ontology has to be changed, instead of inventing computers, or rockets, or machines for thinking. (TV. B.: In this paragraph I have given two interwoven versions: both lead to the same result; do take your own into account also.) 2 5 2 . In paragraph 239 I told you that any structure of coherence is characterised by a sum of fundamental themes, and that a culture lives only as long as its dominant themes preserve their vitality. I was also asserting that the structures of coherence aggregate (paragraph 237

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fine). N o w I shall attempt to show how the aggregation of the states of coherence is accomplished (in other words, how is the continuity of history possible). T h e life of a culture is given by the fact that it lives its d o m i n a n t themes intensely. Its fertility is given by the fact that there are certain themes which dwell in it, which I shall call "latent themes". T h e latent themes are never explicit: this means that they never become objects for "conscious" reflection. T h e state of coherence is accomplished only through the d o m i n a n t themes, perceived as ciphers which cry out for keys to make sense of them. W h e n , around a collection of d o m i n a n t themes, breaking out suddenly and making a civilisation aware of their light, a unanimous consensus is achieved, then we can say that a state of coherence has been instated. T h e general mentality unanimously considers that those themes constitute objects for reflection which warrant the effort of systematically thinking them. T h e time of a culture is the time when this consensus remains active. What is proper to this consensus is the realisation that the themes constitute real ciphers, or else, problems with a substance. T h e undertaking of the Vienna Circle (Carnap & Co.) can be understood in this light: they have tried to demonstrate the falsity of a particular cipher, the one based on thinking which they would call non-scientific; they have tried, therefore, to demonstrate that, from the point of view of correct thinking, the dominant theme of philosophical reflection is not a dominant theme, but a fallacy of approach. It is an irony of history that the main fire of the Vienna school was targeted at Martin Heidegger, the thinker who, as is well known, f o r m u lated radical objections to a m o d e of thinking which he considered exhausted with the Plato/Nietzsche closure, and who, in his exposition which he sent to the Kirkegaard Colloquium (Paris, 1964), u n a m b i g u ously notified its demise ("Together with the t u r n which M a r x has achieved, the extreme possibility of philosophy has been reached, it has entered its terminal stage"). These two stands, so felicitously d e m o n strated, clearly indicate the crisis of one of the fundamental themes of our culture, which may well be the very prelude of its liquidation. A dominant theme is liquidated when it has exhausted its capacity to be present in the spirit of people as a genuine cipher, as a problem worth solving. T h e cipher, let it be clear, is fundamentally insoluble. To think it means to set the spirit working, it means to fuel history. T h e keys which are discovered do not have solving value, only illuminating value. It is not the object that is decoded (the cipher), it is m a n who resettles closer to the best part of himself. T h e essence of the cipher is changing

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man's way of being in the world, by allowing him to go deeper. I believe that science is also a cipher of the last Western civilisation. R e m e m b e r Max Plank's resigned and sceptical sentence which he spoke towards the end of his life, "You can never defeat your adversaries by d e m o n strating the truth: what you have to do is try and survive them." I think of a day when people will lose all interest in practising the GalileanNewtonian science, just as people today have lost the taste for theology. I have limited faith in truth understood as adequatio rei et intellectus. I would rather settle in the formula which implies the subject, instead of the object: You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Such convictions can only be subjective. Still, I myself cannot help but see in them a sign of the times. 2 5 3 . It is not the truth which orients people's hopes, but the feeling that the enigma behind the cipher is worth solving. Certainly, here one runs into a problem which is far from negligible: namely that, today, we are already aware of the motor for change. This fact may neutralise its mechanism. It might happen, on the other hand, that this undeceived feeling which we link closely to awareness will prove to be a transitory product of the incomplete state of consciousness. Except for the fact that there is an imminence of change, it is hazardous to claim anything else about the world which is to come after us, of which all that I can say, for the time being, is that it is likely to be. 2 5 4 . What is the role of the latent themes? From the reservoir of latent themes come to light the keys p r o p o u n d e d to resolve the d o m i n a n t themes. T h e latent themes come into the world in the form of keys to the ciphers. In the epoch of the hunters, the receptacle of sacredness plays the role of a cipher. Towards the middle of the period, two keys are propounded: the totemic cult (in the masculine society) and the cult of the M o d i e r Goddess (in the feminine society). T h e significance of these keys lies in interpreting, through a sexual network, an initial donnee which d e m a n d e d to be understood. Once the sexual divide is created, in the next epoch sexual attributes will become ciphers themselves (Yin and Yang, for instance), and, in certain areas, androgyny will become a key for the new ciphers (which have been keys before). Towards the end of the epoch of hunters, the receptacles of sacredness acquire two more keys: the celestial god and polytheistic beliefs. It is important that these keys are simultaneous. T h e celestial god engenders the relation of transcendence, which becomes the cipher of divinity. Polytheism endures

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as the key for this new cipher (which was itself once a key). This key is later replaced by another, the key of faith. T h e cipher of divinity is "solved" through the new cipher of faith, which posits itself as a cipher in the form of a cipher of consciousness. One of the keys to this cipher is the explanation which I have propounded, that of the change of the subject. And the cycle goes on. Whatever the future might look like, as far as the past is concerned, things appear in this way: a culture lives on the latent themes of the culture which has preceded it; they become dominant themes and excite, in their turn, the latent themes capable of solving them; last of all, the state of coherence coagulated round the dominant themes disintegrates, and aggregates itself again round those latent themes which had been explanations to, or meanings of, the initial fundamental themes: explanations become problems, and so on. These issues are debated in detail in my book Prolegomena to a History Written from the Vantage Point of Its Meaning (a book which exists now only in the form of files and partial outlines of chapters). 2 5 5 . One aspect of the issue is the following: history lives by liquidating themes. However, there is another, equally significant: the soul's propensity to be given a body. I have called that "law" R E A L I S A T I O . T h e spirit tends to realise its constants. Just as the cipher exists only inasmuch as solving keys are proposed for it, the themes of the spirit tend to liquidate themselves, to come to realisation. It is obvious that in us there is a propensity towards forging, which can be understood as an irrepressible desire for manifestation. However, the spirit cannot be manifested as spirit, but only as a forged shape, or else, as materiality. T h e successive understandings of a given spiritual constant are particularly illustrative of mankind's failures to endure at the heights of what has been grasped. Arius' heresy is a typical example of realisation or else, of thinking with a suspended object which precipitates into thinking with a manipulable object. Protestantism is another. By contrast, dogmatics is an attempt to preserve the spiritual intuition as pure spirit. Is it not striking that any chemistry is preceded by an alchemy (which is not a pre-chemistry), and that wisdom is never in the "realised", the palpable form? It is strange that understanding an object amounts to not being able to experience it as immediacy. Realisatio means precisely this spiritual inability and, conversely, this new "physical" power. After all, flying is a constant theme of interiority, and it has always been understood as de-conditioning. Leonardo was the first to dwell on it from the

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point of view of the birds that fly, the first who equalled de-conditioning with a mechanism capable of elevating one. Such personalities do crop up in history, who suddenly become unable to look at things in their physical non-verifiable reality: they "discover" then in the sphere of matter the "material" models of that initial spiritual situation, and make them function. Realisatio is a content of the interior come true as a fact of the exterior. Two immediate consequences derive from that: 1) through "materialisation", interiority loses contact with the content proper to it: the latter ceases to be a theme for interrogation, or a cipher which solicits spiritual achievement, and becomes instead 2) an object of handling/ manipulation, which is to say, power, instrument: in one word, a tool. T h r o u g h realisatio, the spiritual truth becomes manual capacity. It is evident that technology represents (in part) a realisatio of the scientific spirit. As for the latter, the works of Pierre D u h e m clearly show whose realisatio it is. Owing to the nature of his genius, which was not materialist, but materialising, Leonardo no longer understands that a flight is a flight in relation to a petrified situation, irreversible, dead: he sees and understands that the bird flies in relation to the air and concludes that, in order to fly, man has to do the same. Still, man's flight, in its original sense, does not manifest itself in relation to the air, but to his existential condition (let it be said in passing, the flight is the earliest d o c u m e n t e d metaphor for the change of the subject). T h e essence of a flight is not aerodynamics and it is not the lift: it is de-conditioning. Now, everything which states a constant relation of the spirit is susceptible to realisatio. This kind of confirmation is a challenge to the very notion of truth. I am thinking of when truth is going to cease to be: this will be either when interiority is completely achieved, or when no constant relations remain to exist inside it. Current historiography deems it a truism to admit that the increase of manipulation constitutes real progress. As for logic, Plato is considered a "precursor" of Aristotle. This is false: Aristotle has set us free from the determinations that pertained to the very substance of what was thought a way of reasoning that he was the first to deem a universal m o d e of thinking. Moreover, m o d e r n logic is convinced that Aristotle is the author of the first formal system of logic. It may appear incredible, yet this statement has been incessantly repeated for the last one h u n d r e d and fifty years. However, the reality is different: Aristotle states in n u m e r o u s places that his syllogistic is a way to grasp the universal, and it is not in the least a logic of symbols devoid of referent. Such errors of appreciation derive f r o m the

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fact that the p e o p l e who m a k e t h e m are in a relation o f realisatio with the misjudged object. Aristotle himself was in a relation o f realisatio with Plato when he rejected the theory of forms by resorting to the argument o f the third m a n (which Plato h i m s e l f a d v a n c e d ) . O c c a m was in a relation o f realisatio with t h e tradition t h a t p r e c e d e d h i m w h e n , f r o m a perspective that was n o t that o f tradition, he c l a i m e d the limitation o f essences. F r a n c i s B a c o n is in a relation o f realisatio with what, in deliberate m o c k e r y , he calls idols, and also with the m a g i c tradition, which he converts to t e c h n i q u e . T h e list can be indefinitely added to, without notable gain. (I have previously given such an e x a m p l e o f realisatio with M a r x , also, in paragraphs 8 0 et seq., and 8 3 et seq.) W h i l e t h e aggregation o f the states o f c o h e r e n c e is m a d e t h r o u g h obliterating t h e m e s , the m o t i o n o f the spirit is achieved through c o n t i n uous disputation between realisatio and renovatio. O w i n g to the obliteration w h i c h is n o w b e i n g effected o f virtually all its d o m i n a n t t h e m e s , the e p o c h in which we live is informed by an excess o f realisatio. Auroral epochs are c o m m a n d e d by renovatio\ the final o n e s — b y realisatio. Instead, the a t t e m p t to obliterate the t h e m e s is a p e r m a n e n t o n e : this is the will for m a n i f e s t a t i o n . 2 5 6 . N o w I c o m e to the m o s t e m b a r r a s s i n g p a r t o f my a c c o u n t . You will wonder: " D o e s he claim that all the things which he has expounded up to this point were 'given' to him in the 'revelation' o f January 1 3 t h ? — H e r e s y ! " A n d you would b e right. W h a t h a p p e n e d to m e that a f t e r n o o n was q u i t e b a n a l . I a m a l m o s t a s h a m e d to tell you t h a t I k n o w a b o u t E t a n a ' s a s c e n s i o n , that I a m a c q u a i n t e d with E n o c h ' s a b d u c t i o n , that I have read Scipio's Dream and have heard of the " i n s p i r e d " dream which J u n g h a d in a train, in which was " g i v e n " a p r e m o n i t i o n o f the F i r s t World W a r . I shall confine myself to an a c c o u n t o f the facts. 2 5 7 . I was at my table in Caimatei Street and was studying something, as usual (I do n o t r e m e m b e r what it was). S u d d e n l y I was s t u c k , as if the r e a c h o f my m i n d had b e e n instantaneously swept away. O u t s i d e it was dusk and, w h e n I looked out o f the window, the stars were already shining. I held my head in my arms and r u b b e d my temples. It was then that everything started. I saw the g l o b e in front o f my eyes, clearly, in iridescent b l u e , shining. I saw the lands, the f o r m s o f relief, I saw p e o ple's m o v e m e n t s , the towns, the rivers, in a way which I c a n n o t explain. S u c h a view presupposes changes o f perspective, b u t my angle o f vision seemed static; I could, however, see everything in a different focus, with-

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out effort, as if my eyes were being guided. My vision was silent from beginning to end: I did not hear voices or noises. I saw the rise of civilisations, their expansion, and their death: I saw their successors and I saw their continuity, in spite of disappearances and of death. At first all was still; then came a whirling, such as an animal chase, in Spain, France, and the north of Africa, which lasted for a while, and then died away. Something still moved in central Europe, then all was silent. Towards the closing of this movement, there was some irregular throbbing in South America, the south of Africa, and northern China, yet not so intense. T h e n they, too, stopped. What remained was a kind of trepidation of the soil: I could tell that there were people. T h e n the image faded and I imagined that I had lost it. When it came back, I saw extremely tall, black and red men, building pyramids in Central America. They were dressed in white, like Romans, and all seemed to be priests by their looks. T h e same men were in Egypt, only Egypt did not cover its present territory, but rather today's Morocco. These people began to vanish, their white garb was lost and faded, and shrank in size. T h e survivors took refuge somewhere in northern India, in caves. T h e n a cover of dust settled over the earth, through which only the Egyptian Sphinx could still be seen. In all this time, the people whom I could feel in the trepidation of the earth were going on with their lives. After the dust settled, there was a moment of calm, when their number seemed to increase especially in Egypt and in western India; there were also two smaller masses: one between Germany and France, to the north, the other on the northern territory of our country. I was very tense and could not follow all those centres of motion. Then there came an explosion, at the same time in northern Egypt and the west of India. T h e latter explosion spread in two directions: towards the north-east, where it immediately dwindled, and towards the south-east, where is was amplified and became a still stronger light than the mother-light. I knew that the explosion in Egypt had a connection with the people living under the Himalayas, while the one in the basin of the Indus had none. Only now did I recognise what I had seen: from now on I shall speak not about "motions", but in terms of the well-known historical civilisations. One explanation must be offered, however: the "motions" which I could see were something like waves in the relief, which took extremely diverse shapes. One could distinguish forms of people, military equipment, standards, ruins of buildings (some of them quite familiar, such as the temple of Marduk), works of art, or simply faces of unknown men, of very different ages, extremely archaic kitchen tools (which I have not

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run across again in any catalogue so far), ceramic vases, coloured fabrics, beasts of burden, etc. This movement was the more intense the more vehement was life itself: it expressed the vitality of that civilisation. When two such movements united, the images which made them up were also mingled, presenting me with a suggestion, provided there was not too much waste of corpses, of a new ethnic synthesis. Let me resume the description of what I saw. 2 5 8 . An agglomeration of motions took place to the north of the Black Sea. It remained, however, stationary, its whirl was turned upon itself. In the meantime, Sumer and Egypt flourished, and so did Harappa. T h e agglomeration to the north of the Black Sea infiltrated today's Turkey and, like molten metal dripping, struck the basin of the Indus, which it extinguished: it then flew all across India. Part of this wave drifted to the south of China, yet vanished here. After infiltrating into Anatolia, the western wing of this agglomeration (to the north of the Black Sea) now spread throughout Europe, falling over Greece and somewhat touching upon Egypt. Now my eyes were pulled in two directions; earlier, from some place in the extreme north (Yakutia?), a vast population swarmed over all of China and drained itself along the coast of North America, with some infiltration into the South as well; this mass boiled moderately at the fringe of the populations from India, after the invasion of the eastern branch of the northern Black Sea people; the second hotbed was made up by the flourishing areas of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, whilst the western branch of the northern Black Sea people was ready to overflow to the north; at the beginning, the Fertile Crescent had contact with the Indus basin, which was cut off after the invasion: from that moment on, the two hotbeds evolved independently. To the East, the direction of movement was to the East: I refer to the expansion of culture (India fertilises China, China fertilises Japan and Korea); through India, on the one hand, and Korea-Japan, on the other, Indochina was also closed. As for the expansion of populations, there was to the east of China a permanent outflow of races which constantly flooded to the West, and which no longer create ethnic beds, but generate only death. To the West, the direction of culture is to the West. I have seen that truth in all its brilliance. 2 5 9 . In non-visual terms, the interpretation of what I saw is as follows. Sumer was taken over by Babylon, which was in turn taken over by Assur. T h e n the Medes conquer Egypt, the great synthesis of the

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Fertile Crescent. Egypt compounds its significance through the Greeks, who take over the Aegean, Phoenician, and Hittite civilisations, the latter being also the first Indo-European signal. Greece represents in spirit the obliteration of the great themes propounded by the historical civilisations of the Fertile Crescent, compounding Egypt in a synthesis of the smile, of the full form, of exuberance. Rome is the obliteration of Greece into an expansive civilising form; Greece became Hellenism, which means the great universal culture of the great East-West synthesis. Rome moulds the entire known world into the form of the universal state of Sargon I the Akkadian, from 2460 B. C. The spirit, as can be seen, journeys West. In its full forms, civilisation is always Western. Then Rome becomes, in the wake of Alexander, the receptacle of the Christian world, which through St Jerome and die Venerable Bede announced the fusion between Catholic (universal) Christianism and Roma Aeterna. The world becomes Christian by moving even further to the West, in the area of France and Germany, where the Holy Empire of the German Nation took shape. Here Latin Christianity, the only truly universal kind, flourished. Let us stop to think for a moment that the Latin language is the only one which, through Rome, served to obliterate the religious and cultural themes of triple millennium Sumer-Greece, whilst, through the Vatican, it was instrumental in instating the new religious themes which led to the magnificent scholastic culture which has founded the modern age. Through the Reformation and the CounterReformation, the active world leaves the Mediterranean space and unravels towards the Atlantic, pushed from behind by the Turkish expansion. The centre of gravity is in Spain and in the Low Countries, which finally lead to a concentration of the new modern economic power in the hands of England, from where the new spirit disseminates back to Europe. From here, even more to the West, the seat of Western civilisation moves after the Second World War to North America, which is the far west of Europe and the far east of Japan. Here is the place where the millennia meet, and here the circle of the world closes, or it will be here that it will begin again. The rule has forever been for the spirit to be born in the East and then become mature in the West. Never has the "spiritual" West been able to conquer the "barbaric" East. T h e invasions of the barbarians are invariably oriented from east to west. Barbarity always wins, yet only to be in its turn subjugated by what it has conquered. This is because the barbarians always win things which they can neither rule nor command. Those who conquer are defeated. On the other hand, Harappa was destroyed by the Indo-Europeans after it had first brought

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together the East and the West via Sumer. The link would only be established again after Alexander, and after that it was never broken again. Dravidians were pushed towards Ceylon, from where they expanded into Indo-China. In China, the civilisation which had come from the extreme north reached maturity. On its eastern coast there were populations in turmoil which would fuel migrations and destruction, in both directions, for over a millennium. From India, Buddhism leaves to the north and conquers first Tibet, and then China. From here it goes further into Japan. After the war, this Japanese Buddhism was to conquer America and set Europe on trial. The cultural expansion which begins with Harappa has as its final point, in the East, Japan. T h e cultural expansion of Sumer has as its final point, in the West, America. T h e modern expansion of the West is exercised in two directions: it goes through Africa into India, and from here it reaches Japan; in the other direction, it crosses the Pacific and provides Japan with the model of the material civilisation of the West. This way, at the crossing of the millennia, Japan is a significant watershed: the Far East of the West through India, it is simultaneously the Far West of the West, through America. 2 6 0 . One streak dashed from Sumer and Egypt and descended on Asia Minor. From here it escaped along the northern seacoast of Africa, joined the streak which was gathering great momentum in Greece and Italy and together they surrounded the entire Mediterranean. T h e wave coming from the parts to the north of the Black Sea had halted in Anatolia and to the east of the Caspian Sea, after which it disappeared. T h e one which had stretched out a limb across Europe and then overflowed into the two Mediterranean peninsulas now joined the wave which had overcome Asia Minor and Egypt. Another wave was growing at that time in the places from where the Sumerian brilliance had left. Then the swarming of the many streaks chose Italy as its hub and from there it turned back once more to their common cradle; the first time—since the break with Sumer—it had come as far as the crown of India. After that, innumerable waves would set off, ruinously, from the Chinese pouch and from the north-eastern heart of Europe and would wipe off the expansion which had reached as far as Britain. Then western Europe was overrun by people from the north, while peoples from the lower Sumer were pullulating and spreading like smallpox throughout Asia Minor. Suddenly, the movement of the masses on the map became so swift that I could barely keep track of it. And I know why that was: the swiftness of the streaks coming one after another made it visible to me

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how Europe was the centre of stability; it showed me Europe's expansion toward the west, and its return to the east, and how it was coincident with the decay of the peoples once occupying the ancient Fertile Crescent; I saw Europe's expansion to Africa and to America, and also to Asia, where they, the white people, would be the only ones left to reunify the diverging movement which followed the Sumer/Harappa moment. Then I saw the globe again, a little more remote than the last time: an arrow left Asia Minor, blue and red, and went all across Europe, and another arrow, black and white, went from India to China, and thrust itself into Japan. Then the first arrow went round America and became one with the second one, in India, China, and Japan. Then the whole world was in white garments, just as the black and red priests were also clothed in white in the first image. There were no people any longer, the earth was no longer throbbing. There was a breath, with a poignant fragrance, and I could tell that people had withdrawn. The earth was a paradise. There was no God. There were no people. I could see the beauty of the landscape, beauty like that of a Renaissance arrière plan, delicate and pure. However, people were not dead: they were contained in this beauty which the magnanimity of their passion had brought forth. This was a tender silence, like a baby's skin. The earth was a paradise. 2 6 1 . When the vision stopped, it was after five-thirty. I already knew so many things and was assailed by a huge throng of hypotheses. Out of scruple, I forbade them to become certitudes. I had to verify. Only a few days later, I had laid down on paper the essential of what I had found out by watching. Then I started to search. I found, I weighed, I compared. This is how the theory which I have offered to you was born. It owes, of course, a great deal to Toynbee and to Eliade. Toynbee I read after January 13th, in Sommervell's summary, for corroboration. He was shortly to become my favourite historian, and one of my revered masters. Mircea Eliade I had known before, yet when I had read his specialised works I had had only a vague interest. After January 13th, as I set out to read him with care, I was hit by the proportions of the thinker. I acquired from him the essential information about planetary mythologies and religions, and also the bibliographical orientation. The birth and development of consciousness and the change of the subject as sense of history are ideas which I have never found explicitly formulated in any other author. The law which I have called realisatio does not appear to have been identified in more than one place so far, which

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is Le Goff's book on purgatory, where it bore the name of spatialisation. All the rest not already written in the books of my masters deserves to be regarded as sheer hallucination. However, even if I make all that I have thought into utter derision, something very important has been accomplished: whilst the vision lasted, the feeling of prison in which my intelligence had been struggling disappeared. M y mind's fingers scratched at the walls no longer, and no longer broke in the process: they passed beyond it, and they danced beyond it. For a moment at least, I have the certitude that in my body the subject was changed. What flesh can be younger than that in which rot has failed to plant its eggs? None, I am telling you: none. T h e sense of any happiness is eternity. 2 6 2 . Until it came to its end, the year 1984 showed to me two faces: History and Apocalypse. As far as History was concerned, there were the many outgrowths of the event of which I have spoken to you: I would read history books and annotate them. I told myself that I was not yet ripe, which was indeed the case. I left the writing of treatises for another age and confined myself to essays (whose respiration I have, if for their style I cannot vouch). There were three essays spawned by January 13th: "A Perspective on Death", "CONSCIOUSNESS. The Story of A Verdict" and " T h e Word". On the other hand, the beginning of the year found me in an auspicious mood for apocalyptic musing. I would leaf through bestiaries, decipher illuminated manuscripts, contemplate the tympana of Gothic cathedrals and, of course, read revelations. T h e profusion of such texts (in medieval times) helped me now (in the 20th century) put some order into my own tenebrae. The readings which I did from Revelations came as a consequence, not as a cause, of the poems by which I was captivated. They are poems entranced in the face of horror and ruled by the awareness of a final examination which awaits: they seem to have been written in articulo mortis. They are, if you like, hallucinations. T h e same visual faculty by which January 13th came through had been responsible also for the imagery of those "bestiaries". There are three triumphs here: 1) the triumph of horror (and the terror preceding it); 2) the triumph of the image over the gnomic "apologue"; and, lastly, 3) the triumph of colour. As I was writing those poems, the awareness that they were a continuation to A Sealed Fountainhead grew in me, but yet I felt no compulsion (at least at that time) to put them together. I accompanied each of those poems with an epigraph taken from among those

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enigmatic apostils in which Goya used to comment on his etchings in the Disasters of War cycle. Against their grain. In March, I named the newly finished cycle " T h e Night of the Musagetes", then "Lilith" (according to Isaiah 34: 14), then "Wanderer through the Sea of F o g " (after the painting by Caspar David Friedrich). I pondered for a moment over "Nada. Ello lo dice", the name of etching 74 (in the original numbering) in Disasters of War. T h e n I realised that the dominant note was death and that what I did was listen to it. So I called the poem which I began in January and ended in March Listening to Death. Indeed. And the steps, which are the parts of the poem, are the stages of initiation into the cult of Isis. I made ample use of a chaotic and unpredictable erudition, to which I abandoned myself. There was the day work, very organised, and the night's delirium, which was perhaps even more precise. During the day I would take painstaking notes, and made files of them, according to their subject. At night, I would dream the images which were resuscitated out of all the erudition by an inner trepidation (which was also visionary, for it was visible) for which I had no name. Listening to Death naturally followed the organisation of the Customs through which the soul has to go, after it has been deserted by the body. I could feel in my flesh the abandon that comes with the state of being dead: it was vivid, sharp, like the pain of a wound. I wrote like someone throwing up his gall: in convulsions. In March, I was relieved to find that the voices had stopped visiting me: I bound the notes for the poem (its cultural arguments) in a separate file, whilst over the rest (the verses) I embarked on a labour of "style" that lasted until late in the autumn. 2 6 3 . It is significant that this poem ( 9 9 0 lines) has no history in it (I refer to the obsession with history, so very present in A Sealed Fountainhead), although my dominant pursuit at that time was precisely the study of history. In a sense, January 13th liberated me from the state beyond redemption in which I was, in relation to history, and whose expression is possible to have been A Sealed Fountainhead. Still, it did not come to me as yet that, during the time that I was writing Listening to Death, I was given signs of my own death. T h a t thought transpired at the beginning of 1985, when, in circumstances of which I have already spoken (paragraph 2 0 0 ) , I took the decision to write one page of confessions per day. A thing of great consequence happened then. On my birthday (March 18th), I took the chance to leaf through the unfinished files: the one which caught my attention was devoted to an index of rep-

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resentations of death and of itineraries which the souls of the dead cover after they die. The raw material was already set for writing a poem (on the margins of the notebooks there were extensions of them, in verse): I wrote it in three days, convinced that I would die shortly afterwards and that it was the last time that I would ever write poetry. Since I was seeking to attain aequanimitas, and therefore anonymity, as soon as possible, I entitled this hundred-line-long poem Ablatio Memoriae. Only when it was finished did it come to me that, starting from the same notes, I had written two different poems. That discovery left me pensive and sceptical about the religious message of my poems, properly so-called. I told myself, however, that this was not necessarily a flaw, insofar as their meaning pointed directly to death. When I realised (it was in June, 1985) that it was not about my death at all, but about my father's, which, in a way, I felt that I had summoned, I did penance, forbidding myself to write any more poetry (poetry being for me a source of great and unpolluted joy). Anyway, I already knew in May, 1985 that A Sealed Fountainhead, Listening to Death a n d Ablatio Memoriae m a d e u p the three

parts of a poem, whose name was still unknown to me for the time being. 2 6 4 . This interdiction on providing joy for myself lasted until March, 1986. I then wrote Paradiso Terrestre, a poem in which my obstinate resolve and my father's death are both saved in one stroke. In point of fact, it was an Ars poetica which had to do with the manner and the content of the three poems which had not yet produced a name for themselves, for the whole which they made up. In June, I found in Majjhimanikaya III, 123, the story of the seven steps of Buddha, which I connected to the seven weeks that he spent in the world of Awakening. Until December, seven poems were ready which simply reinterpreted the matter of the previous four (y compris Paradiso Terrestre). I grouped them under the generic title of Addenda. I had the certitude that the inspiration which had visited me for the first time on May 3rd, 1981 was going, in this way, to find its last expression. That is exactly what happened. Already around the month of September, the general structure of the poem had become definitive. The whole body of poems was called Listening to Death, and contained: Civitas terena (the f o r m e r Sealed

Fountainhead, rewritten from beginning to end; the title is from Augustine's De civitate dei), Vox et praetera nihil (the f o r m e r Listening to Death,

entirely rewritten; I do not remember where the title comes from: Tacitus? The Book of Revelation?— I cannot tell), Ablatio Memoriae, Paradiso Terrestre and Addenda: a total of almost 5,000 lines.

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2 6 5 . Rewriting A Sealed Fountainhead and even, at long last, writing the whole poem Listening to Death became a necessity as soon as I understood that the present liquidation of history—of which I had had a glimpse on January 13th—was a part in the dialectics of our salvation, as individuals. Properly read, Listening to Death is a geology of history, achieved in the manner of a palimpsest. I did my best to avoid laying the denouement on paper, and ending up as an apotheosis. I had nothing to apotheosise, and I preferred not to lie about it. T h e essential of my formal attitude towards the matter of the poem is line 2465 in Listening to Death: "with lieve god got fer dam alike." This attitude, which accords adulation (O Lord!) with imprecation (got fer dam is a curse), points out the aporia which is that of history, without indicating its sense. T h e simple reason for not doing so is that I do not know it. To the false exultation I have preferred the paradox; to the delirium of certitude—litotes. I was thus led (from trying to be honest) to self-referential structures: the poem is built in circles which close, circle within circle. Although its references are cultural, and the names mentioned belong to history, still, semantically speaking, the poem signifies nothing: nothing in the past, nothing in the future. An imminence of religiosity? Pound, in The Cantos, had been obsessed by a moral (Confucius) and by a civilisation degraded (the West, as a result of usury), and his last word is: "to be men, not destroyers" (Notes for Canto, CXVII et seq.). It could be that my only genuine obsession is the fact that I understand, and that understanding is going away from what has been understood. "When we are deepest in the knowledge by intellection, we are aware of none" (Plotinus, The Enneads, V, 8: 11). T h e essence of what knowledge truly means is identification with the object that is known. What do I care for this subtle instrument of "knowledge" that kills what it knows? This anguish is constantly and multifariously expressed throughout the poem: I have only one body and its life means death. 2 6 6 . Assuredly, a theology is also exposed here (a heretical one, I am sure), one that is close to Origen or, rather, to an Origen having read Dostoevsky. A n d there is also a view on the tradition of the epical in Western culture, the filiation H o m e r - V e r g i l - D a n t e - P o u n d , which I have sketched in Spiritual Exercises (pp. I l l et seqq., 129, 162-164), and which I am in no disposition to resume here. I have grown weary, my dear. Besides, it is always embarrassing to speak about oneself, and when one has been doing it over three hundred pages it is downright... (every-

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one can fill in here what he or she pleases). I am already at a loss facing my overlong presence. What can I say? It was a thrill, at the beginning. I spoke of a labyrinth, and of an initiation. The labyrinth I know: it is the darkness in which I struggle. Yet the initiation? The one thing that would have been work talking about, my childhood, remains forever untouched—I have forgotten it. Besides, I have left all encounters with love out of this whole descant. That is enough to transform any life into a void, and mine I have lost on the way. You know what happened to the Jesuits: Loyola told them "Suspend your judgement" and they understood that they had to be hypocrites. In this one thing they have succeeded to perfection... 2 6 7 . Do not be cross with me, but I cannot go on. For three months now all I have been doing has been to take notes from my old notes, and compose. What? The portrait of a non-existence. April, May, September, thirteen years; then two more: fifteen... How strange... This is more than going back from the dead. I begin to understand less and less what I have done, and why. I am terrified of naming, for fear of losing. Who is this that I have been talking about, in fact? A state that not even the gods can reach. I have constructed myself as a man of fidelity. I discover now that I have lost the taste for fidelity and that I have never really been equipped for such a thing. There is no support, and fidelity is an elopement. In the diversity of life there is an attraction which must not be berated. To live, after all, means to know how to leave in good time. The creature that you love, the book that you write, anything. And life, too. You must not forget this truth: even when shared, pleasure is solitary. 2 6 8 . Every now and again, feeling pleasure, I am struck by its vulgarity. That is not because pleasure is vulgar, it is because I am. Impurity comes into the world with man. To be inferior to your pleasures, that is a motive for meditation: the superiority of the body over that fraction of us that we, with a more than indifferent degree of mediocrity, call soul. I feel that, with a ham actor's obstinacy, I have only spoken of that soul in this essay, and that the true glory of my life, the fact that I am alive, has remained without expression. 2 6 9 . Our memories hop on to the decomposed flesh of a corpse. Like those flies consuming the helpless corpse of the horse in Cochirleni, words decompose a perfect tissue which they pretend to be resurrecting

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yet have no real claim that they are really doing so. There is no moment in the past that we could reconstitute in our flesh. Everything is played here and now, in a split second, in the light which shines now. Life does not become more precious as it goes by, and the thought that there is a meaning that we ignored when we lived it and which we discover after it has lost its actuality is all vain: a body is needed, or else signs are empty. T h e r e is only one glory which is not vain, that of which John Chrysostom said it is "the glory in our conscience". T h a t is the body of glory. 2 7 0 . T h e essential is never something of which you say: now I am doing the essential. Machiavelli playing dice with drunkards in the morning, and at night, in sumptuous attire, impersonating one who can speak with the ancients and with posterity—that is something unimaginably vulgar. In this matter, Bernanos pronounced the ultimate truth: on ne fait pas sa part au sacré. 2 7 1 . T h e r e came a time for Charles V's remains to be disinterred. A shudder of awe passed over those present, and Philip IV told his minister, don Luis de Haro: "A body worth the honours". "Very much so, sire", the minister replied. During the service of abdication, Charles V had wept. In front of Goethe's body, Eckermann was overcome by the same veneration: the body of the master had retained its statuary splend o u r even in death. "I like that genius who has a body fit for him", Goethe used to say. As for myself, some kind of body; more directly said: some kind of corpse—that is what I have left behind me. 2 7 2 . "This is a sign that never escapes me, the mediocre man's fear of failure..." (Mircea Eliade, The Hooligans, 3rd edition, p. 392). For fifteen years, which is to say, half of the life which I have lived, I have been obsessed with this fear. 2 7 3 . Well, that is it: I have always known the words, I have lacked the character. Sometimes speaking stems from a secret humiliation. To urge one to have courage, when you do not have it, is not always hypocrisy. How do you do penance for your lack of quality, when you are still intelligent? Here is how: you use the words adequate to the good which might benefit others, even if your own ability to make use of it is impaired.

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2 7 4 • As I grow older, I remember the books of my childhood better and better. They have no significance. There is, however, something in the encounter between me and t h e m which makes them irreplaceable. I have not yet managed to find out why it is so difficult to live and so beneficial to remember. W h e n I was a child, was I living with the same feeling of discomfort? I always smile in my sleep. W h e n I am awake, there is something which torments me. I have looked upon those books again, I have gone through the same comic magazines. M y present perception is clear (from the point of view of content, there is nothing that should be saved there). T h e charm lies in that irrevocable past: the truth has remained there. At the end of two failed lives, Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers evoke a banal and slightly sordid happening from their early adolescence. They once agreed to go together to the Turkish woman, quite a sensation in that establishment for which respectable people used circumlocutions. Frédéric had the money, Deslauriers the boldness. Frédéric lost his nerve and ran away, Deslauriers was forced to follow suit. T h e y were seen coming out of the establishment; the whole town was roaring. Well, the amazing thing is yet to come: "They told the story in great detail, each adding to the other's memories; w h e n they were over, Frédéric said: " T h a t is all that we've had best! " "Yes, it could be! T h a t is all that we've had best", said Deslauriers." W h a t is this "best" that the two had? T h e happening is simple and its simplicity speaks about its nature: its significance lies in the fact that it has none. Still, the fact that the two people are agreed about the import of the story is not at all a p r o d u c t of chance: it comes neither from an inane reverie nor from mediocrity. This is what Flaubert is saying: there is something in m e m o r y which is not reducible to the lived fact. Happiness being alive through nostalgia is not a cliché, as the rapture of love at which Flaubert pokes fun at the beginning of Sentimental Education is also not a cliché. W h a t do I mean by that? T h e present is inexhaustible, because life is so, too. Yet the past is also an enigmatic realm of happiness. I do not know to whom we owe this past-happiness: any existence, no matter how vile, knows something of it. For, it is clear to me, there are two lives: in one we live in order to die; in the other we live as if we have already regained our body of glory. You will eventually come to understand this: that there is nothing to understand. T h a t , in an enigmatic and serene way, is the sense.

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2 7 5 . Is a m a n formed at thirty? Péguy used to say, "à douze ans la partie est jouée..." What about at thirty? One fact is certain: We always die too young and, to all appearances, par malentendu. In his late years, Goethe argued for immortality claiming the conservation of activity, which he named with a pretentious word, entelechy. I could argue for the probability of immortality pleading the remainder that we always leave behind. Yet death is never necessary, even if we give it to ourselves, like Montherlant, or consent to it, like the martyrs. W h e n we deal with things that we understand little, or not at all, the words rush in, in hordes. I have no idea what image I have managed to build up about myself. From all the meaning which I have organised, now everything comes back to me like a tide of nonsense. Since as early as 1975, I have been obsessed with the thought of understanding the fundamental, in consequence of which I have come to be what I am. T h a t fundamental I ignored. I sought to call forth the truth with passion, the roots—with the glamour of consequences. T h e less I know of them, the stronger my desire. Yet how does that come to be? In 1975 I was something, and wanted to know exactly what I was. T h e n I became something else and the obsession stayed the same. Faced with an object which does not exist, or has changed, what knowledge is there which does not become facetious? T h e only thing which has survived is the desire, which to my mind proves that desire has always been its own object. After all, what was it that happened—what? My father, then my mother, then me, closer and closer. Happiness, love, books. Then, books, love. Helplessness. Somebody takes the decision: "Now you shall die", and everything is over. In the meantime, as if under a burden, you keep writing. T h e incredible spring passes by. I understood yesterday, I no longer understand today. Pink clouds, transparent ones. A sky with dimples: the hip of an alabaster woman. T h e sun—invisible. Neither does the ice melt, nor the waters curdle. In open daylight, the moon: it does never for an instant leave the canopy at noon, with its splinters and with its enamel glitter. What is life? It is, that is certain, a de-conditioning from the tenebrae, a flight. Yet it is a flight against the arrow. To write—that is absurd. Who is the man who has enough gall to keep on throwing it up? I have searched for the essential. I cannot even say that there is such a thing as the inessential. M o s t often, you are left dumb: prostration progresses without any decrease in lucidity. For the climax of lucidity is idiocy. Aware of what? Aware of the nothingness of being: of being aware. Still, immortality—who would have believed it? Essence means this: to live the inessential without resignation. Quattuor

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hominum novissima. How does it start? Meretrix apostasiae, il me semble. Nil nocere, of course, yet what about the evil that one inflicts on oneself? Always there is a quieta non movere observable in what you are. There is no essence in the whole world in which we live, one that would allow us to live it as a true essence. Hardly have you stepped into your role when ridicule overwhelms you. Why? Not even "redemption" can be taken seriously. Explicit mysterium... Do I need to add that this "mystery" is a play?—that play in which Augustus, with his death word, was hoping to have played his part well. The same holds true, let us concede—qualis artifex pereo—with each and every one of our bodies...for in each of us lurks a Katyn, a Dachau, a Kolima: when I die, things will be interrupted, that is all. I shall not find out dying more than I have found out living. If you yourself are the target, you shall never reach it. More than that: time sifts from a substance which is torn from my entrails: mustier and mustier, and, at the same time, ever more lessened, I go towards that thing which, I have the impression, is me. Desires throw me into myself, and they also pull me out. You are just as obscure after you have been, as before. The same gestures which repeat themselves again and again, which are meant to destroy the same being which makes them. To live, always; to be what you are, never... The obsession with knowing what I am is earlier than my being: I was not yet the object of my search, and already I was condemned to becoming the being that I could not find. I was being shaped by the search and driven away by it because I allowed myself to be revivified by a fiction, like death reading on the face of the man who cannot take his eyes off Medusa's gaze. Could one still say, in this case, that esse sequitur operari? I have become, because I have searched. Still, had I not searched, the one I was looking for would never have come to exist. Things exist only if you make the decision to speak of them. The same happens with beings, if you agree to love them for the flesh with which they block the light (and not, as hypocrites do, for the putative soul). This is what makes life intolerable. Without answers, the world is void. To ask makes the answer impossible. That is all. EXPLICIT MYSTERIUM

October-December

1987

C O N S U L T E D WORKS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23' 24.

Journal I Gan.-Feb. 1973), 34 p. Notebook I (1974), 6 p. Notebook II (1974), 38 p. Journal II (9 Jan.-20 Sepi. 1974), 102 p. Journal III (24 Sept. 1974-13 March 1975; 22 Aug.-6 Sept. 1977), 24 p. Notebook III (1975), 20 p. Notebook IV (1976-77), 37 p. Notebook V (1977: 18 p.; 1980: 19 p.; 1981: 18 p.) Notebook VI (Oct.-Dec. 1976), 56 p. Notebook VII (Sept.-Oct. 1978), 58 p. Notebook VIII (1977: 9 p.; Sept. 1979: 36 p.) Notebook IX (1978: 22 p.; Feb.-March 1979: 69 p.) Notebook X (Aug. 1979: 22 p.; Sept. 1980: 16 p.) Notebook XI (Feb.-Jul. 1979), 44 p. Notebook XII (Jul.-Aug. 1982: 63 p.; Jan. 1983: 38 p.) Notebook XIII (Feb. 1983), 55 p. Book I (1974: 82 p.;Jan.-Feb. 1976: 4 p.) Book II (Nov.-Dec. 1974: 33 p.; 1975: 84 p.; Jan. 1976: 4 p.) Book III (Jan.-Oct. 1976: 57 p.;Jan. 1977: 2 p.; Dec. 1978: 10 p.; Jan. 1979: 3 p.) Book IV (March-May 1977), 80 p. Book V (May-Sept. 1977), 70 p. Book VI (May-Dec. 1977: 46 p.; May 1978: 13 p.) Book VIIA (Sept.-Dec. 1978: 18 p.; Feb.-Jul. 1979: 8 p.) Book VIIB (1975: 16 p.; Dec. 1977: 3 p.; Feb.-Dec. 1978: 102 p.; Jan.-Oct. 1979: 71 p.) 25. Book VIII (March-May 1979: 20 p.; Oct.-Nov. 1980: 12 p.; Jan.-Feb., Oct. 1981: 15 p.; Feb., May 1982: 34 p.; Jul.-Aug. 1983: 11 p.; May 1986: 14 p.; Jan. 1987: 8 p.) 26. Book IX (Oct.-Dec. 1979: 26 p.; 1980: 59 p.; 1981: 18 p.; 1982: 93 p.) 27. Book X (Jan.-May 1975: 15 p.; Jun.-Sept. 1976: 2 p.; Dec. 1977: 2 p.; Jan.-Feb. 1978: 4 p.; Jul. 1982: 1 p.) 28. Book XI (Dec. 1975: 27 p.;May.-Dec. 1976: 17 p.; Nov.-Dec. 1977: 15 p.; Jan.-March 1978: 6 p.) 29. Book XII (Dec. 1982: 2 p.; 1983: 51 p.; Jan.-May 1984: 70 p.; Sept. 1985: 15 p.) 30. Book XIII (disparate notes 1979-1984: 12 p.): Journal of Fidelity

252 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Journal IV (1981: 58 p.; 1982: 56 p.; 1983: 26 p.; 1984: 6 p.; 1985: 1 p.) Journal V (1982: 14 p.; 1983: 14 p.; 1984: 18 p.; 1985: 3 p.) Files I (Book XIII) (March 1981-Jul. 1982), 252 p. Files II (Book XIV) ( J " l - D e c . 1982), 173 p. Files III (Book XV) (1983), 269 p. Note I (history) (Book XVI) (Feb. 1983-May 1984), 352 p. Poetry I (1973-1977), 206 p. Poetry II (1978-1981), 292 p. Essays I (1975-1980), 326 p. Essays II (1980-1983), 263 p. Note II (history) (Book XVII) (May 1984-Jan. 1985), 247 p. Files IV (Book XVIII) (1984), 253 p. Journal VI: Spiritual Exercises (Jan.-Jun. 1985), 189 p. Note III (history) (Book XIX) (March 1985-Dec. 1986), 193 p. Files V (Book XX) (March 1985-March 1989), 205 p. Essays III (1985-1987), 300 p. Poetry III (1982-1985), 277 p. Journal VII: Light Is in Things and under Their Skin (Aug. 1985- Sept. 1986), 186 p. Essays IV (1988-1989), 300 p. Poetry IV {Poems) (1978-1980), 217 p. Poetry V (1986), 121 p. Poetry VI: The Nights (1986), 190 p. Journal VIII: Anarh (Oct. 1986-Dec. 1987), 179 p. Poetry VII: Listening to the Night (1981-1987), 329 p. Notebook XIV (1985), 36 p. Note IV {Book XXI) (1987-1991), 226 p. Journal IX (1988-1990) (contains also Spiritual Exercises 3) and Journal^. (1990-1992), 257 p. Flight against the Arrow (1987), vol. I, 194 p. Idem, vol. II, 194 p. Essays V: In the Mailer of an Aberration—Romanian Patriotism (1985-1990), 463 p. Essays VI: (E. Cioran, M. Eliade, On Love (1987-1989), 250 p. Fiction I (1973-1988), 200 p. Correspondence I (1981-1988), 255 p. Spiritual Exercises, vol. 2 (1988-1989), 357 p.