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Rugai-vă pentru fratele Alexandru © by Constantin Noica
Originally published by Editura Humanitas, Bucharest
Translation published in by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way.
https://punctumbooks.com
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Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress
Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei
Proofreading: Joyce King
Cover image: Annett Müller, Fort , Prison of Jilava ()
Pray for
Brother
Alexander
Constantin Noica
Translated by Octavian Gabor
’
Aer the end of World War , the Communist Party took over
power in Romania. e social and political changes transformed
the life of philosopher Constantin Noica as well. Considered an
“anti-revolutionary” thinker (the les of his trial reveal that his
writings on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit were consid-
ered anti-revolutionary*), Noica was placed under house arrest
in Câmpulung-Muscel between and . In , he was
sentenced to years in prison. He was freed aer years; Pray
for Brother Alexander covers his experiences during this time.
For more on his life and philosophy, see my article, “Constantin
Noica’s Becoming within Being and Meno’s Paradox.”†
is is the third volume by Noica published in English. e
previous two were both published in , both translated by
Alistair Ian Blyth: Becoming within Being (Marquette University
Press) and Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit (University
of Plymouth Press).
For this edition, all footnotes belong to me, unless other-
wise noted. At times, I have chosen to keep Romanian terms,
explaining their meaning in a footnote. e register of Noica’s
writing varies throughout the book. At times, it reads as a diary,
while at other times as a philosophical treatise.
I remain indebted to Dana Munteanu for her continual sup-
port during the translation of this volume and for reading and
* See Prigoana: Documente ale procesului C. Noica, C. Pillat, S. Lăzărescu, A.
Acterian, Vl. Streinu, Al. Paleologu, N. Steinhardt, T. Enescu, S. Al-George,
Al. O. Teodoreanu i alii (Bucharest: Vremea, ).
† In Zara Martirosova Torlone, Dana Lacourse Munteanu, and Dorota
Deutsch (eds.), A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central
Europe (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, ), –.
oering helpful suggestions. My wife, Elena, and my son, An-
drei, have oen suggested the right word whenever I could not
nd it. For this and for sharing their lives with me, I am forever
grateful.
’
is book was written by Noica aer his release from political
prison, in , but it remained unpublished until . Its chap-
ters were sent to England starting in , as letters addressed by
the author to his rst wife, Wendy Muston, with the idea that
Wendy would translate them and publish them abroad. One
version of the manuscript was kept in the author’s archive; this
version was at the basis of the edition published by Humanitas
in . As will be seen, that version was incomplete.
e present volume contains four new chapters compared to
the and editions: , which was present in the previ-
ous versions in the form of a summary written by the author (we
maintained this summary within brackets), , , and .
ese texts were found in the archives of the former
Securitate,* and were returned to Mariana Noica, the widow of
the author, by Virgil Măgureanu, the chief of the Romanian In-
telligence Service, in . Marin Diaconu published them in
Viaa românească,† year , November–December ,
nos. –, and we have took them from there. We thank Marin
Diaconu for his help and kindness.
* e secret police during communism.
† Romanian literary journal.
Toward the end of World War , a nunnary from Moldova* was
occupied by the conquering Soviet troops. e nuns le and
looked for refuge in other places. When they returned, they
found a note on the altar: “e commander of the troops that
occupied the monastery declares that he le it untouched and
asks you to pray for his soul.” Beginning with that moment, the
name of Alexander is mentioned at every religious service.
Pray for brother Alexander! You too, reader, pray, because
this name does not concern only the commander of the vic-
torious troops (But what have you done, brother Alexander,
in the meantime? Have you spent your days in prison or have
you become a conformist? Have you slaved on the elds like the
others, or have you written books and sent them abroad?†), but
it also concerns all the other brothers Alexander, the insecure
victors. Pray for brother Alexander from China, but do not for-
get brother Alexander in the United States; pray for the strong
everywhere, for those who know, physicists, mathematicians,
and super-technicians, but who no longer know well what they
know and what they do, for all those who possess and give or-
ders, together with their economists; pray for the triumphant
wanderers through life without culture, but also for the wander-
* Moldova was a province of Romania. Since the monastery was occupied by
the Soviet troops, Noica probably refers to the part of Moldova which was
annexed by the Soviet Union rst in and then also of the end of :
Bessarabia, the current Republic of Moldova.
† Due to censorship during Communism, writers from the Eastern bloc sent
their manuscripts to the West with the help of acquaintances. Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, for example, was rst published in the
West .
ers within culture; for the European man who triumphed over
material needs, for the modern man who triumphed over nature
and over the good God. Pray for brother Alexander!
When a victor asks you to pray for him, it means that he of-
fers you his victory. “Can you do anything with this victory?” he
seems to say. It is true, not anyone can triumph over his own vic-
tory and feel as deep as brother Alexander that he has nothing
to do with it. At his own level, however, a common man oers
various victories on the market, victories that he cannot always
use, so that today’s world seems to be one in which victories are
suspended, are for sale. At every step, there is a victory of the
modern world, having no master, being certain of itself.
Being certain of their deed, some say, “Take, eat, this is my
victory, which spills over the world for you and your happiness.”*
Others, more uncertain about what they have to do, say, “Here is
my victory; see what can come out of it.” A few get angry: “Don’t
you see what I accomplished?” As good mercenaries, the scien-
tists, the politicians, the technicians, all of them won the battle,
receiving their money and glory. e rest of the people are, with
or without their will, for sale.
But don’t we nd a human miracle and a blessing even in this
situation? e conditions for a deeper solidarity among the peo-
ple of today have been created through it; a solidarity between
unequal people. It would have been such a spiritual disaster if
victory remained in the hands of victors, if the physicists, the
biologists, the sociologists, and the politicians knew what to do
until the end, or if the super-technicians became better manag-
* During the Orthodox Liturgy, at the moment of the Eucharist, the priest
intones the words of institution at the moment of the consecration of the
Eucharist: “Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you for the remis-
sion of sins.” See also Matthew :.
ers! It would have been such a disaster if brother Alexander had
the conscience of a victor when he entered the monastery! e
world would have been separated between human subjects and
human objects or, rather, between privileged humans, the vic-
tors, and the sub-humans. e human miracle is that victory
can be shared.
And it is shared even on a political level, where the victor
thinks that he maintains victory with power. e one who has
lived attentively and especially serenely during communism
realizes that an apparently odd result is reached: this revolu-
tion is, aer all, for the benet of the rich, not of the poor; the
poor people’s wealth now comes from the rich, which is no big
deal; but the poor is given the ideal of enrichment. But a man
frustrated by the ideal — and at this level this means “meaning
of life” — is in a way destroyed. In the meantime, anyone who
possessed something and was alienated by possession can at
times feel that he is reinvested as human, reestablished. Some
people from the upper classes, who no longer knew their human
measure because of their easy lives, discovered when they were
dispossessed of their goods and privileges that they knew some-
thing and that they could do something; they even discovered
that they wanted something and that they could do something,
and even that they wanted something with all their hearts. In a
sense, they discovered their own necessity. Today, they no long-
er aspire to regain liberties, in plural, but only that liberty which
fullls their interior necessity.
Aer all, it should not be surprising; if someone was alien-
ated by his possession, this was the possessor; instead, the man
who lived under the level of possession was in sub-humanity.
e revolution just raised the latter to the condition of a human
being. Doesn’t he risk his humanity only beginning from here?
e victory of communism in a large part of the world is not for
him at the end. Who can do something with this victory? e
true surprise could be that one day we would see that those who
defend the menaced revolutions are not their supposed bene-
ciaries — just like in the chapter from Hegel’s Phenomenology,
where the generosity of the one who wants to help the oppressed
encounters the opposition of their solidarity with their oppres-
sors.
If, however, communism, which wanted strongly to obtain a
certain thing, has a chance to obtain something else, then capi-
talism, which does not want almost anything, has even more
chances to obtain something completely dierent. ere is
something else beyond the two worlds opposed today. It’s not
the two of them which are still interesting, but rather a subtler
thing, a third human condition dierent from these two. A child
is a third starting from a certain moment: it is no longer impor-
tant what the parents want from him and what they invest in
him. It is not important what the tree bringing forth the seed
wants. From a certain moment, it is no longer important what
the states and the governments want regarding a person, whom
they fostered directly or indirectly; this person entered another
growing process, under another law. From a certain moment, it
is no longer important what happens to us externally. Very seri-
ous things can happen to us, but they no longer mean anything,
in a sense…
“It is of no importance,” I tell him.
He is years old. We are both imprisoned in a cell for two
people, with a shower and the water closet under the shower.
When he takes a shower in the morning, I can see how well built
he is, with long muscles. Sometimes, when the guard does not
watch through the peephole in the door, my young man jumps
and touches the ceiling. He used to be in the national volley-
ball team. ey played in East Berlin, and a girl asked him if he
wanted to see the other Berlin. He did not like it so much in the
West because the authorities bored him with various interroga-
tions. When he came back to East Berlin, he was well received at
the beginning. en, as he was returning back home… Now we
are both under investigation.
◊
“It is of no importance,” I tell him.
“For you, perhaps,” he bursts out. “You are over . But for
me it is! You see that ‘this thing’ puts you in prison. And then
you say that it is of no importance?”
“It is very serious, but of no importance.”
“Look, you kind of bore me, sir! According to you…”
e door’s latch is moving.
“Take this and come,” the guard tells me while entering.
He gives me opaque glasses, made out of metal; we must put
them on any time we come out of the cell. e bloke takes you
by the arm and, at times, seeing that you wobble, makes fun of
you: “Careful, don’t step into water.” You hesitate to put your
foot down, and he laughs. But what a gentle thing to walk like
that, guided in the unknown! It is like in a ritual of initiation or
like in a dream…
I return aer two hours. e guard takes o my opaque
glasses and closes the door loudly, locking it up. For a moment,
I remain confused in the middle of the cell. I feel my cheeks
slightly swollen, and my young man must have seen something
as well, since he asks me, “ey have beaten you, haven’t they?”
“Yes,” I nally consent aer a hesitation, “but…”
“But it is of no importance, I know,” he completes the sen-
tence. “Nevertheless, why did they beat you?”
“at’s what I wanted to say: they beat me without a reason.”
“How so, without a reason? at’s what they do?”
My young man is worried. e idea of being hit without be-
ing able to react probably oended his pride of a sportsman. Or
perhaps he would react… I have to better explain to him the
non-sense of everything that happens in our situation.
“I was beaten because I did not want to take a cigarette.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“But I assure you it was because of this. e guy who was
interrogating me started by asking to whom I gave a book that
I had received from abroad. I replied that the work had noth-
ing problematic for the regime. ‘Scoundrel,’ he said, ‘you will see
how things are with this book. Now tell me to whom you gave
it.’ ‘I am not obligated to tell you,’ I said, ‘since this cannot be a
criminal charge.’”
e young man interrupted my story: “is is the moment
when he hit you.”
“No,” I answer, “the guy was more skillful. He took from his
pocket the list with the names of the ve or six friends who re-
ally had the book in their hands (the informant I feared had
done his work fairly well). en all of a sudden I had the idea
that I could save my friends by paralyzing my interrogators with
a cloud of names. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you were referring to these peo-
ple? But there are tens of other people to whom I could have
lent the book, or to whom I actually lent it.’ I was reckoning that
they could not arrest eighty or one hundred people who had a
perfectly innocent book in their hands. So I say,* ‘You have taken
my agenda with addresses and phone numbers. Give it back to
me for a moment, please, so that I could remember.’
“ey give me the agenda and I read absolutely all names
from it. From time to time, the interrogator stops and says with
satisfaction the rst name of the person who is mentioned; at
other times, he asks me who that person is. I follow how he puts
down on paper name aer name methodically, for around
minutes (ey have a good stomach, I tell myself; they can han-
dle any quantities). At the end, he oers me a cigarette.
“At that moment I realized† what an idiot I had been, perhaps
even criminal, for I had put under his eyes so many names from
which he could have chosen whomever he wanted. I refused the
cigarette. ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Take the cigarette!’ he
shouted. ‘I won’t.’ ‘Take it or I’ll dislocate your jaw!’ he yelled, as
if peeved.
“I was afraid, of course, but a kind of ‘no’ came out from my
lips. e next moment, I was surprised by a strong blow on the
neck, with the side of the right palm (I had not known of such
special blows), and then some slaps that shook my head quite
seriously. I felt how my le eye was trying to come out of its
socket. I thought of two things at the same time. First: so there
is a concrete meaning for the expression ‘he hit him so hard
that his eyes popped out.’ e second thought was totally dif-
ferent in kind: he hits me — I told myself — in order to check
my strength in resisting. He probably wants to be sure that he
can obtain from me whatever he wants, and in any case that I
am not able to hide anything from him. e pretext with the
cigarette is as good as any other; or, precisely because he has no
other occasion to verify from the beginning my capacity to hide
something, he uses this one. It is a simple question of technical
skill or virtuosity — on my part or his part. What if I gave up,
* e switch from past tense to present tense takes place in the original here,
and I decided to maintain this change.
† At this moment, the author changes back to past tense.
all of a sudden? It would be the best assurance for him that he
dominates me totally, while for me it would be a chance to hide
something from him another time…
“‘Take the cigarette,’ he shouts aer he hits me.
“I took it.”
“Oh,” my young cellmate sighs.
“You see,” I try to explain to him or to justify myself, “it can
be a tactic to show that you are weak…”
“But I would have never done this,” he exclaims disapprov-
ingly. “Aer he hit me? Never…”
He looks at me. I probably have an uneasy air, in my incapac-
ity to clarify the subtleties of my game; aer all I am not certain
about it either. His indignation stops all of a sudden, and the
young man turns things around, changing his tone. He does
not want to oend me, at least not entirely, in the conditions in
which we nd ourselves.
“You know why you took the cigarette?” he asks me.
“Why?”
“Because you felt like smoking,” he said.
My young sportsman is not stupid at all. In a way, he was
right. e slaps I got had brought me to reality: nothing made
any sense in that moment. I could smoke a cigarette.
I wake up the second day before the sound of the prison’s bell,
and I see Alec sleeping calmly, his hands outside, according to
the rules here, on his back, under the light that must be on all
night.* (My young cellmate is named Alec, from Alexander. He
could be a brother Alexander as well, a victor for whom you
must pray. But aren’t all young people this way?) He has already
learned to sleep according to the rules in prison, and he’s been
here only for four days. Poor young man… I am more and more
overtaken by a feeling of responsibility for him. Could I do any-
thing good at all for him?
But I realize all of a sudden how ridiculous this pedagogical
temptation is. On the contrary, I run the risk of irritating him
and of making him reluctant, as it happens with those who are
very close to you or those who make it a point to make others
happy. Aer all, perhaps they, these communists, also want our
good — perhaps the improvement of our human condition, the
overcoming of alienation, welfare for all, or at least welfare with-
out the feeling that you are privileged if you have it — but they
create such resistance in us! Nothing from what they oer has
taste, and the world is so ungrateful for their trouble to make us
happy that I wonder at times if we are not a little unfair to them.
But they came too close to people; they installed themselves in
the people’s storerooms, in their shelters, in their drawers, and,
as much as possible, in their consciences (“say this,” “make your
* According to the testimony of many who suered in communist political
prisons, this was one method of torture: to force the inmates to sleep in one
position only for the entire night, and always with the hands in sight, above
the covers.
own critique”). ey make you uncomfortable just by using
their simple voice, just with their newspaper or speaker.*
In fact, they are too demonstrative. ey have no discre-
tion. Imagine that someone would take, or would imagine that
he takes, the responsibility of food digestion and would speak
in this way: “Now the food comes into your mouth. e teeth
should do their duty and crush it; the salivary glands should
attack it from all sides. Behold, new juices are waiting in the
esophagus, well prepared, to hurry its decomposition, and the
stomach must be ready not only with its acids, but also with its
ferments and especially its pepsins. But where is the trypsin?
e trypsin should not be late! I tell you food passes well by
the duodenum at this very moment, where the pancreas and the
liver send their subtle juices to accomplish the work. In a mo-
ment, the intestine with its complex organization, concentrated
economically in a small place, will absorb the water, the salts,
the sugars, the fats, and the proteins, and even some vitamins
from the food in order to nourish the all-nourishing blood. e
plan has been accomplished!”
I should not be like them with Alec. Life is a problem of di-
gestion. I have to let him digest alone everything that happens
to him. Everyone has his own stomach. Do I know what the
good is? Perhaps he does not know it himself. I want for him the
better — how to pass through this event more easily — but not
necessarily the good. And perhaps if I say it this way, I do not
fall into platitude, le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.† I think I want
to say, le mieux est l’ignorance du bien.‡
Aer all, this is how all politicians, of one kind or another,
behave with us: they want our “better” and think that they want
our good. In large part, the dirtiness of our modern political life
is a grammatical problem: people confuse the comparative with
the positive, and they even no longer think of the positive. (e
Americans no longer consider even the comparative, but direct-
* “Speaker,” in English in the original.
† “e better is the enemy of the good,” in French in the original.
‡ “e better is the ignorance of the good,” in French in the original.
ly the superlative: “the best”). e politicians come and tell us,
“Wouldn’t it be better if you all have an apartment each?” “Yes,”
we answer in a choir, “it would be better.” “Wouldn’t it be better
to have longer vacations?” “Yes, it would be much better.” “You
see,” they say then, “we want your good and you have to vote for
us, to ght with us. And if you are not aware of your interest, we
have to take the responsibility to fulll it for you, running the
risk to encounter your misunderstanding, your inertia, even at
times your evil disposition.”
I actually indisposed Alec a little. I only realized it yesterday
morning, when I was doing my two gymnastics movements,
precisely for digestion. He told me, “I have been here for three
days, and I see you doing the same two movements. Don’t you
know any other one? Let me teach you.” I also got angry a little
myself, and I did not ask him to teach me a third movement. I
am as childish as he is.
“How did the fellow from yesterday look like, the guy who
got on you about the cigarette?” he asks me aer he stands up.
“To be honest, I did not really look at him,” I answer. “We do
not have to register and remember all things. I decided to not
remember their names, so I would not recognize them on the
street when I will be free one day. ey do not matter. ey are
not themselves.”
Alec looked at me with pity.
“Perhaps your eyes darkened because he slapped you.”
“No, my dear, honestly, I am not interested in how he looked.
ey are not themselves, I repeat; there is something else or
someone else behind them.”
He shakes his head at what he takes to be my platitude.
“You mean the Russians…”
I wait for him to wash, and we sit on the blankets, waiting
for the poor substitute for morning coee to come. I then try
to explain.
“Aer all, it is not about the Russians; I think there is some-
thing else in place, which transforms all of them into objects.”
“Ah, the system!”
“If it were only this! But our entire Time, time with a capital
T, pushes them to do what they do.”
“But you, is it still the time with a capital T that threw you
in here?”
“Of course, and also those who must guard us. In fact, our
time has already been described almost to the letter. Goethe did
it, in the second part of Faust. If I told you the story, you would
s e e …”
“Well, culture! You explain everything with it perfectly, even
when you do not know anything. If you were so clear with
Faust about time, then how come did you get here?”
“Such things cannot be avoided; you cannot evade your own
time. ey* are victims as well, just like us.”
“What, isn’t it going well for them?”
“I could not say that it is going so well for them.. Consider
these guards: they have to look at us through the peephole every
ve minutes, to see whether we are not plotting something or
trying to take our own lives. If they have ve cells to oversee, this
means that they look through a peephole every minute. Is this a
human job? ey are like the dogs, running from door to door.”
“I see you pity them. Perhaps you pity the investigators as
w e l l …”
I sense how he is about to boil. I try to avoid being too cat-
egorical and provocative in my judgments, and I tell him:
“My dear, regardless of the situation in which one nds one-
self, it is good to ponder on the situation that may follow.”
“Should I have pity on them because they run the risk to be
judged one day?”
“is does not even cross my mind. I pity them (if I can talk
this way in our situation) because I see that they are not placed
in the condition of being humans, beings who do something
and nd out something from life. ere are so many things they
could learn about man from this entire gallery of human speci-
mens that go before them! But how could they learn? ey must
* “ey” could refer here to the investigators or more generally to the com-
munists.
reach a pre-established result; they have to make people recog-
nize what they want. ey do not want to learn even new words
or new ways to speak. You will see that they do not allow you
to write your declaration alone, but they write it, in their terms
and with their clichés, and you are only to sign it, if you cannot
refuse and resist. I oen thought that it would be interesting to
investigate an investigator, that is to cross-examine him about
the human types he has encountered. But in fact, he is trained to
precisely destroy dierent human types and even man as moral
being. ey do not realize that, with people, if you destroy the
other, you annul yourself. What will they do in life when this
story is nished?”
He listened to me until the end, but when I raise my eyes to-
ward him I see that he is suocated by revolt. Coee came in the
meantime. Aer he drinks it, Alec recovers a little. It feels as if a
demon makes him to continue to put traps for me.
“And those in power, the bigwigs, are they also not doing
well?”
I breathe deeply. What can I do but tell him my thought, even
if I really attenuate it?
“ere was a French writer, Montherlant,” I answer, “who
had the courage to write in a book published during the Ger-
man occupation: ‘pitié pour les forts!’* I let aside the fact that
the communists, aer they dreamed, fought, and crushed all
adversity, they have to do simple work of administration. is
is the misery of any political delirium. But what’s the curse that
makes them, the materialists, who spume of anger against ideal-
ism, to practice the worse idealism, the type that deforms reality
by their idea instead of forming it by the idea taken from real-
ity? Everything is disgured, starting with them, the material-
ists, just like in Faust . Someone told me that the most painful
thing is to watch one of their parties: they are afraid to drop an
* “Mercy on the strong!” in French in the original.
inappropriate word, they or their wives.* ey can’t even party
anymore! ey are not interesting…”
“As if it were about this?” Alec bursts out. “About this? You
don’t believe yourself an iota of what you say! ey hold us in
their claws, don’t you see? ey hold us in their claws. It is as if
you would say that the lion that caught you is not really interest-
ing because its manes are too short or its eyes too yellow!”
I watch how he stood up. He is furious, and I truly feel like
I am in a cage with him. ere is a feeling of animality coming
from him. I would deserve to be crushed since I provoked him
like this. If something took place… Anything…
en the miracle comes. e door opens widely, and the
guard brings a bucket with dirty water and two large rags.
“Wash the oor,” he commands. I jump to take one of the rags
and I begin to feverishly scrub the concrete. Alec became calm
all of a sudden. e idea that he has something to do restores
him to order. He recovers even the strength to be ironical: “is
too is in Faust , isn’t it?”
* Noica probably refers to the fear one would experience during a commu-
nist regime. People avoided to express any opinions that may be construed
as opposing the regime because such opinions could send you straight to
prison. e Securitate, the secret police, had informants among all people,
especially among the Communists themselves, and one could never know
how his or her conversations would be reported.
I do not say anything and I ponder while I continue scrubbing
the oor: where does this scene or a similar one appear in Faust?
It should be somewhere in Goethe’s work, for this is about some-
thing profoundly human: the work of a slave…
However, to wash the oor of your own cell does not seem
to really be the work of a slave. is is work as well, and it has
something good in it, regenerating. In the lack of meaning in
which they threw us (and in which they threw themselves, be-
cause of the excessive power that they assumed), any useful
work is a blessing. Alec fully feels it too, and he gets more and
more on my half of the oor, until he decides to take the bucket
with water to him, not allowing me to do anything else. Perhaps
he wants to spare me. He does not realize that I take pleasure as
well in washing the oor.
“I was afraid that you would not have cleaned the oor well,”
he tells me so as to give an explanation. “For you, all things seem
without importance, while for me the cleanliness of the cell is
important.”
“is is more important than the great historical events,” I
answer.
He sits on the bed. He is content that he did good work, but
aer one moment he remembers my previous reection and he
revolts again.
“How can you make such cheap paradoxes?”
I am afraid to say the littlest thing. In fact, I don’t even think
that he would nd a meaning in what I am tempted to say now.
He is too young to know of the vacuum of many of the so-called
“historical” events. I remember some events from the more re-
cent past that seemed historic to their contemporaries and to
the media. “e historic meeting in Bermuda.”* Who remem-
bers this? Churchill met there with some American president,
and some president of a French council could not come because
he had a cold. How historic would the meeting have been if the
latter had not had a cold… Making order and cleaning around
you have a positive meaning for both you and the society, while
some great events can be a simple stammer of history.
In fact, if it could be said about nature that it stammers, then
this can be said even more about history, since it is done the way
it is done by this approximate being, the human. Perhaps we
live now during a stammer of history, an organized one — this
is what I would like to tell Alec. It is terrible or it is stupid, how-
ever you want to take it. It is like in the English proverb: the dog
barks, but it barks up the wrong tree (where the cat is not).
You oen have the impression that the people of public life
bark up the wrong tree, even if you do not know which tree the
cat is in, either. (e unbelievable thing is that these people, the
communists, ask you to bark like them, up their tree. “If you
don’t bark, I will bite you.” And they really bite.)
Alec cannot know that two generations, those before him,
were troubled by two world wars generated — at least on the
continent — by something incredible today: the French–Ger-
man conict. It is as if the le hand would ght the right. In
all of Europe, people were divided in public life but also in pri-
vate life on this theme: are you with the French or with the Ger-
mans? Parents were ghting their children. I do not want to say
that we can delete these wars from history, started by Teutonic
blindness, or the communist revolution that came between
them. How could they be deleted, since they had so many con-
sequences? But anyone can see today that the Europeans barked
up the wrong tree. ree great nations in Europe were ghting
one another so that two other greater nations from the margins
of Europe, the Americans and the Russians, could take the fore-
ground faster than even they could desire it. And even behind
* Noica probably refers to the meeting between Churchill and Presi-
dent Eisenhower.
these two and their unnatural and forced antagonism there was
something else: the fact that Europe, together with the Ameri-
cans and the Russians, was destined to wake up Asia from its
sleep and Africa from its animality. By its civilization — histori-
cally the rst one that was established on exclusively rational val-
ues and perfectly transmissible to any human mind — Europe,
this peninsula of Asia, was about to wake up the whole globe to
life. It almost did it in a dierent fashion, through colonialism,
but this was more abusive and too slow. It quickened, and now
things happen too fast. But it is this waking up to life of the globe
that is important, or something of this kind (the demographic
explosion, the indirect and direct pressure of the ird World),
and not the barks of the rst half of the th century. Someone
said, “the stupid th century.” You could rather say, “the stupid
rst half of the th century.” At least some art was done during
it. Otherwise, it would have been a perfect stupidity of history.
“Tell me something. Tell me about a movie,” says Alec.
He cannot stand this prolonged silence, even though he
would stand my rattle about history even less. I have to do what
he asks of me. But I do not like movies too much, or I don’t like
those with a “subject.” e absurdity of the movie with a subject
is that it wants to xate the imagination of the spectator with a
few images. But it should, I do not know how, free it. Perhaps
giving the same scene two or three times, in dierent fashions.
But, behold, I act like someone wise when I do not know to nar-
rate a simple movie.
“You see,” I tell him, “I do not think I could describe one as
you would like, with details, especially an action movie.”
“How so? You are telling me that you can narrate entire
books, and you are not able to tell me a movie? en tell me
something else, a story.
“Yes,” I say, “yes, of course.”
I try hard to remember a story.
“You won’t say that you don’t know a story?”
“No… yes… of course yes; who doesn’t know any story?”
I feel worse than under investigation, and I try to invent
something. I begin, “Once upon a time… there was… there was
a village which had only one well, and that well did not have a
lot of water either. (It’s an idea, I’m telling myself; it’s an idea).
e women had to come very, very early to nd the water ac-
cumulated during the night. One morning (now I have to invent
something, now is the moment), one morning when they came
to get water, the woman found at the well… an outlaw with his
saber in his hand, an outlaw who told them, ‘Nobody gets water
unless I allow her.’ (I breathe, relieved: now I have a subject, one
with a possible conict). e women began crying, saying that
children are waiting at home; one even said that her child was
sick, but the outlaw did not have pity. e elders of the village
came to implore the outlaw, even promising anything to him,
just so that he would go. But the outlaw enjoyed showing how
powerful he was and, as any other earthly powerful man, he be-
gan to believe that he was also wise. He took out a bucket with
water, placed it on the edge of the well, rather to provoke them,
and began to give them advice: ‘Just look: do you call this water?
You should dig a well there, in the valley, a deeper one, so that
you could nd better and more water. I’ll teach you.’ Saying this,
he really enjoyed seeing how they listened to him obediently.
‘You are right, and we thank you,’ one of the elders said, ‘but,
for now, let people take from this water too.’ At that moment, a
blackbird descended from the air to the bucket, dipped its beak
into the water twice, and ew away. ‘You see, not even the birds
like your water,’ the outlaw said. ‘Actually, I suspect that you do
not have good order, and some people take more water, others
less. I am certain that the chiaburi* of the village come and take
water by the barrel. We must do things right, as I will teach you.’
And time passed this way, with well pondered words, as taken
from a book, until evening, when the outlaw took pity on some
more troubled women, but he le all of the others thirsty…
“Next day early morning, the entire village was lined nicely
around the well, men on one side and women on the other, wait-
ing obediently for the decisions of the outlaw. ‘is is how I like
* e chiaburi were wealthy peasants who owned land. In Russia, they were
called kulaks, which is the term that is also oen used in English.
it,’ he said. ‘Now we can work well.’ He gave to some the right
to take water, but not to all, but all of them thanked him and
praised him, so that they would not upset him for future days.
And the outlaw did the same thing for a few days, proving his
power and right judgment, until he thought that the only thing
he got out of it was the empty rule over people. He then said to
them, ‘If you continue doing as I told you to do and if you give
me what I need as payment for the good I did to you, I will leave.
But know well that I can return anytime.’ People rushed to give
him even more than he requested, vowed submission even in his
absence, and accompanied him to the forest.
“e outlaw went into the forest, being content with the work
he had done, and he went on until he became thirsty. He was
loaded with goods, and it was warm. He headed toward the
spring that he knew was there, but the spring was no more. He
went toward the creek in the middle of the forest, but the creek
had drained. An uncertain fear took hold of him, as if nature
and the forest were punishing him for the power that he had
assumed over the people. Exhausted, he sat down on the bed of
the creek. At that moment, a child came close to him. He had
been sent by the people in the village to make sure that the out-
law had indeed le. ‘I’m thirsty,’ the outlaw said. ‘Bring me a pail
of water.’ e child went back to the village in a hurry to bring
the news. Some said, ‘We should not give him water.’ e wom-
an who had a sick child said, ‘Give him water.’ And the young
man* went back, carrying the pail on his head. When he went
down to the bed of the creek, where the outlaw was waiting, he
stumbled, the pail broke, and the dry bed engulfed all the water.
e child was terried, thinking that the outlaw would kill him;
but the outlaw had understood that it was not the child’s fault.
As he was staying there…”
I stop, happy that I succeeded in inventing at least those
things.
* e change between “child” and “young man” takes place in the original. It
was a story invented on the spot, so we should not be surprised by the lack
of accuracy.
“As he was staying there…,” Alec continues.
“Yes,” I say to him, “we can continue the story together.”
For a moment, Alec is caught in the fairytale:
“As he was staying there, the blackbird who had drunk from
the bucket comes to him and places two drops of water on his
lips. en, the outlaw…”
But he stops abruptly.
“What did you mean with this story?”
“How so, what I meant? I just told you a story…”
“Is this story not true? I mean, a story that others tell?,” he
asks in a harsh voice
“I no longer know. It just came to my mind. Perhaps I in-
vented it.”
He looks at me with a sharp look. One of the veins at his
temple swells, and he shouts:
“I know what you wanted to say. You wanted to say the same
thing, the lesson you have been giving me; you wanted to say
that those who cut o the springs of people cut o their own
springs; that if somebody takes away the life-giving water, he
takes it away from himself; that these people who torture us,
the communists, should not be hated, but rather pitied, pitied.
Aren’t you ashamed to repeat yourself that much?”
“I swear, Alec,” I say, “that I didn’t think of anything when I
began…”
But a wave of shame takes hold of me indeed. How didn’t I
realize what I was saying? And how did things get so connected
to end up in a homily? He, the young man, wanted to dream; he
needed air, gratuity…
“You are… you are just an educator,” he shouts. “Educator!”
he thunders again and turns his head from me. (He says it as a
true insult, as if he said, “Demagogue! Mystagogue!”)
e guard shows his face at the peephole: “Where do you
think you are that you yell that loudly? Stand for an hour facing
the wall in the back!”
I look at Alec, who doesn’t even wink. He would not talk to
me for two days.
We both stood for an hour, facing the wall in the back, without
exchanging looks or words. No one is in harmony with anyone
else any longer, and the relations between people are no longer
natural in these socialist regimes. I do not know how these re-
gimes move everything out of place, dislocating even people’s
souls. You would think that only the public life is changed and
that you can take refuge in your private life; for a moment you
are even delighted that you no longer have public responsibili-
ties and that you are restituted to your personal life. But even
here everything is vitiated. You no longer get along with your
wife (“you no longer bring home enough money and you are not
worth anything in society”); you no longer get along with your
child (“your truths are no longer in agreement with those of the
school”); with your friends, it is even worse: if you complain,
you risk being politically inappropriate or even dangerous; if
you do not complain, you oend them.
Something does not “click” any longer. e relationships
among people, just as the relations humans have with objects,
have in general something of the complexity of a mechanism
which, once established, must “click” and begin functioning.
In this socialist world, the ultimate adjustment of things disap-
peared. Everything moves forward, I don’t exactly know how,
but without making the “click.”
It is like this in Faust, at least in Goethe’s version. Faust, the
hero, no longer “clicks” with anything. is is what he says to
the devil when he declares that the devil cannot make him ex-
claim, “just a moment, stay a while”: he tells him that he will
not make him feel the “click.” He is der Unbehauste, as he calls
himself, the man without dwelling, without being in agreement
with anyone and anything. In fact, he no longer wants anything
aer he wanted everything at once, thoughtlessly, and so he al-
lows himself to be dragged by the devil here and there. In the
scene with the drinkers from Auerbach’s tavern, where Mephis-
topheles has terrible fun at the expense of the others, Faust says
only one thing: “Let us leave!” (is would be the rst “Faustian”
work, according to interpreters.) In the love story with Gretch-
en, all poetry is poisoned by falsity, by the crookedness of the
situation. It is true, Gretchen falls in love with her whole heart
with the “sage of the four Universities,” who was articially re-
juvenated by the devil and the sorcerers. She dreams of bringing
everything to a nal “click,” which would have been the religious
wedding; but she feels, with her feminine intuition, that Faust
cannot do things properly with her because he is not properly in
order with himself (he does not have the right faith, he does not
“click” with the good God). She, who is the victim in all things,
will have to have mercy on him sometime.
What a typical brother Alexander is this Faust: a conqueror
for whom you need to have mercy! However, he is a complete
victor. He has overcome ignorance, he has overcome human
weakness and helplessness, and, aer all, he has conquered any
religious sentimentalism or illusionism, allying himself with the
devil absolutely and without any fear. He is in the situation of
being able to do anything, due to the means and allies that are at
his disposal, but he does not know what to do. You must pray not
only for his soul, as Gretchen does at the end, but for his deeds
as well, for the risk he runs to do things that are not to be done,
like modern man. How could one claim that Faust is representa-
tive of modern man due to his aspiration or his “creativity” and
that our world is Faustian because it wants and it knows what
it wants? Our world is Faustian because it doesn’t know what it
wants, just like Goethe’s hero; because it has prepared its means
and victories with which it has nothing to do.
However, when you do not know what to do with the means
you have at your disposal, they begin working by themselves.
is is why, just like in Faust, the possible has precedence over
the real in our world. is is what I wanted to tell Alec, in my
conviction that I was helping him understand what is happen-
ing to him, that is that we live in a world in which the possible,
from the possibility of technology to that of politics, has prec-
edence over any reality. But he is confused when faced with his
own time, just like Gretchen with Faust.
is girl — just like my young man — embodies the world of
the real, while Faust brings with himself the world of the pos-
sible. His youth is “possible,” not real, and even this being with
whom he fell in love is, for him, “a possible Helen” (just like the
devil had prepared him to feel, when they were in Hexenbüche
and he made him see beauty in a mirror). Something crooked
has appeared in the world, substituting the real, and now it takes
being, with its false sound. Everything is a question of sound,
aer all. ere is something that Gretchen does not like, just as
the story that I improvised did not sound well to Alec. He felt
that it was a possible story, not a real one.
e devil interfered between us, just as he interfered between
Faust and Gretchen. Aer all, what does the devil mean? It
means the unending possibility, but a bare possibility. In itself,
the world of possibilities represents something good and hu-
man, just as the technology of the modern world is something
good and human in principle. Due to technology, our world has
moved from the harsh or indierent real into the kindness of
the possible, and we no longer live among realities, but among
the admirable realized possibilities. An automobile is a realized
possibility and is something good. But when science or tech-
nology comes to make, as it has tried, some sort of insect to
correspond to the idea of “chimera” from Antiquity, then it is
about an empty possibility and it is no longer something good.
Or when an ideologist comes to make a state…
When we go directly from the possible to the real, with a
deeper necessity, and when, for example, we make up states that
do not match the souls or we want to make (just like “engineers,”
in this tender matter) souls that do not match people, then it
means that the devil somehow interfered. e entire Faust
is — at times it is even acknowledged to be so — a t of the devil,
reprised over ve acts. But the strange thing is that everything
that takes place there also happens in our time. And this time
of ours is no longer always the work of the devil, or it is possible
for it not to be so.
I would have told Alec that Faust is, act aer act, the re-
alization of the empty possible, of the possible deprived of any
necessity. Aer all, the empty possible reigned in the rst part of
Faust as well, beginning with the devil entering the play; but the
emptiness of the devil is not seen there because there were still
real people in play. In the second part, though, there are almost
no people. You look for them with a candle and you only nd
specters. ere is no real human in Act , and even less so in Act
, the act of the homunculus. Only in Act does the face of a
real man, Lynceus, the guardian of the Faustian city gate, appear
timidly. He remains mute with admiration when the beautiful
Helen appears in the city and brings to him, later, his gis of a
poor man. en again, there is no human during the entire Act
, the act of the diabolic war, but, in Act, we nally nd two
poor real men, the old Philemon and Baucis, who resist against
forced agricultural collectivization, just like now. Other than
that, only specters, specters…
In such a spectral world, the empty possible is, of course, at
home. I would have liked to tell Alec how, in Act , Goethe un-
leashes over the real world of some state the empty possible of
money without coverage, the banknote, when Mephistopheles
suggests to issue banknotes on the basis of possible treasures
buried under ground; then, in Act , how a small man comes
out of the tube — again as empty possibility, unrequired by any
need — so how a technical-scientic revolution is made and
what science-ctional consequences (the return in time) it can
have. Aer these typical Mephistophelic exploits, you have in
Act the empty possible in terms of culture: the marriage of
Faust with the beautiful Helen, the marriage of the modern
spirit with the Greek one, as a true anticipated movie, directed
by Mephistopheles. No commentary is needed any longer for
Act , the act of the war led with devilish means, as today. e
last act brings into play the political possible, which is the un-
leashing of ordering and planning reason, and Alec and I nd
ourselves now under its hysteria.
However, it would be worth saying now, when faced with our
time, that you can no longer exclaim as you did about the hap-
penings in Goethe’s work: this is the work of the devil! Even
Goethe’s work no longer appears like this today, since the th
century made it true, so it came on man’s account, in a way. In
any case, things may be dierent with us. For us, the issue of
banknotes is not an empty game of nancial magic; science is
not the projection of a singular genius or a form of exasperation,
like for Faust, but rather a slow accumulation, oen anonymous,
for centuries; the myth of the beautiful Helen has been democ-
ratized, with her image (or the image of her sisters, the stars*)
multiplied on our screens, leaving us free for another encounter
with the Greek spirit; war has become so devilish that the god
Ares must be really expelled from the skies and from the earth,
if man still has judgment; and the political delirium, which
comes into our world as well, like in Act , to colonize a new
humanity on a new and renewed earth, to the level of suocat-
ing it, the political delirium, then, is hit steadfastly not only by
some old people like Philemon and Baucis, but also by a strange
challenging young generation.
Are we, the moderns, distorted or not? Goethe anticipated
us with some repulsion. But the problem is whether we are or
not in order, even us, who got thrown into prisons. Is there
something deprived of necessity, perfectly arbitrary, and, aer
all, without importance, as I think and say, in everything that is
done above our heads, as from the surplus of the possible over
the real? Would this be an organized stammering, something
fabricated and revocable, just as these communist parties con-
tinue to return to their orientation, making their self-critique
periodically, like in a chess match in which they would take back
their moves? Or is the good and human possible at stake, which
comes into the world in whatever way and by whomever it can?
If Napoleon could tell Goethe that, from him onward, le destin
* Noica refers to today’s stars, the stars of cinema, music, or television.
c’est la politique* and that the destiny of the ancients is done for,
it was not only about the self and about his politics. But about
which politics? e politics of the poor electoral agents from one
part of the world? Or the politics of the poor “central commit-
tees” from the other part?†
As I stay in prison with this young man, taken out of the
reality of life or perhaps separated from a frieze of its temple,
as we both stay like this, innocent with a possible guilt, I feel the
full primacy of the possible over the real and I think that I also
understand why we are here and why they‡ will have to take
us out. ey need the real, they need our testimony! Without
the consent of Philemon and Baucis, Faust’s work is “impure.”
e great reformer is disturbed by some trees, those real limes
of the elders, from the patch of land that they did not want to
leave. e bell of the small church exasperates him. But when
Mephistopheles comes to tell him that he has destroyed every-
thing from the face of the earth, Faust withdraws in horror. (e
horror of the despots and dictators!)
Now, the old Ladies come around him: Lack, Debt, Care,
Need. Goethe makes only one of them, Care, speak to Faust
and tell him, in the name of all four, that he has been blind his
whole life. Won’t these old ladies come around the communists
as well? Don’t they also need us, just like Faust? I feel like telling
them, “Beware, so that you don’t fall one day under the investi-
gation of the old Ladies!” To avoid it, they need our mercy and
our testimony. ey need Alec’s joy and youth.
* “Destiny is politics,” in French in the original.
† e part of the world with the electoral agents is formed by the Western
democracies, while the one with the central committees (the leading organs
of the Communist party) by the Eastern communist states.
‡ “ey” refers to the Communists. During Communism, people oen re-
ferred to the Communists with this impersonal “they.” “ey” were giving
potatoes at the grocery, “they” were interrupting electricity in the evening,
etc.
During the following days, I no longer do the two morning ex-
ercises, to avoid irritating Alec. When the meal comes, I pretend
that I have something to do and I let him eat by himself. e
third day he is taken to interrogations. What do they have to
impute to him? He crossed from East Berlin, where his team had
a game, to West Berlin; he got bored by the Americans’ inter-
rogations, and he came back willingly. ey will hold him for a
while, and then they will free him, letting him nish his degree
in architecture (he’s a senior) or making him a volleyball coach,
as so many others.
When he returns to the cell, he is pale with rage. He forgot
any anger he had with me, and he tells me directly:
“ey will try me for ‘treason against the state.’”
“Treason against the state?” I shout.
“at’s what they told me. Between and years of prison.”
It is awkward to think that, aer all, it had to be this way, ac-
cording to my own explanations: he was also a possible traitor
for them.
“I no longer care about anything,” he says. “If I get out one
day, I won’t nish Architecture and I’ll go someplace to the
countryside. Perhaps I’ll nd a young girl in a mountain village,
with two cows as dowry. Can you imagine what this is? Living
simply, in nature…”
He sinks into that shattering silence of an injured young be-
ing. Aer an hour, he looks at me with a gentle smile. It seems
that life made him mature all of a sudden!
“Don’t you want me to tell you a story?” I suggest this so that
I can make him think of something else. “I can tell you a love
s t o r y .”
“But is it a true one?”
“Yes, it is from Plato’s Symposium,” I say quite imprudently.
He frowns for a moment and then relaxes.
“Aer all, if it’s a good one…”
At that moment, the guard’s face appears in the peephole. He
orders me: “Get your luggage ready in two minutes.”
He closes the peephole, and while I start gathering the few
things I have, Alec becomes agitated.
“I’m sorry you’re leaving, I am so sorry! What do you need?
What can I give you? I want to give you something.”
He only has two shirts and three pairs of socks; he wanted to
patch up one of them the rst day when we would receive needle
and thread. Helpless, he frets.
“I want to give you a memory,” he says, being emotional.
“Give me the third exercise movement,” I suggest.
He’s happy that I’ve asked something from him.
“Yes, look, this is how you do it: with your arms on your hips,
you raise your knees rhythmically, touching your chest with
them if you can.”
He shows me the movement, which he executes so supply.
“I’ll do this exercise, Alec, and I will think of you.”
“Quiet!” the guard says coming in, and he drags me to him,
dumps the metal glasses on my head, and leaves me holding out
my hand, but I no longer nd Alec’s.
I am taken through all sorts of corridors. It could be just the
same one, as this is the guards’ habit, to confuse you, so that
you don’t know where you are taken. I may have arrived in the
neighboring cell or some completely dierent place. Even if I
were next to Alec, I would be in another galaxy. When the door
slams behind me, I hear knocks on the wall, more and more
persistent, from three sides. Poor guys, I tell myself, they want
to hear news. It’s good that I don’t know Morse code at all; oth-
erwise, I would not be able to resist the temptation to answer.
Aer one or two days of desperate attempts to get in contact
with me, my neighbors calm down. I calm down as well. All of a
sudden, a quite curious thing comes to mind: what an interest-
ing problem of communication appears especially when you do
not know Morse or some other alphabet. e person next to you
is just like a rational being from another planetary system. How
do you communicate with him? is is probably, at this time,
one of the greatest problems of man: how to communicate with
other rational beings of the cosmos. We have no common code,
and everything must be invented, both language and concepts.
It is fascinating. You must be thrown into a place such as this to
realize that the real problems of the mind are not to be found in
books. How is it that people don’t think of such pure situations
when they are free? How stupidly they get mixed up into tan-
gential situations. e situation here may even be ideal.
In this particular case, my neighbor is a rational being, just
like me; this is the only presupposition. Everything else can be
invented. But no, there is one more diculty here: I must rst
convince my neighbor that I do not know any code and that I
ask him to not know one either, so that we would invent one
together. It will be dicult, but I must try. If I succeed, then
everything is just like an encounter between a human being and
another rational being in the cosmos.
I wonder which of the neighbors I should choose, so in
which wall to knock. I decide for the wall on the right, because
the colleague from that cell knocked the most. In my walk of
steps that I can make on the diagonal of the room, I stop every
time at the wall and I knock. At the second signal, my neighbor
responds to me. I knock again, intently erratic. He answers with
still too regular signals. I knock with my st. He still answers
with signals. How come he does not understand that I do not
know any code and that I would want him to not use one either?
I stop for a longer time next to the wall and I knock in all pos-
sible ways, rhythmically, non-rhythmically, hastily, slowly.
“What are you doing there?”
I turn around and I nd myself before two guards that had
opened the door’s latch silently and come stealthily in the room.
“What are you doing? You’re knocking Morse!”
“I am not knocking Morse.”
“How come you don’t? Haven’t we seen you?”
“I give you my word of honor that I do not know Morse.”
“Look at this bourgeois, how he gives his word of honor!
Aren’t you ashamed to lie, when we caught you in the act?”
In despair, an inspired idea takes voice within me:
“Please take me to Mr. Commander, because I have some-
thing to report.”
e guards look at one another. Perhaps they imagine that I
found out something from a neighbor and I want to denounce
him. Aer all, they had to ask for permission to punish me for
my oence anyway, so they grab me by my arms, one of them
puts the metallic glasses that he had in his hands on my eyes,
and they both take me to the commander.
“We caught this scoundrel knocking Morse, but he says he
wants to report something.”
“Leave him here.”
“Mr. Commandant,” I begin, “I confess that I knocked on the
wall, but I didn’t do it to communicate with my neighbor, be-
cause I do not know Morse, but rather to establish a code for
communication in the cosmos.”
“What?”
I try to justify everything, calmly and as persuasively as pos-
sible. I show that, next to the technical problem, which has al-
ready been solved by humanity, the extraterrestrial communi-
cation is a question of imagination and sustained meditation; I
add that I fell upon an idea that authorizes me to believe that I
am able to bring a contribution to adding a code. I would place
everything at the authorities’ disposal, without any claim, not
even a claim to improve the conditions of the regime in prison.
I only ask for paper and pencil.
“You, buoon,” the commander says, aer he listens to me
with a vague smile, “do you think that someone like you can
solve this problem? We have academicians…”
“I do not contest that there are more competent people,” I in-
sist, “but they do not have time to consider such a problem and
the idea may not have come to them. You see, this is something
special; you need a ashing, crazy idea…”
I become enthusiastic, I sense that my eyes stare as in a vi-
sion, and I enter a trance. It no longer matters what the com-
mander thinks, but I have something to say; I have something
to say… e commander calls for the guard.
“Take him back.”
I cannot avoid a pathetic gesture, of despondency. At the mo-
ment we are at the door, the commander says, “Here, give him
these sheets of paper and a pencil. If he lied, I’ll show him.”
I return to the cell happy. e guard counts the sheets: there
are . He gave me a pencil later. I begin to meditate impas-
sionedly, but condently. us, let us assume that the techni-
cal means of communication are given: the radio waves or any
other waves that carry messages. It is true that transmission of
data takes years or dozens of years at the speed of light. But it
does not matter. As Pascal says, the whole humanity is just like a
human being. So, what does this human being transmit so that
he makes himself understood by another being of a similar level
in rationality?
Something curious comes to mind from the beginning: any
signal or regular group of signals risks appearing to the other
being in cosmos as stemming from the processes of dead mat-
ter. Aer all, today, we also register various emissions of waves
from the cosmos, but it is precisely their regularity that makes
them seem uncertain, and we attribute them rather to material
processes taking place there. If you want to show that you are
a rational being, you must rst prove that you are not under a
mechanical necessity. e rst armation of rationality is, then,
the freedom to not be rational; or the rst manifestation of logic
would be coming out of the strict logic of mechanisms, so fan-
tasy and, in a way, the lack of logic. e dialogue of two rational
consciences would thus begin with each indicating that he is a
rational being: he can signal arbitrarily. You must show that you
have spontaneity; that you are a rational subject, not an object
of natural laws.
is is a beginning, too. Perhaps it is the only beginning.
We want, then, to show that here, on this celestial body, there is
reason. us, we reveal reason on earth by its capacity to deny
itself, just as the laws of dead things cannot do. We start, then, by
bringing the rational chaos, by bringing chaos purely and sim-
ply, the one from which all things begin. (is is what I could not
do with my cell neighbor, for whom I was knocking chaotically
on the wall: I could not make him begin from chaos as well.)
You can surprise your interlocutor and make him pay attention
and be interested in speaking to you only in this way. You prove
to him that there is a rational being here, because, if this being
wants to, it can decide not to transmit anything. Just as you erase
the board or the magnetic tape so that you can record some-
thing new on them, you must begin here by non-transmission
as well, by a zero-transmission, so that you could later transmit
something intelligible to the other rational being. Faced with a
clearly armed chaos, with a categorical zero-communication,
this person will be lled with wonder, and wonder is the begin-
ning of knowledge and of contact with things and other beings.
e guard throws me a well-sharpened pencil through the
peephole. It fells on my bed. I rush to take it, because it has been
years since I held one in my hand. What an admirable zero a
pencil is, a positive zero, just like the white sheet of paper from
where I consider beginning the cosmic dialogue. Anything can
come out from the use of a pencil: communication, non-com-
munication… I write on the rst sheet of paper, beginning with
a large title: . I’m thinking that the signal sent by
humans, together with the answer received over years, could
represent a unity, a day of conversation. “Cosmic Days,” then.
Let their emergence among people be blessed!
When I wake up the second day, I feel as on a cosmic day. I
do what I need to do in my cell as if sleepwalking, and I begin
writing down the results I had achieved. e rst cosmic day
came this way: I established contact with the extraterrestrial be-
ing and the possibility of communication precisely because we
did not communicate at all. We thus gained two things: rst,
we recognized each other as rational beings, capable of com-
munication; second, we agreed that we have not communicated
anything yet.
We have obtained all of this by a manifestation of spontane-
ity as rational beings. Now, we have to come out of spontaneity
or to control it, still as rational beings. I let you know that I am
rational because I say, “tra la la,” or “bum, bum, bum,” but now I
have to transmit something. Since the rst day was with free sig-
nals, the second day must have connected and ordered signals.
Everything begins now.
I stop for a while. Aer the exaltation that had overtaken me,
this is the rst time when I begin to have doubt. I was convinced
that it was sucient to put the problem well — according to the
principle that a problem asked well is half solved — in order to
get a result. But what if nothing comes out of this? I shudder for
a moment, but not out of fear for the commander, but out of
shame before myself. Still, let us not give up. Let’s see. I have ob-
tained the attention of the other cosmic being. Perfect; I should
not tell him something; it will be something still indeterminate,
but regular this time, like a signal that is repeated at innity.
(If he answers with the same repeated signal, it means he’s not
stupid.) In fact, I can begin even better, with a group of repeated
signals instead of a simple signal that I would repeat. is will
help me to isolate the group later and, since the other knows it,
to make out of it an announcement-signal: that I exist, that it is
I, the one on Terra; or that I begin transmission. I prepare then
a rst concept: the beginning. We will be able to begin every
emission with that group of signals, but we will also say “begin-
ning” by it, anytime we would wish so. Similarly, we could end
every emission in the same fashion, and then we will detach the
word “end.”
Is it possible to compose an entire language with two words,
beginning and end? I could introduce a few others as well. I can,
let’s say, invent a kind of negation: I could reverse one of mine
or one of his structured succession of signals. It is not really free
negation, or logical complement, as it is called in logic, but it still
is one way of negating or canceling something. I can declare that
it is not so; thus, I communicate something. I also can — what? I
can introduce some notions of quantity: “much” and “little”; or
notions of intensity: “rapidly” and “slowly”; or even the idea of
unity (for example, with a regular group between two irregular
emissions), the idea of plurality, and perhaps some mathemati-
cal operations. I would still have to nd an abstract formula for
them, namely that I shouldn’t have to indicate every time that
this is a unity, here is a relation. But let’s grant that I nd a kind
of language for mathematical notions. What do I communicate
with them? As some mathematician says, mathematics is the
only science that does not know what it refers to. We should
however communicate something: that there are trees on Terra,
that there is hydrogen in the cosmos, or that everything can be
reduced to electromagnetic elds. How do I get to this point?
I only need a few days to realize that I cannot obtain “cos-
mic days.” ere is no place for any excuse: that I don’t have
the means to experiment by communicating with my neighbor,
that I don’t have books, that, aer all, everything depends on
the answer of the other from cosmos. ere is no space for “let
me explain.” I am worthless. I have nothing to say to humanity
and, aer all, I do not deserve to be free. Yes, I don’t deserve my
freedom. I feel that, if I had known how to solve the problem, the
gates of prison would have opened; even if it had not been about
the commitment, or the service done to humanity, etc., etc., the
gates would still have opened. When somebody has some essen-
tial thing to say, the walls do not resist.
It’s true, though, that there may have been some people who
had some essential thing to say in Auschwitz or in the Soviet
camps, and the walls did not fall, or they fell on them. But now,
they would have fallen aside. Or let me say it this way: it is not
always true that a human who knows or can do some essential
thing comes necessarily to light, but the one who does not know
or cannot do some essential thing deserves to stay in darkness.
I deserve it. ey* can go ahead and condemn me for ridiculous
reasons, as they want to do, for having declared that socialism is
for the rich, not for the poor, for example. ey are right. ey
judge badly but condemn well.
I have lled almost half of the sheets of paper, and I should
ask to have my pencil sharpened. But I am not asking it. I re-
member a dear boy, who once told me how he received a passing
grade at the exam in mathematics, although he was not good at
* e Communists.
it. He tried to solve the problem in all possible ways; he lled
four sheets of a notebook, and at the end he wrote, “I do not
know how to solve the problem.” e teacher gave him a passing
grade because he was honest. I have to do the same thing.
e next morning I push the button to be called to report. At
my third signal, the door is open, and the guard and the ocer
on duty come in.
“Get your luggage ready.”
“But I want to report to Mr. Commander,” I say.
“Let it go and get your luggage.”
“But I have these papers,” I insist; “it is a rather important
problem.”
e ocer takes the sheets of paper that I hand to him, looks
over them for a moment, and then shouts, “ah, it’s about that
story!” He tears up the papers, saying, “do it!”
I am suocated by a wave of revolt: what if I had written
something valuable? And why did they give me this chance to
say something? But then I understand all of a sudden: they had
been afraid that, in my exaltation, I could have fallen into a cri-
sis, into folly. at was all.
ey shoved me in a jeep with curtains. While they take me to
I do not know what destination, I think of the whole human
sadness that is comprised in “I do not know how to solve the
problem,” which you must utter not before a professor, but be-
fore life itself. We do not know how to solve even the small prob-
lems — they take care of themselves, aer all — and we have no
clue how to solve the equation of our lives. How uninteresting
are we, psychologically, intellectually, and morally, each one of
us…
To me, it seems incomprehensible how people gave so much
importance to the inscription on the temple in Delphi, “know
thyself.” To know myself. Who? I, Hans Castorp?* Not to say
ersites, that wretch from the Iliad? Or I, Smerdyakov, that
villain from e Brothers Karamazov? But anyone, on any hu-
man level, senses how limited and uninteresting he is as object
of knowledge. It is interesting to know nature, it is interesting
to know the good God or the Great All, as the Indians say, to
know people in their variety and how anyone bears an innity
within themselves, but to know yourself? Taken at face value,
this incentive represents one of the great stupid sayings of hu-
manity — there are others as well —, and it is dicult to accept
that it was uttered fully by the Greeks. is saying could seem
of great value only to the moderns, with their interest for the
human subject and person. For the ancients, it is surprising to
see the importance (perhaps an importance of argumentation)
that Plato gives to it, and, if we are to give it full meaning, we
* Character from omas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.
can only give the Socratic understanding: search yourself so that
you see that you know absolutely nothing.
e interpretations that attempt to save this saying do not
go that far, though, and the way in which they attempt to give
a meaning to it provoke pity. e majority of the commentators
say that by “know thyself ” man is encouraged to see his limits
before god, and, practically, the same thing would be said by the
second inscription, “nothing too much.” Others who are less so-
phisticated say that it is about a warning for common man, who
must acknowledge his subordination to the others: “shoemaker,
stick to your job.” But there are really exquisitely sophisticated
people, who claim, no more, no less, that, given that man’s soul
has several incarnations, according to ancient traditions, know-
ing yourself would be the encouragement to “remember” the
successive reincarnations. is is where people have arrived in
despair! Can someone know one’s “previous lives”? And, grant-
ing that one may, would it be that fascinating to know that I was
a shoemaker, then a not so courageous soldier, and then a wine
merchant?...
If I remember correctly, a crazy Englishman was the only one
who said something meaningful regarding this problem. He be-
gan noticing that there were several inscriptions on the frontis-
piece of Delphi; among them, there was this mysterious letter E,
which certainly had a deeper, perhaps religious, meaning. en,
there was the inscription, “surety, then ruin.” However, it is curi-
ous that all ancient and modern interpreters speak gravely about
the rst two inscriptions, without mentioning the third. is is
the one that gives the key for interpretation! It shows the main
clientele of the oracle: the world of Greek merchants, entrepre-
neurs, and businessmen.
Of course, from time to time, during more special histori-
cal times, states or potentates from Asia Minor, Africa, Sicily
came to consult the oracle. e regular income, though, for the
one and a half million years of the temple’s existence, could only
be provided by the inexhaustible requests of common people
who needed an advice or solution. e inscriptions could only
be for those people. “Know thyself” has no meaning for a state
or for a colonizing expedition, but it has complete meaning for
a ship owner or a merchant, who must know how far he can go.
“Nothing too much,” so do not get into too great adventures;
and especially be careful and don’t give surety to others, because
you risk getting hurt. is is the extent to which a “great” saying
of humanity is reduced if you consider not its possible meaning,
but its object, so yourself…
e jeep had stopped for some time now, and the driver had
come out of it; the ocer who was staying next to me was about
to get out as well. He was probably the one leading me to the
next destination.
“Don’t you dare come out of the car,” he says. “Take a ciga-
rette.”
“I would prefer the newspaper you were just reading,” I dare.
“Forget about it!” he replies.
How ridiculous they* are! ey are afraid that we may nd
out what happens in the world. But we do not need newspapers
to realize that there is a calming of politics in the world and that,
as long as they have it better, we, the detainees, have it better
too. It is certain that, at this hour, some generous people from
all over the world intervene for the freedom of those who are
in our situation in all communist countries. I imagine that they
invoke the Charter and Human Rights, even if some of us,
the victims, pretend like me (how sincere is it?) that they do not
have a right to freedom. Humanity gives credit to the individual.
In every individual, it sees a human chance, and it may hope
precisely from us, the victims of the times, to get a deeper hu-
man reaction.
However, in reality it is not us, the ones imprisoned, who are
interesting today, as human specimens; it is not us who give that
“knowledge of man at a limit,” by which a human being has al-
ways been dened. We are only the last wave — let us hope that
* ey, the Communists. As before, I le this general “they” unspecied be-
cause it was so prevalently used in Communism. For a short discussion of
this, see my essay, “Birth-Givers of Beauty: An Excursion into Finding One’s
Given Place within a Constellation,” in Aspazia Otel Petrescu, With Christ
in Prison (Citrus Heights: Reection Publishing, ), –.
it is indeed the last — of an evil that came in the rst half of the
century. But there is something more interesting that takes place
with the human person in the world: according to what even we,
in our prisons, nd out, a rst wave of humanity is confronted
with “wellbeing” on a large scale, without historical precedent,
in the developed countries of Europe and America. ere have
been some encounters with material wellbeing in history for
some groups, casts, or clans, but wellbeing maintained some-
thing perverted and perverting, especially since it was not about
goods of civilization (radio, museums, etc.), but rather about de-
lectation and gorging.* Now, for the rst time, wellbeing has be-
come something common and educational, at least in one part
of the world and for one historical moment. It may be a form of
health for humans. What will it produce? In any case, it could
be a deciding exam for the European man, who has believed so
earnestly in materialistic values.
All of a sudden, half of the communist ideal is degrading
if the full satisfaction of material needs does not bring about
happiness to man by itself. And the entire capitalist ideal is de-
grading. e fact that capitalism succeeded to arrive rst at this
point, and not communism, is less relevant. Today, something
takes place beyond them: it is the exam that the materialist ideal
of the European man must take and, together with his ideal,
man himself.
e European man has eliminated everything. “Leave me
alone, you god, you philosophical doctrines, you church or tra-
ditions. I know better what I need.” Beginning with the th cen-
tury and until today, the individual has gained rights that he had
never possessed in history. e totalitarian regimes that survive
are ashamed by the audacity that they have taken, for a moment,
toward the individual, not only oppressing him directly, but also
transforming him into an object, as they had wanted. For the
last two hundred years, all revolutions, and especially all mate-
rialist transformations, no longer serve narrow and privileged
* Both terms have a Biblical overtone, reminding one of Dante's Inferno.
casts, but the individual in general. e brother I* has won; even
if it is menaced, from time to time, by some — some true col-
lectivism, going even to Teilhard de Chardin’s odd idea that we
might arrive to the association of consciences in some superior
brain — the brother I still is, for the moment, the great bene-
ciary. e individual has succeeded in being and continues to be
(until the encounter with the Asians, who are completely lack-
ing individualism) that for which everything is done. For — as
Goethe says — what is the good of all this squandering of suns
and planets (of historical revolutions and technic-scientic rev-
olutions, we will say), if, aer all, a human being is not happy?
So, aer all, humans do not feel happy, according to the news
we receive even here, in prison. Pray for the satiated modern
man… He has, in his consumer society, something of the psy-
chology of a socialite woman: “I don’t like this champagne; do
something to entertain me…”
I do not know if we, those who are deprived of the most el-
ementary joys, could have a better encounter with joy. But we
experience here something that other people, in their plentiful
society, do not realize: it is the rst encounter of humanity with
a more generally spread wellbeing, and it may be that a second
one will not exist too soon! In principle, an “era of respites”
should follow; but it is not at all sure, in fact, that today’s idyllic
moment in both Europe and the Unites States will continue.
A terrible exam for the individual is then played — the indi-
vidual as it is conceived and respected by Europeans, as opposed
to Indians and Chinese. It is an exam for the universe of the
individual ego, so for the small idiot that each one of us is. is
restricted individual — for whom the encouragement from Del-
phi to know oneself had a shadow of meaning, if anything — has
won the game. e small idiot is driving his car and leaves be-
hind the boredom of the workdays to go to the boredom of the
weekend. Pray for him.
And we, those people thirsty for all the goods of the earth,
from our daily cigarette to the freedom to take a walk without a
* “I” in the sense of the ego.
sentinel, we shout to that humanity that lives so idyllically: “Pay
attention to what you do, for you are responsible, with your joy
or disgust, for the European man and for humankind.”
When our jeep nally stops and I am ordered to come out of
the car, I address humanity in my mind once again: “Pay atten-
tion,” and I make my rst step, concerned.
“Pay attention, idiot,” the guard tells me, seeing that I stumble
and fall. “We don’t need broken heads here!”
As fast as I can, I gather my things from the small suitcase
that was opened, and I get a foot in my back, with the order, “to
the wall, and wait there for me to take you!”
I go toward the wall, somehow ashamed by everything that
happens to me, to a large extent because of me. e oracle was
right: know thyself!
e guards no longer give me glasses, so I see the fort well.*
ere are so many lives that drag along in its belly. is time,
I will be with more people in the cell. But will I nd someone
who would be as dear to me as Alec? I carry with me, as in an
envelope, the third exercise that I learned from him. I will begin
doing it one day, in his memory. Who knows, I may even meet
him again…
In the high basement to which I am taken, I see all of a sud-
den that there is no Alec. Twenty-ve or thirty heads raise up
from their wooden bunk beds, on three lines, to see the new-
comer. It is late in the evening. A voice tells me, “Come up here,
I know you.” en, toward the others, “We now have another
one who can deliver lectures.” I climb to the third bed, where my
friend is, a doctor who had met me on the occasion of a confer-
ence I had once delivered. When I begin to take o my clothes,
I realize that it is cold: there is only one window, at the level of
the ground, but it is big, and it is largely open even though it is
cold outside.
“Don’t you close it during the night?” I ask timidly.
“We spent the whole evening discussing whether we should
close it or not. But a swallow came in, there it is (I see it on the
glass cover of the light that is above the entry door, as if it were
looking for a place to make a nest), and then nobody said any-
thing else.”
* Noica is taken to Fort , the Jilava Prison. It is one of the most famous
political prisons because it was built underground. e darkness and the
humidity of the environment added to the lugubrious aspect of the prison.
I am no longer cold either. I place my clothes at my feet, and
I begin to talk to the doctor, whispering. He is not yet years
old, and he did not get to profess medicine because they* found
out, some years earlier, during his college, that he had vaguely
participated in a beginning of a “counter-revolutionary” move-
ment. He became embittered during the years he has spent here.
Communism? For him, the only thing of interest is what hap-
pens in Russia, and nothing takes place there. Today’s world? A
biological failure. e sudden growth of the youth’s size is mor-
bid; the defense of free eros is a sign of the degeneration of the
species; the malady ascends to the nervous system, and there is
no more healing there.
e following day, I witness the household activity of the cell.
(Any newcomer is given one day to adapt.) en, the “lessons”
begin. People study anything, with passion: elementary anato-
my, physics, history, theology, and especially languages. What
strikes me is the need for accuracy of those in our situation.
People who still did not know to connect two words in English
knew perfectly not only the nouns that form the plural dier-
ently, but also almost the entire list of English irregular verbs. It
was not surprising that people knew exactly the seven wonders
of Antiquity. But the people here learned scrupulously the list
with the Roman emperors by heart, or the names and residency
of the main families of the Renaissance, as well as the succes-
sion of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church. Someone
has produced sensation in the cell when he recited the Chinese
dynasties.
is need for exactness, not only for them, but also for the
mentality of modern man, seemed so signicant to me that,
when the hour for conferences came and I was asked, as a new-
comer, to also say something, I could not help but talk about
Exactness and Truth in the contemporary world, a theme that
has obsessed me for a long time. (“I’m glad Alec does not hear
me,” I thought.)
* e same impersonal “they” that has already been used.
“Just as it happens to us here, in prison, it also happens to
the contemporary world. Everything has been undermined
around us: here, we no longer know anything of family, we have
no profession or activity, we don’t even have an identity, except
an elementary one, the one of our weakened body and of our
ultimate moral nature, as much as it can hold. Some of us do not
even know whether we were right in what we did, if we defend-
ed good causes and if we are here innocent or still with a touch
of guilt. In this chaos in which we are all thrown, we want cer-
tainty, any certainty. Just like a man who grabs a pillar to avoid
losing his balance, we are also looking for pillars, certitudes, and
they are the exact pieces of knowledge. We want to know some-
thing that is and that does not change, something that does not
depend on the whims of people or of masters, something as the
grammar which even poor Stalin recognized as unquestionable
toward the end of his life. e list of the Roman emperors is
graved in stone. We and our lives are, though — at least for the
moment — simple names written on sand.
“But this is how the world today feels everywhere. And the
world is in prison. It no longer has heavens and relatives in
heavens, it no longer has nature and divinities of nature around
it, but it is alone, in a cosmic captivity, attempting to evade from
Terra or at least to communicate with a neighbor in the cosmos,
whom it cannot nd. It has given up myths a long time ago, be
they religious, philosophical, or uncontrolled dogmas of tradi-
tion. Instead, it has so many small local truths that it feels as
chaos. And so it wants exactness.
“It wasn’t always like this. Up to a certain moment in the
past, cultures were only of Truth, not of exactness also. ey
placed man in a state of drunkenness, in a sacred ecstasy. Not
only the mythic and religious cults were this way, but also the
profane orientations. Pythagorianism is a form of sacred de-
lirium; the pre-Socratic thinkers are as in a trance when they
say that all things are water, all are air, or all are re; and Plato
requires enthusiasm for Ideas, which you recover now because
“you have contemplated them in another existence.” Everything
is ecstatic under the magic of truth — until Aristotle, who is the
rst thinker who is awake, sober, oriented toward exactness, in
the European culture. (Other cultures continue to be under the
sacred drunkenness even today).
“Just like us, Aristotle no longer gets drunk with ‘truths,’ and
he would feel at home in our world. He would like to see that,
nally, the world wants exactness everywhere, just as he wanted
it. More than half of his work is a collection of data from zool-
ogy and botany of this sort, ‘the cicadas sing by the friction of
a thin membrane that insects with a longer life have in the dent
below the diaphragm.’* e same Aristotle was composing a list
with the tens of constitutions from the world of Greek cities, and
even — this is a peak of the spirit of exactness — the list of the
winners in Olympics. Do you realize what this was? ere had
been centuries of Olympic games, and he wanted to record the
thousands of names of winners, as simple as that.
“It is not surprising that so much exactness — beginning, of
course, with the list of the ten Aristotelian categories, with the
list of syllogistic rules, and the list of virtues — lled the eras.
But it is also not surprising that Christianity, as any religion,
attempted to bring back the sacred ecstasy and, to do so, it even
adopted Aristotelian exactitudes to transform them into Truth.
e result was what we all know in the Middle Ages. Man really
woke up, or he was detoxied so radically by the Enlightenment
that he did no longer bear any alcohol or elixir of truth. en,
the methods of exactness came into play, which the ancients did
not have: the empirical sciences and mathematics. e ecstasies
were done for.
“But the spirit of exactness was not content. Mathematics
is the most exact thing we have on earth, and it is as solid as
the pyramids, about which people say that they would last until
the end of Terra. Now, imagine that someone would consider
consolidating the pyramids. Well, if we exaggerate a little, this is
what happened in our culture: thinkers questioned how to make
* To my knowledge, Aristotle does not say this. Noica’s point is to illustrate
this philosopher’s kind of discourse. Using his terminology, I would say that
the statement about Aristotle is true, although it is not exact.
exactness more exact, how to ensure something that is certain,
so in this case how to substantiate mathematics. is is what so-
called ‘mathematical logic’ attempted. It is true that it stumbled
upon some paradoxes, but the spirit of exactness did not give up
and it cannot give up.
“In fact, the spirit of exactness is active everywhere, not only
in the exact sciences. History, for example, can no longer be
done without exactness. Man cannot bear to not know exactly
what and how it happened. A French historian from last cen-
tury, Ernest Renan, wanted to see exactly were and how Jesus
Christ lived. He went to the holy places and proceeded scien-
tically to the reconstitution of the Event.* You know what hap-
pened to him? He found the traces of Jesus from Nazareth, but
he no longer found the traces of Jesus Christ.
“If this is how things are in culture, it could not be otherwise
in life and in lived history. ere is no more space for utopias,
modern man said to himself, with the risk of nding them just
as the logician found paradoxes. We have nothing to do with
utopic socialism; we need a scientic socialism. is is where we
are, in a culture of exactitude.
“But I should not continue to speak about this version of the
spirit of exactness. All of us, those who live under communism,
know what planning means, how controlled everyone’s life is,
the level of “exactness” all processes have, including elections
or meetings, and how precisely the destinies of our children are
programmed or want to be programmed by the ‘engineers of
souls,’ as Stalin said. Toward what? Nobody knows it any longer,
because this belongs to Truth — or to myth. For the moment, we
need exactness in experienced history, just as we can no longer
aord to lack it in the science of history and in all sciences. Even
these latter disciplines do not know where they send us. A great
physicist of our time said, ‘We now know that we do not know
where science leads us.’
“However, scientists must go forward. We cannot continue
without exactness, but empty exactness is blind. We have seen
* Capitalized in the original.
genuine communists cry: aer the terror and the sacrices that
were imposed to one generation, and now to a second one, the
result is bitter. We know that Ernest Renan cried, in his own
way, at the end of his life: in his autobiography, he confessed that
ces petites sciences conjecturales,* the historical sciences, did not
take him anywhere. e experts know that the logician Frege
also cried, at the end of his labors, when a younger logician,
Bertrand Russell, showed him that his entire construction was
awed due to a paradox. Modern man proved to be extraordi-
nary, with his spirit of exactness. However, in a way, he cries,
and you must pray for him.
“It is true that, instead of admiring and deploring, at the
same time, modern man, who replaced truth with exactness,
we could consider the English solution. e English know what
they are doing: they gave up exactness for the machine (which
was invented by them also) and for the natural sciences, and
they maintained for life and politics the ‘seeing and doing’ at-
titude, so the approximation. London, with its crooked streets,
was projected by a ‘drunken architect,’ the English themselves
say… But not all have the virtue to behave in a disciplined fash-
ion in the middle of disorder. is is why English values survive,
while the others were ruined by exactness.
“One cannot live without values and without an idea of truth.
But people nowadays no longer want to get drunk. Or, if you
want, they are also drunk: with lucidity. Let us pray for them.”
“For the communists as well?” a voice asks.
I am unsettled, all of a sudden. ey do not want to forget
either. I had thought that Alec was not there, but he appears
before me all of a sudden, in twenty-ve or thirty human speci-
mens.
* “ese small conjectural sciences,” in French in the original.
Starting the second day, my roommates give me the task to pour
the water for washing, because they see I am not strong enough
to carry the buckets or do other tasks. From the beginning, I am
surprised to see how dierently each man washes his hands or
face, and I only needed a few days to recognize, just by looking
at their hands, who was the one who washed himself, and even
his character. One can “guess” by the washing of the hands.
When work is done, some people in the room begin to cor-
ner me with questions regarding what I said the previous day.
“What is truth if not exactness?” “How can you say that being
locked up and being free is the same thing?” (I had no intention
to say this!) Only the doctor with whom I share a bed seems to
be content with what I said. “It’s bad for everybody, so it’s good,
all in order.” Other than him, I receive the approval of a young
man without studies, on whose face you can see the wisdom of
peasants. He declares that he does not understand too well what
I said, but he feels that this is how things are.
I am saved from the duty of giving explanations only because
it is “search” day. We are all taken out, in the corridor, and we
are made to stay in a line, our faces to the wall, while our beds
and belongings are checked. is scene, with the face to the wall,
in the corridor, reminds me of something from a book. It’s just
impossible to remember which one exactly; only aer a quarter
of hour, when we are back in the cell, I remember the book, and
I smile.
“Why do you laugh, you there?” one of the guards asks me.
He had remained by the door, to see how we put our beds and
luggage back together.
“I don’t laugh, I smile,” I say, stupidly.
“But you laughed.”
“I only smiled.”
“You laughed!,” he thunders and wins the game, since I real-
ize how absurd my resistance is on such a topic.
He starts again:
“Why did you laugh?”
I think I should avoid the risk of involving a colleague in this
lamentable situation, and I say the truth.
“I remembered a similar scene from a book.”
“Which book?”
“Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.”*
“By whom?”
I repeat the name, which of course does not tell him any-
thing.
“And what was in this book?”
I swallow and I sense that I cannot go back, nor invent some-
thing.
“It was a scene like the one before, with prisoners who had to
face the wall, in the corridor.”
“So? What’s to laugh about this?”
“Nothing, just that the scene ends dierently in the book.”
“How?”
is idiot bores me with his insistence. Let me tell him the
truth and be done with it.
“In the book, the prisoners get a pistol in the back of their
necks.”
e whole room froze. For a moment, the guard seems to be
paralyzed as well. en he lets out a howl: “Instigator!” and he
jumps on me, pulling me by the coat until he gets it o me. en
he grabs me by the neck, yelling: “To the isolation with you!”
e “isolation” is a dark cell, which has some sort of table or
stone bed and a hole for a . When you are in isolation, one
day you do not get food, but only a bowl with warm water at
noon, and one day you get half of the portion. As I am only in
* Noica mentions the title as it was translated into French: The Zero and the
Infinite.
my shirt, I begin to do some exercises, to warm up. Aer half an
hour, somebody else is thrown in, also in a shirt only.
“Now you can laugh together,” the guard says and locks us
up.
I look at my suering companion, and I see that he smiles
indeed.
“It happens,” he says friendly.
“Why did they punish you?” I whisper.
“ey found a pearl button during the search.”
“A n d ? ”
“You don’t know? With a pearl button on a string, you can
produce a spark, and then you can light a cigarette or the re in
the stove, if it is quenched.”
He is already an expert, and he teaches me to sit on the stone
bed, back to back, to warm up. He begins to tell me:
“I’ve been here for two years, and I still have three reasons for
joy. We had meetings at my job — I was an economist — and we
were getting bored, of course. We could not laugh even at the
jokes told by the speaker coming from human resources — as
you know, they had received the order to sprinkle the sandwich-
es* they read with a joke. So I taught – colleagues to laugh
heavily three times: ha-ha-ha, at every joke. Our laughter caught
on, and the whole room adopted it. For a while, it was all good,
but in the third or the fourth meeting, the politruk† took notice.
He investigated the case and ended up getting to me, since I was
known as someone who enjoyed making jokes. Realizing that
they wanted to arrest me, I ran away from home. I didn’t want
to hide at a friend’s place because I did not want to get him into
trouble, so I traveled by train all over the country for a couple of
years. I got used to no longer pay for a ticket, and I felt at home
in the train. en I got bored, so I turned myself in. I was con-
demned as instigator and enemy of the popular order.
* In the context, the term “sandwiches” refers to speeches.
† e person responsible with political education. Every institution had such
a person with this role.
“In reality, I don’t only like to laugh, but I am also interest-
ed in the problem of laughter. I had begun to look into it even
before prison. It’s quite something, laughter in humans. Read-
ing and meditating about laughter, I noticed an aspect that we
don’t always consider: man laughs especially, if not exclusively,
about man. Laughter is social. But it is also something extremely
personal, and I was particularly interested in this line, so that I
could understand people. How does each laugh? I had begun
keeping a list: there is Homeric laughter, out of all your heart
laughter, laughing out loud, laughing from the tip of your lips,
ironical or sardonic, sour, bitter, or yellow laughter; laughing
in his beard, and laughing at someone’s beard,* hysterical, idi-
otic, or intelligent laughter, clear or stuy laughter, and so many
more that deserve to be catalogued.”
“Of course,” he continues, “just as it is interesting to see about
what people laugh, it is also interesting to see why. One can even
arrange historical eras on this theme. e medieval man, as well
as the ancient man, laughed at things dierent from us. When I
began studying the problem, I fell upon the case of the ancient
sage Parmeniskos, who realized at a certain moment that he
could no longer laugh. He then went to the oracle to get back his
laughter, but he did not. Only upon his return, seeing a clumsy
wooden statue of Apollo’s great mother, he burst into laughter. I
don’t even mention the goddess Demeter who, aer the kidnap-
ping of her daughter, Persephone, to Hades, wandered and no
longer laughed, until she saw Baubo, the wife of her host, raising
up her dress. ere must be something in these legends, just as
it remains a problem why yellow people laugh less than white
people. But I did not go too far with my investigation; aer all,
the question of what people and eras laugh at is a problem of the
history of human culture and nature, and it is beyond me.
“I am only interested in how people laugh. And not how they
laugh in general, but each in particular. Since I imitate others
well, I was making people laugh imitating the laughter of hu-
* e Romanian expression a râde cuiva in barbă is used for situations in
which one fools you.
man types — the star, the idiot, the boss — or of colleagues and
people of the day. en I looked into how the main characters
of books laugh, and I want to read again, when I am set free,
Dickens or Balzac, to see how their heroes were laughing. is
is how I got to the laughter of historical gures. I wondered how
Napoleon or the Duke of Wellington laughed, or Henry ,
or Philippo Nerri, that saint of whom people say he was joy-
ful. I could imagine the laughter of Francis of Assisi, because it
certainly was the natural laughter of the man pure at heart. But
when I wondered how Jesus may have laughed, I stopped.”
We were both silent for a while. ere was something inter-
esting in this easiness that ended in gravity. e man I was next
to seemed to be a “free” man. In any case, he seemed to be de-
tached from all things.
“How could you bear wandering on trains for so long?” I ask
him.
“At the beginning it was wonderful. Just think about it, to
have no roots, no xed point, no home, job, nor any destina-
tion — such freedom! I felt that all people are just plants around
me. I had saved a small sum of money, so I could leave in any
direction, with the overcoat on one hand and the suitcase in an-
other. Of course, I was choosing the trains with a long and cheap
route. I was like a spirit owing freely among the other travelers,
who were heavy with matter, worries, and purpose, as they were.
I noticed only then the full stupidity of the traveler, the stupidity
of a boulder thrown into a running river. ‘Is this the train that
goes to…?’ ‘Haven’t I missed the direction?’ ‘Where should I put
my suitcase?’ He doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t understand
anything, and his only human reaction is fear. en, the boulder
gets lighter, and it begins to roll as well, but it remains a boul-
der.* I was talking to people, nding out what was happening in
the world and, at times, interesting things about them, but, aer
all, I was defying them with my freedom. ey wanted to and
had to arrive some place. ey had a dependency; they were
* In Romanian, there is the expression “being as stupid as a boulder,” in the
sense that a boulder does not move and does not have exibility in thought.
Greeks.* How terried they were when the train was late, which
was a blessing for me! I felt as if I had a personal airplane. I truly
believe that man will not travel happily unless he has a personal
airplane, just like the birds, and not in cages, as now, on rail-
ways, roads, or airways previously given.
“However, I cannot hide the fact that I was participating in
the life of these non-ying animals that lack any gratuity: hu-
man beings. When there was some serious delay, I was mak-
ing comments, gathering info, and ending by protesting with a
greater indignation than that of the others. I had all the interest
to delay; still, at times, I also felt the need to arrive precisely no-
where. At the end of the line, I was coming o the train, looking
for a room close to the train station, recovering, and then going
back on the road. Money was getting scarce. Aer a year or so, I
started to travel without paying, pe blat,† as one says.”
“How do you travel pe blat?”
“ere are two kinds of blat: one is arranged with the con-
ductors, the other one at your own risk. If you want to risk it,
without any arrangement, you can only do it on short distances.
I had to prefer the arrangement. At the beginning of the trip, be-
fore departing, I was walking on the platform, carefully watch-
ing the conductors. Depending on their human type, I would
decide whether I could try it or not. I used to travel in second
class, which was lled with people. But sometimes, a conductor
would let me sleep in rst class for a small amount of money. He
took tickets from those who were coming o the train and put
one into my pocket. If there was an inspection, I could say that
I fell asleep and forgot to get down at my stop. Others took my
identity card with them, so that they could say to an inspector
that they were about to write me a report. It was good when there
were overcrowded trains, but this could not take place all the
time. When we were many travelers, especially students, it was
* e ancient Greeks.
† I le here the Romanian expression, pe blat. When one travels pe blat, one
does so without paying. Due to the explanation in the next paragraph, I
considered that leaving the original may be more helpful.
calmer: the conductor let us know when the inspection came.
If there was only one inspector, I could avoid it. It was harder
when there was an inspection ‘in pincers,’ with two inspectors
from each end of the train, who caught you in the middle. You
would hear them ticketing, and you would run from one to the
other. In despair, you would get up on the roof of the train car
and get down further in the back. One time, someone caught
me by the hand, when the train was about to leave. It was the
inspector. Another time, I was next to a group of Soviet tourists.
I pretended I was also a tourist, speaking with them in Russian
as well as I could. ey realized what I wanted, and they saved
me. ey told me that people were practicing this sport in their
country as well, and they call the clandestine travelers ‘rabbits.’
“And, indeed, this is the bad aspect, that you feel like a rabbit.
You need to have great awareness, and you cannot join longer
conversations with anyone, you cannot read a book, you can-
not lose yourself in thoughts. Even independently of the risks
associated with traveling pe blat, my life had become a rabbit
life. What did I still have of the freedom I have assumed? I only
had the run. at’s all: I could run anywhere. Aer two years, I
started to miss chairs, carpets, and people, other kinds of people
than the spectral ones I was meeting in train. I was missing trees
that would not move and grass. I gave myself in.”
“I don’t think you found many carpets here, in prison,” I say.
“No,” he answered (and I sensed he was doing it with a smile),
“but I kept a magic carpet, the taste for ying. Even here, among
people so heavy with so many troubles, I feel like a light being.
I try to make people talk, dream. Haven’t you sensed how much
and how well one can dream here?”
In three days, we were separated.
“Look for me when you get out,” he said. “My name is Ernest.
Ask for Ernest at the City Hall, the Economic Services depart-
ment; all know me.”
“How do you know they would take you back?”
“I’m sure of it. ey need people like me; I am happy and I
make people laugh. eir world is so sad…”
Everyone in the cell receives me with aection when I return
among them. ey had pitied me for my naivety with Arthur
Koestler’s book, and now they had a bit more condence in
me. I surprise myself by asking the doctor what happened to
the swallow. “It gave up making a nest here,” he tells me. Too
bad — it would have been a proof that it was not bad here either,
I tell myself.
e doctor tells me that, having run out of speakers, he had
to give a talk. He talked about the demographic explosion, and
he succeeded to unite everyone against him.
“How so?” I ask.
“I spoke openly, without humanitarian prejudices. I showed
that, most likely, two demographic explosions will take place,
not only one, and that, if the rst will be bearable for humanity,
the second one will be unbearable on all counts.”
“Which one is the second?” I ask.
“I will tell you in a moment. We all heard something of the
rst demographic explosion and, even here, every newcomer
who is more informed tells us about the worries that the West-
erners have. Even under the hypothesis of limiting births from
now on, the increase in population will become problematic by
the end of century. is is what I thought: if this sudden increase
in population risks being an evil for humanity, let us remember
its cause. Everybody knows it: the decrease of infant mortality.
What is more logical, then, than to suspend medical care for
newborns for two, three, or ve years? And natural selection
would kick in.”
“But it is criminal,” I say.
“is is what our colleagues said too.”
“Let me remind you what a contemporary scientist said,
showing that all progress of humanity was done against natural
selection.”
“I returned to this problem,” the doctor resumes, “and I ac-
knowledged that, aer all, it is about billions of young people
who will know, with their energy, to nd solutions. But what do
we do with the second demographic explosion, that of the old
people?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, until now, the population increased rather from the
outside, by the appearance of new beings. Now it will grow from
the inside as well, since the old beings no longer disappear. It is
almost certain that man’s life will be prolonged until –
years old. But doubling the age means doubling the popula-
tion. Unfortunately, life will be prolonged — for the moment, at
least — as old age. I was telling our colleagues that this looks like
the story from the antiquity with one of Priam’s brothers, who
had obtained from a goddess eternal life, but forgot to also ask
for youth, and so he remained an old man into eternity. Let us
ask ourselves: three billion young people can be supported by
humanity, but can humanity support three other billions, espe-
cially billions of old people?
“You see, medicine, with its entire cortege of auxiliary or
neighboring sciences, has triumphed. In a way, it has obtained
its revenge against the ironies it suered so many times (just
as meteorology today) at the hands of a Molière, for example,
or of those who could not forget that the ancestor of the sur-
geon was the barber. Now, medicine has triumphed; but hasn’t
it triumphed too well, tending to prolong life beyond its natural
limits? Something must be done, then. Aer all, by a consensus
in the interest of humanity, medicine might not apply its means
to extend life. Not all progresses are immediately uncovered: it
seems, for example, that there are one-person aircras, but the
army keeps them secret; or articial rain, and so many other
things. But the physicians, just like the physicists, do not keep
any secret. If they can extend life, they will do it. Something
must be done, then, to prevent them from doing so.
“Someone asked me, ‘Do you want to put old people up in
the tree and then shake it?’
“is irritated me a little,” the doctor continued, “so I said:
‘No, we only have to make them get up in the tree by themselves.
Aer all, the problem will become relevant only aer or
years, when we will also be old. What I say is this: we must un-
derstand that we will be overpopulated and that we will pollute
our spiritual, political, and cultural life, our public taste, and our
history. Until we also nd the solution to prolong active life, old
people, in their wisdom, will have to take some measures them-
selves. For a period of time, it would be good to nd some noble
justications or who knows what ethical and religious signica-
tions for the right to suicide aer a certain age. But this problem
can be raised in a dierent way as well: for centuries, youth has
been urged to be ready to give its life for one thing or other, for
the “country” most of the times but also for much more debat-
able ideals or purposes. Wars have been waged with hecatombs
of young people. Can’t we ask for some “heroism” from the old
people as well? In the meantime, as I heard that some Japanese
do, they can do competitive sport, but en masse and mandato-
rily. is could speed up their infarcts.’
“All people in the room stopped me at this point,” the doctor
admits. “e theologian over there, who now speaks with that
guy, who seems a bit agitated, told me, ‘We don’t need to become
beasts if we stay in prison.’ He was right, in a way, I grant it. But
you tell me: don’t we have to call things as they are?”
I look at him and try to see beyond this surface of cruelty.
“Do you know what I would do to you when they release you
and would have to give you a job?* I would send you to a geri-
atric clinic. I am sure you would be fully devoted to all people.”
“Perhaps, out of my scientic interest in the problem of old
age,” the doctor answers smiling.
* Under Communism, all people had to have a job. Ocially, there was no
unemployment. Aer graduating college, for example, students were as-
signed to dierent positions depending on grades, their party connections,
and their propagandistic activities while in college.
“What is that, ‘geriatric’?” asked the young guy from the
country, Matei, who had listened to my speech on exactness and
who had listened to our discussion.
He seemed to desire to learn as much as possible. I translate
the word so that he could understand it. I even start talking to
him, being glad to be able to relax a bit aer the conversation
with the doctor. Matei has not been embittered by prison. On
the contrary, he tells me that, being imprisoned for the second
time, he came back here with some joy: he was coming to the
“University”! He had not found out about so many books, mov-
ies, sciences, and languages at any other place. Now, he was
learning – languages at the same time, badly, of course, but he
was learning them.
“Why don’t you learn just one or two, but well?”
“I could not, because I am not schooled well enough. But
I want to be able to communicate with anyone, just like those
sailors who used to travel much. I like people and their variety.
Maybe I’ll get to travel the world. But you can travel even if you
stay put, as a merchant, for example. I fully experienced the joy
of commerce, and this is why I got here twice. I cannot work in
the factory or in the oce; I’d do anything to work in freedom.
I le home to the city when I was ; at the outskirts of the city,
on a eld, a group of young guys were forming two soccer teams
that were playing for money. I joined one of them, I lost half of
the money I had on me, and I ended up at one of my teammates’
father, who had a shoemaking workshop.
“At the beginning, when I saw that a simple shoe is made of
pieces with dierent names, I got scared. en it became
monotonous. I could no longer stand the sedentary life at the
shop. I tried something more special: to go on my own, with a
minimum of tools and fabrics, in search for clients, as the buyers
of old clothes do. I purposely followed one of these people for
a full day. I think he yelled ‘buying old clooooothes’ a thousand
times, but nobody called him to sell him anything. I suspect he
was walking too fast, or he was just beating the air, having who
knows what other purposes in mind. I began dierently: I was
walking slowly, starting conversations with some child or some
woman standing by the gate, asking them if they have any shoes
to repair, and so I was beginning to have some results. You must
invent your clients, create a need for them: this is the art of trade.
At times, I was invited to lunch. In any case, I was talking to
all sorts of people while I was repairing their shoes. All went
well until I fell upon a shoemaker’s family and I asked if they
have something to repair. I ended up at the police and then con-
demned for illegal practice and vagrancy. When I came out aer
a short detention, I was sent to the factory.
“In the factory,” Matei continues his story, “I think I under-
stood why today’s world, everywhere, is not good. I would not
have stayed there for a long time if my work in the factory had
not given me the right to take some evening courses and thus
learn something. But, aer all, I did not regret the factory. I rst
learned one thing: in a factory, in any factory, you cannot work
with joy. is is something serious, I thought, for today’s world;
it is like a heavy curse on a factory. Joy is, I don’t know, a bit
crooked, and in a factory everything is in straight lines. It’s not
just the shoe factories, where nobody works any longer on a full
shoe, but only for one of the parts; but, as I said, it’s bad in any
factory. Man starts the machine, and then the machine moves
man. Well, if the machine is so great, I thought, why wouldn’t it
do the job by itself?”
“is is what happens today,” I interrupt him. “We have ar-
rived at automatized industries.”
“I heard this, too. I even think that this is when the benet as
well as the wickedness of the machine will be revealed. First, it
makes you work without joy (my shoemaker master was at times
whistling when he hammered a nail; here, nobody sings); then,
the machine breathes dierently than man, who may take a rest,
sigh, or have a chat. But there is something else, some kind of
pollution, as they say today, but not only of the atmosphere or
the surrounding world (it’s their business how they take care
of it), but a pollution of the souls. I have never seen more envy
than in factories, among workers. ey do this much, make that
much money; everything is measured. Why would others make
money freely, they say. ey began with the merchants, they
continued with the physicians, and ended with the waiters and
the barbers. Why should they receive a tip? ey, the workers in
factories, remained persecuted by fate, and this is how they will
remain as long as there are factories in the world.”
“Don’t worry,” the doctor steps in, “the numbers of workers
in factories will diminish more and more, just as the number
of plowmen in the country. Someone who was passing through
our room said that, in the United States, more than of the
workforce does not produce goods, but rather ‘provides servic-
es,’ so in schools, hospitals, banks, and stores. But I want to tell
you that people are not pleased there either.”
“Perhaps the spirit of the factory entered them,” Matei re-
plies.
I wonder: how could the communists throw into prison peo-
ple so pure of heart? Why didn’t they try to transform them into
followers? Matei tells me that the prosecutor called him a class
traitor at the trial. “What will you do when you get out?” I ask
him. “I will continue to be a traitor, if they don’t leave me alone.
Nobody gives them any trouble anymore. Why do they ght
everyone else?”*
I get up to move a little. While I walk between the bunk beds,
I hear fragments of conversation between the theologian and
the guy next to him, who had seemed a little agitated. Aer a
few years of staying in the cell by myself or just with one other
person, now, that I rediscover a group of people, I cannot avoid
feeling attracted by the variety of human specimens: Ernest,
the doctor, Matei, of course Alec… I walk a few times through
the corridor of beds, but the theologian senses that something
makes me slow down every time I pass by them, and I listen.
“Look,” he tells me at one of these stops, “come here to meet
a totally special man, engineer Goldstein. He discusses theology
with me because he wants to become a Christian. Perhaps you
* Aer the Communists came to power, many people were ghting against
them by forming armed groups in the mountains. By the time Noica is im-
prisoned, almost all of these resistance groups were annihilated. It’s possible
that Matei refers to this kind of resistance when he says that nobody trou-
bles them anymore.
can help me to understand him, because I don’t really under-
stand what he wants with this.”
e engineer oers me his hand; for a moment, he does not
look into my eyes, as if ashamed, and then his warm look em-
braces me.
“How could he understand what I want,” he says, “if I don’t
know well what I should say? I would become a Christian out of
my love for the Jewish people.”
e theologian looks at me as if saying, you gure out what
this means. I sit down next to them and I listen…
How strange these meetings in prison are: you don’t sit next
to a man, but next to an entire life. But there is something up-
side-down in time and upside-down with regard to life itself,
as in the vision of the Prophet from the Old Testament, where
houses begin to take on life. At the beginning, here, in a room
as this one, a skeleton sits next to a skeleton. e rst skeleton
says something: it thus gives itself a voice. e second skeleton
turns its skull toward it: it gives itself sight. e rst one invents
a hand, the second one, another hand. One skeleton brings in
the world a mother, the other a brother. At times, the two skel-
etons begin to quarrel, they get sts, muscles, and they invent
the ght. Life seems to be rebuilt here, piece by piece. You shake
one skeleton a bit, and you see coming out of it, like from a me-
chanical box, love, a job, two children, a gun forgotten in the at-
tic, capital punishment transformed into hard work for life. You
shake another one, and, like under a magic eye, there are other
things coming out of it, great cities of the world, images from
a dream, then the beginning of a counterrevolution, a fateful
hunting dog, and a deance before the communists. Flesh and
life slowly get attached to these skeletons, as in a game of cubes,*
bringing buttons, mouths, steps, or attitudes. At times, there are
not enough cubes, and the skeleton remains with uncovered
parts: without a nose, without a way of walking, without tics, or
* Noica refers to a game with several cubes which had sides of dierent
colors. Children used them to construct various gures, by placing them on
top of each other.
without a life goal; other times, there are too many pieces, and
so, aer you nished remaking one real life, you must attached
to it one, two, or three possible lives, with their deliriums and
the fullness of their “non-living.” A shadow, like the skeletons
here, takes in its hand the entire history of the world and throws
it as in a game.
Engineer Goldstein cannot come out of the fascination with
the condition of being a Jew, and he feels responsible for the des-
tiny of his people. It is the only people that has transformed its
most catastrophic defeats in victories, but also the only one — he
says — which transforms a victory into a defeat. For him, it is
unbelievable how a people that gave the Universal to the world
can withdraw so much in its particular. It gave all goods to the
world, and it kept for itself what is most bitter. e engineer
doesn’t “understand” his own people, and this fascinates him.
All nations have a stable space, a history, their own creations,
joy, and fatigue. His nation has nothing of these. It gave to all,
but it only has a book as great creation, the Old Testament,
which has been conscated by other people, to make marvelous
works of art, history, and wisdom out of it, as his people did not
know to do. It built a Temple, and it was immediately destroyed.
It had no full joy, but it does not labor to want anything, to hope,
or to ght — for what?
“It gave,” engineer Goldstein continues, “the two great reli-
gions of this decisive half of , years of the world; it gave
Christianity and, indirectly but by itself, Islam. Let us leave aside
Islam, which seems to have adopted everything that was fanati-
cal in Judaism. But what a splendid gi has it given to the world
with Christianity, in which it did not want to see itself in the be-
ginning, when it could place its seal on it — instead of the Greek
Jews, like Paul, or the Greeks themselves later — nor later, when
Christianity was accepted by Rome and the Jewish people could
have priority, as chosen people, by accepting it. It did not want
to be the rst people of the world; this is unbelievable. Did it
want to be the only one? e only saved one?
“en something else appeared. Aer it gave the religious
Universal to our humanity, it has prepared the secular Universal
for , years. What is this Universal? Being in diaspora, but
home everywhere; engaging in trade, and not in agriculture; us-
ing money, and not goods; making calculations, and not value
judgments; being rational, and not emotional; doing math-
ematics, having abstract thought, wanting an open humanity,
through reason and masonry, and not one closed by religious
fanaticism; translating in all languages, interpreting anything,
bringing nations closer, creating ‘Internationals’; perceiving the
machinist era as a humanistic school, and not as a defeat and
sublimation of nature; being done with nature on all levels: eco-
nomical, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical; saying,
Deus sive humanitas, and not Deus sive natura, as the heretical
Jew Spinoza!
“All these have been obtained in , years. In , aer
the huge sacrices suered under the outburst of the beastly na-
ture against the rational man, my Jews have again conquered
primacy in the world, giving to the secular Universal its purest
version: the fellowship of humans as rational beings. ere is
the version of Marxist International, given by the Jewish spirit
as well; it could have taken it in its hand, enlightening it. But
there is also the less annoying version for the rest of the world
of a supra-historical rational community. I am not saying that
the president of should have been a Jew every year; but its
permanent secretary should have been a Jew. It cannot be oth-
erwise, if the Jew is the ‘binder’ of the world and if he is the only
one able to interpret this new Testament.
“And what did my nation do?,” engineer Goldstein concludes.
“It made a nation state, it revived a local religion and a local lan-
guage; it wants to reinvent a local nature; even more, aer it had
obtained a type of human liberated from animality, with a brain
closest to the electronic brain, now wants to reintegrate Judaic
humanity in animality, vigor, force, and combative spirit.
“I do not know whether, in this way, the Jewish are maybe
planning a third Universal for humanity, in , other years.
But I return to the rst Universal it has given to the world, and
I ask to become Christian so that I could pray for the soul of my
p e o p l e …”
is morning they gave us grams of bread instead of
grams. All morning lessons prior to going out to the solar (a
small court surrounded by tall fences) are suspended in order
to discuss the event together. e grams extra do not mean
freedom, not even enough calories, but they are grams extra.
Together with some other extras, innitesimal as well, the
grams weigh heavily and feed us well.
ere’s something enchanting about the good in these com-
munist regimes: it comes slowly, in pieces, but irresistibly, when
it comes (unfortunately, only to a certain level). Every day brings
its own increase: a weaker shove from the guard, a few beans in
the soup, a newspaper forgotten as if by mistake, a “what do you
think, that I like it?” (Toward the end of my stay, an investigator
would do something unbelievable: shaking hands with me.) All
these things were accumulated, great pleasure aer great pleas-
ure. It’s happiness in installments. It’s true that the evil comes
similarly in communism, in installments, and it is infernal. Eve-
ry day begins with its privation and interdiction, but you also
sense for months in advance that you will be arrested. You see
how the rock rolls slowly toward you, and you look at it hypno-
tized. Everyone says that they would have preferred the evil to
have come fully from the beginning, not in small portions, and
they may be right. But they also want the good to come abruptly,
and thus, in their lack of patience, they disregard the admirable
chain reaction of the good. Such a restrained eruption is a real
school of attention to small things; it is an initiation into life.
What price does life have if you do not have access to its inni-
tesimal?
When we are taken for the walk, they do not take us in the
usual solar, but in a larger court, with some grass. Grass! It is a
beautiful day and, to our surprise, we are asked to take o our
tunics and shirts. ey have never allowed this in the solar. Our
livid bodies are now an oense to the light. While we look at one
another astonished, some ocers with a lady show up. She is a
doctor who checks our blood pressure. Somebody heard that
they would ask us if we want to go to work. It is clear that they
do not force us, and this gives us good hopes. Nevertheless, al-
most all of us would like to go. Matei is the only one who rejects
the idea: “I prefer to stay at the University. Such work makes
people stupid. ere, I am smarter than my colleagues, and I do
not like that.”*
When it is my turn, I nd out that my pressure is over .
e doctor shakes her head. I hear her telling an ocer, “ey
should all be allowed to recover for one–two months.”
ese sad gures and beings that we are wanted to ght not
a revolution, for this is dreamlike, but the regime brought by
the largest army in the world at that time. ey would continue
to do it, but just like Don Quixote who, when he was stand-
ing before the portrait of St. George or St. Martin, felt that they
knew what they had to conquer, but he did not know, just as
we no longer know well. We only know one thing: that we do
not like this. It’s possible that the entire world, the communists
included, may ght to change or at least correct the regime, just
because it uglies life and the world. e others regimes follow
it in its steps. Some people here reproach the free world that it
has not applied communism within its conditions. But its fault
is more serious: it has no model to oer, but only some temp-
tations. Everywhere the world is enchanted by ugliness today.
Dulcinea, whom Sancho, exasperated, shows to Don Quixote
under the face of a country girl encountered on the road, truly
* Communist political prisons were lled with intellectuals from all elds.
ere are other testimonies that refer to the prison as to a university, pre-
cisely because people could listen to various lectures given by others, as
Noica mentions as well.
exists, but she is bewitched in ugliness. Only now, when the ght
no longer has meaning, when the free world also revealed its ug-
liness, a counterrevolution in the name of freedom would have
grandeur: you would ght for liberating the world everywhere
from the spell of ugliness.
“I would like to tell you the story of Don Quixote,” I said aer
the meal in our cell, when I am asked to speak.
“Look,” the theologian intervenes, “we are sick of books and
movies.”
“But this book is about us,” I insist.
“We are tired of us too, with our DonQuixotisms!”
e theologian is the one among us who truly fought against
the regime. He has an extra certainty and authority in every-
thing he says: “We would like to know what is to be done. We
want practical solutions. We know well that Don Quixote has
deep words — I remember the advice he gives to Sancho when
he is named governor — but, if he were the one to govern during
those three days, he would have been worse than Sancho. is is
the problem: what do we do, not what we are and what we say.
How can someone create a good state?”
How miraculously do man’s resources get recovered! ey
just gave us grams of bread extra, and these convinced ght-
ers already consider that they may have the responsibilities of
victors one day. A state? A good state?
I turn toward the theologian: “I know only one stupidity
greater than the ideal state: the ideal army. If the state and the
army are ideal, we are done for. ere still are Germans today
who tell themselves that it was something extraordinary that
their army resisted before the entire world twice. So what? If
an army is so good that it instills every ecstasy, then it becomes
a curse. If a state functions too well as a state, it is a plague for
an individual. But all utopias about a state want this. Humanity
was lucky that nobody tried to accomplish Plato’s Republic: the
totalitarianisms of our century are nothing compared to it. Any
time I hear somebody complaining that he does not get a pass-
port, I tell him that, in Plato’s state, a man cannot get out of the
city until he is y, and even then only on a special mission. e
good thing is that the state will disappear one day, as the com-
munists say. Unfortunately, no one knows when.”
“is is precisely why we must create bearable states in the
meantime,” the theologian responds. “ere is something in-
comprehensible regarding our states: we have all seen people
going to war joyously, but we haven’t seen anyone going to pay
taxes with joy. Why? Aer all, it’s about the same thing, the city,
the state.”
I nd the theologian’s observation interesting. I attempt an
explanation: “Aer all, in war you feel you are a super-citizen,
while you are a simple citizen when you pay taxes. e state
should create super-citizens during peace as well. Or I should
say it this way: the state is forced to limit the individual, but it
should liberate the ‘person.’”
“ese are just words,” the theologian says. “It is as Nietzsche
said, that the state must be a nursery for geniuses. Very beauti-
ful, but how? Let’s say something concrete, not just in general
what should be done.”
I feel cornered. In fact, I have an idea, but I was ashamed to
ever share it with anyone else, because of its naivety. My utopia,
however, has a merit: it does not involve a coup it is applicable
everywhere, and it only requires a few checkbooks and an ad-
ministrative disposition.
“I have imagined a way,” I begin, “and I must tell you about
it, regardless of how fanciful it may seem: ‘the unlimited credit.’
I imagine a state with unlimited credit, one in which, at the be-
ginning, a few hundred citizens, then a few thousands, anyway,
God knows how many, will have the right to a checkbook.”
“What do you mean a checkbook?”
“A checkbook, like a rich person who can pay any sum any-
where; just that, in our case, the sum would not be limited, as it
still is in the case of a billionaire.”
“But this is crazy. How can you give to a citizen the possibility
to spend more than a billionaire?”
“He will spend less than one or two salaries, but he will have
the unlimited on his side and will shame the poor billionaire.”
“Still, he does not dispose of the money like him, you say.”
“He does not, because this man doesn’t need much; it is suf-
cient for him to know that he can dispose of anything, so that
he has no worries and takes care of his job.”
“And what does society gain out of this?”
“is is where the problem comes: society begins to dene
itself, or to get some balance and backbone by those it cred-
its. It begins to know what kind of people it wants to bring for-
ward. Don’t you nd it curious that we elect Miss Austria or
Miss Europe, but not the successful specimen of a society? We
have beauty prototypes. Couldn’t we have a prototype of hu-
man nature? Perhaps one of the works that risked unbalancing
American society was the anarchy of the prototypes. To what
should we aspire? What success should we obtain? From here,
all those idols taken altogether from the ranks of heroes, of ad-
venturers, of the ‘kings’ of shoe polish or of the newspaper sell-
ers who became presidents of a country. But these idols could
not be prototypes, because their success was limited and oen
strictly personal. e only open success there, which is at every-
one’s disposal, is that of money, and this is sad. In the old world,
the prototype seemed to be given by aristocracy, but it also was
limited and, in any case, it was lacking a truly human message.
So, if a state has responsibilities beyond the administrative and
national ones, it would have the one of producing and support-
ing chosen people.”
“Pensions for merit or favors have been given at all times,”
someone says — everyone was listening to us already.
“But it is not about pensions, but investments; not payments,
but credits. e selection should be done among young people,
between thirty and thirty-ve years old, so at an age when their
human promise has been armed, but unaccomplished. At the
beginning, we would choose – young people who would
receive all freedoms together with the material means. We
should less prefer young people with exceptional talents — art-
ists, mathematicians, physicians, or poets, people who create
their own place by themselves, through their singularity — and
instead beings with complete human gis, intellectual, moral,
and practically creative. From any eld, we would choose people
who would have demonstrated up to that age that they want and
they can give a creative meaning to their lives, with dignity. We
would authorize them to choose their place, to change it when-
ever they think it is needed, to travel wherever they feel they
should, to capitalize on their thoughts and raise their children
as they wish. We would give them the checkbook and tell them,
‘decide for yourself and do what you want.’”
From that moment, something extraordinary took place in
the cell: my idea stopped belonging to me. I don’t know how, but
it was transformed into an object for play, for quarrel, for imagi-
nation, or for ecstasy of all. Perhaps under the eect of the extra
bread or of the sun and of the hopes brought back to life, per-
haps under the magic of the “unlimited” credit, people seemed
taken by a hunger for this idea like I have not encountered be-
fore. ey were all making and destroying projects. Something
seemed good for my idea: I clearly sensed that everyone consid-
ered themselves targeted, wondering whether he would deserve
or would have deserved a checkbook. is was, of course, the
source of their positive or negative reactions.
“I would not accept a checkbook,” someone says.
“You will accept it if they give it to you.”
“I will not. I want to gain my own money.”
“What is that, your money? is is the only way in which it
would be yours, if you deserved to be credited because of the life
you had until you were thirty years old.”
“Being credited, so being a guinea pig? I want to be free, sir, I
want to do what I like.”
“But this is precisely what you are allowed to do with the un-
limited credit, to nally do whatever you like.”
“I would like to buy a yacht.”
“You would not like to buy a yacht, but only to go around
with it from time to time, which is perfectly honorable.”
“No, I would like it to be my yacht, to equip it as I see t, to
stain it as I want.”
“Possibly, but then you are not thirty years old yet.”
“I’m already forty.”
“No, I’m telling you, you are not thirty yet. You would not
be thirty even if you said that you wanted a castle according to
your taste or paintings by Rembrandt and Turner, which only
you, and perhaps a few friends, would admire! Something has
changed in the world. We know today that man’s taste, his ca-
pacity to delight, and his reason are not limited to a class, and
even less by one man; and we know even more, that you don’t
like your things if others don’t like them as well.”
“It’s true,” Matei intervenes, “I also found that, if the bride
is not liked by others, then the groom does not like her either.”
“Okay, but do you realize the anarchy that would result if
some people would be allowed, even paid, to do what they like?”
e theologian, who aer all had triggered the whole discus-
sion, intervenes here: “I think that our friend, when he dreams
a state that would tell a few hundreds people ‘decide for yourself
and do what you want,’ recovers — without knowing or without
wanting — St. Augustine’s saying, ‘love and do what you want.’
is saying also seemed to be crazy; but we know its meaning,
that precisely the one who truly loves no longer does ‘what one
wants, but only what one must, because any love is aer all love
of God. e people whom society would credit unlimitedly
would have an unlimited responsibility.’”
“But how to choose? Even if there were only three hundred at
the beginning, you must know their lives, their promise, to see if
they are not badly married — because the wives or, respectively,
the husbands of those with checkbooks, can destroy the whole
game —, to appreciate if their human gis truly are of interest to
society, etc., etc. Who chooses them and how? By notes, just like
the ball’s queen?”
“Allow me to tell you how I think the beginning would be
done,” I try to intervene. But, to my joy, somebody takes it from
there, for my opinions no longer matter.
“Let’s suppose,” he says, “that the choice of the rst three
hundred was done, regardless of how it was done. Among those,
y, forty, or thirty were not chosen badly. You see, the nucleus
for the development of the ‘state with unlimited credit’ would
be established. From this point, we know who would credit oth-
ers, who would make those who prove unworthy fall from the
condition of credited people, who would control, discreetly but
rmly, others, as they control themselves. Actually, public opin-
ion would also have a role…”
“ank you. Having a star on my chest and being controlled
by anyone, whether I eat at a better restaurant, what I eat and
what I drink, just because I do it on their account?”
“You don’t need to have a star on your chest, because from
someplace, from the inside, not from the outside, the sense of
measure would appear.”
“I would even enjoy checking annually the accounts of a
‘credited person,’” someone, an accountant by trade, says.
“But then it is not really a privilege to be credited,” the one
with the yacht says. “If all people have with eyes on you, and
then you also have the internal eye, what kind of a life is this?”
“It is a human life, or we are all worthless,” the doctor, with
his categorical judgment, decides. “If we are not able to handle
the responsibility of being humans, under the request and with
the support of society, then…”
“en let us do like the existentialists,” someone jumps,
“complain about the human condition.”
“No, then we deserve to commit mass suicide,” the doctor
decides.
“Well, well, all of these things are beautiful for the individual,
or for the person, as you want to call him. But what changes do
they bring to the state?”
“What do you mean what changes?,” someone says. “ey
change everything. For a capitalist state, it is a terrible correc-
tive, I would even say a whipping: think of how much people
fret to gain what they need, and even more than they need, but
never enough, according to them, leaving all the rest — hones-
ty, humanity, culture, creativity — to be secondary or to ‘come
by itself,’ while here this rest would be the primary and money
would come by itself, without struggle and always as much as
needed. It would be an even greater corrective for a commu-
nist state: here, where people are dispossessed by force, and so,
regardless of the level to which their right to possess would be
restored, this right would no longer interest them. Here, then,
where man is directed in all ways, like a minor, it would be such
a great blessing to give him unlimited credit not only at the -
nancial level, but also at that of freedom and human dignity!”
“I consider even another aspect,” a professor says. “Even if the
credited ones would not be that great, their educative function
would be extraordinary. Parents would raise their children hav-
ing in mind the purpose of getting the checkbook, if the number
of the credited ones is not limited; and I think that many young
people, aer the excesses of their early youth, would consider
how to get qualied when they approach thirty. e society
would have princely conditions to aspire to.”
“But, aer all, what would these princes do?”
“at’s exactly what I like, that we do not clearly know what
they would do,” somebody else says. “We do not know what man
can give under a request that would not be professionally nar-
row. e state usually closes people’s lives, as if telling them, ‘You
will do this, you will be that.” Now, it would not only tolerate
man’s freedom, but it would also support it with its means. Man
was free only at the level of the individual. Now he would be free
at the level of society.”
“In fact, it would be normal to choose the society’s political
leaders from among these elements that are credited by it…”
At this moment, when the game seemed to be won for the
“state of unlimited credit,” a subtle and gloomy thought comes
to engineer Goldstein’s mind.
“us, you build a state that would free people who, in their
turn, think of a new state? I grant you that these people are
good. But what guarantees that the state which they would cre-
ate is not evil?”
A shiver goes through my body at the memory of the tyranny
of the good ones in history. What do we know about man when
he is inamed by the fury of power? I would like to withdraw my
project, but it is already too late. e theologian says, “Gentle-
men, this state is in any case a good discussion theme. I propose
to create committees to research every aspect it has: the mode
of its constitution, its administrative problems, the function in
economy and production that such free and mobile specimens
would have, their educative role and their leadership, the limits
of the unlimited credit, etc.… Don’t you think that, not having
something else, it is good to discuss it in an organized fashion?”
Engineer Goldstein comes close to me: “ey did not al-
low you to narrate Don Quixote, but you still talked about Don
Quixote.”
Engineer Goldstein is not right: I did not talk about Don Quix-
ote; at the most, I have involuntarily injected Don Quixote into
some of the people in the room. But if I think better about it, I
did something else, something that seems more valuable to me:
a success of the “secretariat” order. By “secretariat” I mean the
organized self-armation through others, up to losing oneself
in others. I have no other way to call this than “secretariat.”
All virtues have something too personal within them: good-
ness, equity, courage, wisdom, or altruism usually involve some-
one else, but they dene you. is is why any virtue is impure: it
risks vanity. You remain a person, because you are the one who
gives, just as you are the author of any deed in general. You do
not become dissolved in the Great Everything. Here, though,
with the secretariat — so by making others move — you get dis-
solved in the small everything that you have made possible.
In Don Quixote it was unfortunate that a team would never
appear. e ideal, though, is the team, as an autonomous crea-
tion which would continue to give fruit without you. I name the
capacity to create such a thing a virtue, because it comprises
both oering and renunciation; I see it above the other virtues
not only because it defeats, more than any other one, a person’s
pride, but also because it is open, like life. ere is no longer a
moral automatism in play: request — response (here’s the poor,
here’s the alms). Here, there is something that is born, grows,
and is able to not die if it is a good thing.
e secretariat… People attribute to Stalin an uncanny sense
of humor, in a good and in a bad way. ere have been three eras
in the history of humanity, he apparently said: the matriarchate,
the patriarchate, and the secretariat. It’s true, aer all, from the
matriarchal agrarian economy to the society of managers, or su-
per-technicians of tomorrow’s world. But the perversion of this
truth appears when the secretary becomes the leader, when he
is rst secretary:* king. In fact, “secretary” must be the one who
hides, who gets “segregated,” in the sense that he does not come
out. Saying rst secretary is a violation of language and spirit.
General secretary, yes, but rst? You would have to say nal, sec-
retary being precisely that diused energy, that lack of identity
of the center, that multiple One, already dreamed by the ancient
thinkers and operating now in perfect modesty and submission.
What will come out of the work that I have put in movement?,
a good general secretary wonders. We live that splendid histori-
cal hour of secretaries who, when they do not have the imper-
tinence of being the rst, represent the ferment and the cement
of today’s world.
us, in small, I realize I make something cooking here, in
the cell, with my idea. I will have a few happy days, and, I would
say, morally clean. Others will make my “state with unlimited
credit.” en, may my thought be done and may it be lost in
their will.† I remember Alec again: would I have caught him in
this work? rough others, perhaps, I may have succeeded what
I alone could not obtain from him: making him think at twenty-
two years old that he may deserve the unlimited credit one day.
Out of joy, I decide to “bring” Alec among us, in this deliri-
ous room, doing the third gymnastic movement, the one he had
oered to me as gi at our parting. It is the right hour, immedi-
ately aer the morning wash.
I head toward the open window, I place my hand on my hips,
and I raise my right knee. It does not reach my chest, as Alec
wanted. I raise my le leg more rmly, and it touches my chest,
but the violence of the movement seems to bring me an internal
turbulence. I am overtaken by pain in my stomach, and I sense
more and more clearly that something happened to my intes-
* Noica alludes to the leader of the Communist party, whose position was
called “rst secretary.” All local organizations had a rst secretary as leader.
† An allusion to the Lord’s Prayer.
tines. I sit on the bed; I get up with diculty when the guards
change, and I sit back again, tensed.
“Something happened?” the theologian asks me. “Why didn’t
you ask to go to the doctor?”
I ask someone to signal. e guard comes to the peephole,
and I say, “please take me to the doctor.”
“Stupid, if you didn’t ask at the guard change… Now stay and
suer until tomorrow!”
I stayed and I suered indeed until the second day. “It’s prob-
ably an intestinal occlusion,” the doctor in the cell says, hearing
what I feel.
I am worse and worse, and out of consideration for my suf-
fering, my cellmates do not resume the debates about the state
with unlimited credit, although it would have been the only
thing that could have risen my spirits. e entire promise of sec-
retarial happiness disappeared all of a sudden. Will they resume
the discussion? Will they not?
When I am taken to the prison hospital the next day, I can
barely walk. I realize that the surgeon who would operate on me
is a fat guy. I do not know why, but I trust fat doctors. Perhaps I
suspect that a fat surgeon makes fewer useless movements and
operates with more certainty. He palpates my swollen stomach
and says from the beginning: “intestinal volvulus.”
“Volvulus,” I think. Such a beautiful name! I remember the
high school years: Volvo–volvi–volutum–volvere. “Volute” comes
from there. How distinguished do physicians speak and what a
delight to listen to two young physicians…
“Are you afraid?” the doctor asks me, seeing that I mutter
something.
“I was thinking of ‘volvulus,’” I say.
“Yes, it is quite serious. But how the hell did you do it?”
He lowers his head on my chest, as if he wanted to listen to
my heart, but he asks me in a whisper, so the guard could not
hear: “Did they beat you badly?”
“No,” I say, “I did a more violent gymnastic move.”
“at’s what you needed, when your intestines were failing
because of weakness,” the doctor says.
“is is what Alec had taught me,” I say as if for myself.
“Who is Alec, your wife?”
“No,” I answer, “Alec is a man’s name. He is a younger col-
league who taught me to do this gymnastics movement.”
“He was not too inspired,” the surgeon says. “Well, let’s see
what can be done.”
On the surgery table I am given oxygen to inhale, and this
puts me in a good place all of a sudden. e lower half of the
body is anesthetized. In the white globe of the lamp under
which I am, I see an open abdomen, in which people work; but
this happens there. I feel better and better under the oxygen and,
in a sense, in the clear awareness of being detached from my
bodily being. In the meantime, the surgeon, who is assisted by
another doctor, says, “You see, it is twisted three times. If he
delayed a few more hours…”
Detached as I feel, I wonder about this obsession with le
roi se meurt?* Why this universally human lamentation, which
could be lled with meaning only by the extraordinary talent of
Ionesco: “we’re dying, we’re dying!”† All of us, standard people
made on a production line, feel as if we are a king, and the king
laments that he dies. Perhaps the disaster would be if the king
does not die. e disaster would not be for humanity only, as the
doctor from my cell was saying about the demographic explo-
sion of old people, but for each one of us.
How come the king doesn’t see that, starting with a certain
hour of his life, he has already died in entire regions of his be-
ing? It is not grave that we die physically every hour of our lives,
as it was said, but rather that we start dying spiritually at a cer-
tain moment, so that it would be unbearable for ourselves if we
did not have an end. If you are certain of your human talents,
content, you realize that your life becomes repetitive aer a cer-
tain moment, as a broken mechanism, either in one space or
* “e king dies,” in French in the original. Noica refers to Ionesco’s play Le
Roi se meurt, translated in English as Exit the King.
† “We’re dying” renders the Romanian expression ne stingem. Noica either
refers to a translation with which I am not familiar or he translates directly
from Ionesco’s French.
another of your spiritual life. And what is death if not the fall
into a repetitive inertia? e poor king in us nds it more un-
bearable that it repeats than that he is told, from the outside,
“stop already!”
If you are Don Juan and make the same declaration of love,
you are dead. You have the same way of brushing your teeth,
of approaching people, of tackling new situations in the world;
you give the same advice and you delight in the same sad joy.
In some zones of my life, I realized I am no longer capable of
novelty. One day, I will feel that I am making the same kind of
secretariat and that, in this way, I have died at the same time
with what I thought was best in my life.
Besides, “death” is not only the entering into repetition; it
seems to me that it also is the retrieval of the same thresholds
or limits. You try to understand something in some eld of life.
You give up because you feel you have reached a threshold. You
return later, but you stop at the same threshold. ere are peo-
ple, for example, who cannot get over a threshold in learning a
language or in the initiation into a science. eir intelligence
and memory do not diminish, perhaps, in time, but they do
not increase either. I started mathematics three times, but every
time I stopped there. ere is a “there” for each, so a border of
his spiritual being, of his capacity of reception and, aer all, of
his human condition. As someone said, “scientists must die so
that science can progress.” Otherwise, they would keep it in
place, with their authority and limits.
Well, if there are limits, there is death. You do not have the
right to live beyond your own limits, which are forms of passiv-
ity also, not only forms of your armation. For, starting with a
certain moment, you are receptive to a limited number of things
only, and, regardless of how much you travel, you no longer
“see” anything new. ere is only one thing that would entitle us
to still request the extension of our lives at that moment: poor
curiosity. A friend of mine used to say, “You deserve to live so
that you can read the newspaper every day.” But is it still worth
living?
Perhaps things will be dierent. By this techno-scientic rev-
olution, we will have extra memory and something extra in our
faculties for knowledge and assimilation. We will learn languag-
es while sleeping, we will make more and more unexpected as-
sociations of ideas, we will register the most diverse sensations
due to the machines that are adapted to our organism. Perfect,
then we will have the right to live longer. But we do not have it
now. I defy anyone today to produce headlines about a survival
over eighty lawful years.
Oh, I know very well how interested Pascal would be to see
today’s world, the world of calculators, which he rst imagined,
and the world of moral reections, illustrated still by him; I
know how impassioned Archimedes would be by a book of el-
ementary physics or Faraday and Maxwell by electronics. But
I do not feel personally my inner boundlessness and I do not
think that anyone senses it, aer the precedent of Lord Ruther-
ford, who gave the model of the atom, but who said that the
atomic energy will never be released; or Einstein’s example, who
was also blocked somewhere in physics. As for today’s philoso-
phers, historians, or economists — they enter a terribly broken
mechanism, a blind repetition starting at one moment in their
lives!
I vaguely hear people talking. e surgeon who’s operating
on me explains to the other doctor: “I think he’ll be ne. I had
to cut only cm of his intestine. Look, the problem now, when
you sew the intestine back, is to make sure that the small veins
from one side come in the prolongation of the small veins from
the other side. You have to proceed so that the organism would
not register that you have made a resection in it.”
Isn’t the entire civilization, I think, a way of cheating nature?
“So that it would not register…” I wish I could sleep now, in full
euphoria, under the oxygen I inhale, but the nurse does not al-
low me. Perhaps, in order to cheat nature eectively, you should
not put it to sleep because later, when it wakes up, it gets up-
set because you hacked it. Maybe this is why people’s victories
today are approximate: they have truly narcotized nature and
made it so that it “did not feel it,” instead of touching its face
with a nger from time to time, talking friendly to it, just like
the nurse does with me, so that I don’t fall asleep…
[is chapter was sent by its author ve times out of the coun-
try — by mail, just like all the others — but it never reached its
destination, and the manuscript that remained in the country
was lost as well.*
e author remembers that he was describing here the
two years that he spent alone in the cell, rst because he was
convalescent, aer coming out of the prison’s hospital, and
second because he was too weak to participate in the work of
“reeducation”† that was being conducted in prisons during those
times, in view of the release of the political detainees which was
requested and obtained, in principle, by U ant, the secretary
of the at the time.
In the beginning, the total solitude was a delight for the
author. But what a curse it becomes when you realize that, by
yourself, you cannot give your life a fuller content! Perhaps
the spiritual techniques of the East know how to populate soli-
tude — through the forests of India of even the prisons of East-
ern Europe — but the author of these pages did not know them.
He could not do much with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of
Loyola or Descartes’ Meditations, which he had in mind. en,
* See explanation about this chapter in the Romanian Publisher's Note of this
volume, p. .
† e “reeducation” was one of the most terrible tortures that took place in
Romanian prisons. Its purpose was to change the souls of human beings,
to transform them into machines that follow the precepts of the commu-
nist regime. For more information, see Virgil Ierunca, Fenomenul Pitesti
(Bucharest: Humanitas, ). Fr. George Calciu also speaks of it in his In-
terviews, Talks, and Homilies (Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood,
).
with a few straws from the mattress on the concrete bed, which
was ripped in a corner, he tried to do geometry, like Pascal when
he was a child, or to recover some formula, that he only knew
only a little, such as vector calculation, for example. He did not
succeed much, again.
At that moment, man asks for forgiveness because he exists.
“Lady,” you say, “or Mother Nature, delete me from the civil list
of those who exist and give forgiveness to the spermatozoid that
made me possible, that it ran to take the place of another sper-
matozoid, which was destined to have a more worthy life than
mine!”
In one of these moments, the guard opened the peephole and
gave to the author of these pages the rst volume from Marx’s
Complete Works. He would continue to give him the others too,
volume by volume.]*
When I came out from the hospital, even if I was alone in the
cell, it was clear that something had changed in the world and
that the change was toward the good. I was given paper and
pencil, in the beginning in order to write my biography. (Per-
haps there was something else to nd out!†) I hastened to write
it, but I soon saw how empty our lives are. Even if many write
their memories with pleasure and with a secret vanity, it is a
terrible torture to remake your life in your mind, with its lost
occasions and stupidities. How interesting is one’s own life! De-
scribing it, I suered more than when I was beaten.
I remembered even with pleasure one of those beatings,
which had been administered so that I tell “everything,” just like
now — but with dierent means, while I unfolded a dull life of
an intellectual on two hundred large sheets. I had been laid on
the oor with my face down, they had placed a piece of leather
on the so parts of my back, and a sturdy guy who held a thick
whip with knots in his hands was giving me two strokes at a
* Addition by the Romanian editor.
† is phrase is, of course, ironical. Noica was already heavily under investi-
gation.
time. I don’t know how, the rst one was more bearable, but
the second one, which fell around the same place, was very dif-
cult to bear. ey had not given me more than eight or ten
strokes, but my entire body seemed to revive and — I am almost
ashamed to say it — when I returned to the cell I had a better
digestion than ever.
e connection between the spirit and the body is strange.
Any time I have a better idea, I experience happiness in my whole
body, including the stomach. But now, when I was writing my
biography, I had such indigestion! e only thing that I wrote
with pleasure was the rst half of the rst page, somewhat pro-
vocative in a socialist regime, in which I described how I came
into the world. “I was born as a protest: my mother waltzed for
a night at a ball in order to lose me, but I was stubborn to come
into the world. is is why, perhaps,” I added, “I am so stubborn
and sometimes impertinent.” e rest of the autobiography was
prose. I think this is one of the harshest punishments, to make
people write their autobiographies — and this is, actually, what
happened, in these parts of the world.
Going over my life, I realized then how vain European phi-
losophy is, the only way I studied and in the spirit of which I was
writing. It does not teach you anything, even if I still think that,
without it, you cannot think anything in an articulated fashion
in all cultures of the world, anything that would “belong” to the
rational. (Goethe’s saying makes sense for anyone: “I cannot do
without philosophy, and I have nothing to do with it.” Unfortu-
nately for him, he became attached to philosophy aer the death
of his friend Schiller, and he was going to pay for this. European
philosophy does not even teach you to meditate because it does
not oer you any spiritual technique.)
With Descartes’ Meditations, which I knew well, I saw that
I had no use of them from the beginning. en I thought of
Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, trying, by vague memo-
ries, to do the exercises of organized imagination which he ex-
pects (seeing Christ concretely, with the sweat on his forehead,
bearing his cross, etc.), but they could not take my anywhere
either. ey were probably good as meditation eort, just for the
xation of imagination (le péché de distraction,* as the French
Catholics say) and to avoid letting memory, which is so tyranni-
cal and capricious, throw before you, in your conscience, all its
horrors or, I would say, its dirt. ere seems to be a devil in us
which, when man is alone and not busy, comes to mock all our
helplessness. One or other disgusting memory refuses to with-
draw in the swamp of the unconscious and, the more you want
to not think that specic thing, the more you make it resistant,
just like today’s bacteria with penicillin.
It may be that other European schools of wisdom have given
more adequate spiritual techniques: Steinerism, Guénonism…
But how poor did they prove to be! If I at least knew yoga. But
what has always scared me in Indian thought — which gave the
number zero to mathematics — is that it rather annuls than edi-
es. Well, an opinion, of course…
Here, in Europe, we know almost nothing of spiritual life. We
will soon meet Asians, some great, some common, who know
something about spirit (not only about intellect) and who, on
top of it, can easily assume everything that we believe we have
better than others: our mathematics, physics, and technology.
Mathematics, what an anti-mystery! It is a religious mystery up-
side down. All cultures had their mysteries and their initiation,
with symbols loaded with meaning and a good ambiguity. We
are the only ones who discovered (or capitalized) the symbol
emptied of meaning, the pure symbol, a mathematical sign. is
play with gures and signs (later with structures) was a simple
play at the beginning, as Pascal tells us, who, being invited by a
mathematician of his time to meet in I don’t know what city in
France, replied in this way, “Sure, happily, but we should speak
of serious things, not of mathematics.”
Something happened aerwards — beyond or even before
the application of mathematics to physics and technology — and
this probably was the capture of the only mystery that could
still operate in this profane world: the capture of innity. Our
mathematics were accredited and applied, beyond the Antique
* “e sin of distraction,” in French in the original.
geometrism, only because they domesticated the innity (with
the innitesimal calculus), and then because they cheated with
it (Cantor and set theory). e ecstasy of mathematics begins
only with the taming of innity. But, you see, it is an ecstasy that
is handy to all, even to the tribal people who have rings through
their lips.
Still, it’s just a manner of speaking to say that mathematics
is “handy to all.” When you ask him to go more slowly in his
demonstrations so that you can follow him, the mathematician
does not understand that you need a certain animality in order
to do mathematics well: a “bossa,” as was said in phrenology,
the so-called science of the spirit, or an extra-cranial protuber-
ance, or who knows what wrinkling of the gray matter. You need
something like the animality of the pianist or of the painter. e
most “rational” thing of a culture requires the most irrational
talent. (Woe to the people of Israel — as engineer Goldstein
said — who sold this superior animality for the animality of rst
order. If things continue this way, I can imagine an hour when
the Jews — at least those from Israel — no longer know the mul-
tiplication table well.*)
As for one like me, I can say that I will die with the sadness
of not having been a mathematician. I am laboring now, in my
solitude and with the rests of sheets of paper I still have aer I
nished and delivered my autobiography, to do a little math-
ematics by myself. Doesn’t Plato say that divinity, once alone,
only geometrizes? I try as well, as a small man, to discover, or
at least rediscover (like the child Pascal), a little mathematics.
I know, for example, the beginning of vector calculus. I take a
few straws from the mattress, because the sheets of paper are
done fast, and I cannot hope that I would receive more, even if
I would soon be proven wrong, and I begin working. I get stuck
on the rst theorems. How could Descartes get analytical geom-
* Noica speaks here of how various cultures include a certain animality, the
one of the artist. He believes that this animality is necessary for doing math-
ematics as well. His note about engineer Goldstein refers to what his cell-
mate said regarding Jewish culture on pages –.
etry out of nothing (just as dans un poêle,* as he said himself,
in a small room with a stove-oven, where he was quartered for
the winter, like an… ocer), from nothing, that is from playing
with coordinate axes? I resume, because I know perfectly its be-
ginning, but I stop again, even if I still have space to write a few
recovered formulas on the margins of a few sheets of paper. I
then move to the moderns’ “topology.” Maybe there’s something
to try with it. I know that topology is the “science of the rubber”
(or it was so until it became an abstract discipline by excellence),
so a science of gures which, while twisted in any fashion, still
retain some constant relations. But even now something is con-
stantly denied to me — like a greatly coveted beautiful woman.
I perfectly know that, aer you have “had” mathematics, they
are no longer interesting (“Who knows what one plus one is
knows everything that the human spirit can know in this re-
gard,” Descartes used to say), just like the poor women who are
nothing else but beautiful. But what suering to not be able to
have them!
One day, as a blessing, I am given the rst volume of the edi-
tion of Marx and Engels’s complete works through the peephole.
I gather that I would be given all of them, one aer the other, if
I want. I soar into lecture — reading, the only form of spiritual
life of the European! — and, even if the translation is made from
the Russian version, where the pages with the deep ideas from
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are missing, I am
delighted. Do I really like Marx? Am I in the situation of kissing
the hand that hits me? Or is it that inner poverty, my incapacity
for doing geometry, meditating, and creating something out of
nowhere, makes me experience even this reading as a blessing,
as long as it is printed paper, so, for me, a European, about truth
and life? For centuries, the printed book has said to the Euro-
pean man, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”…
I feverishly read the rst volume, and, from its beginning, I
understand something that seems to be essential for the success
of Marxism and for its lamentable ideological failure with those
* “In a stove,” in French in the original.
who are forced to learn it. is doctrine can only have sense for
those without culture, to whom it gives a few slogans, in our
case for the masses of workers in factories and only for them;
or it has meaning for those who have stayed too long in culture.
It’s either something too elementary or something too rened.
It does not stand at the middle level. But, aer victory, the doc-
trine is taught precisely at this middle level, and this is why it is
a catastrophe in consciences. Instead of allowing people to end
in it, they begin with it, continue with it, and remain at it, being
forced to pass exams and to learn laws (listen to this: laws in
philosophy!). Or, at times, believing that they understand some-
thing, they explain the dialectical contradiction in the sense that
one thing can be and not be: “Here, comrade, the hat is; if I hide
it behind me, it is not.” I tried to tell such a propagandist that, for
the dialectical contradiction, he should rather use the saying of
a French humorist, Allais, I think: “How sad it is to know that a
glass half full is a glass half empty.” He replied that this is a say-
ing for drunks, which does not match the proletarian morality.
Objectively speaking, and without kissing the hand that hits me,
there are bewildering things in Marx’s work! I even regret now
that this doctrine will disappear by itself in the era of automa-
tions, with the disappearance of the workers from factories and
of the miners. It was valid only for them for a moment (so for an
era); for the others, for the peasant, the clerk, the freelancer, the
intellectual, and the merchant, it only represented something in
the line of “resentment,” as Max Scheler said, so in the line of
irrepressible dissatisfaction of seeing someone else and entire
classes better equipped than yourself for happiness and comfort.
ere are pages where Marx shatters you. How troubling is his
notion of “alienation” from the manuscripts of his youth — and
I saw it later, because those pages were intentionally taken out
from the edition I had received. Today everyone invokes them,
but how many of us stand under their direct seduction and, aer
all, their ambiguity? He describes there the three or even four…
no, a cascade of man’s alienations, all of them being impressive
in the light of living conditions of modern man.
In the phase that capitalism reached, he says, work produces
not only goods, but also the worker as a good. e object pro-
duced by work opposes it as something foreign, as a force that is
independent from the producer. As he produces more, he falls
further under the dominion of his own product.
One is tempted to ask, to whom does this happen? Only to
the worker or also to the one who gave him work, poor guy? If
everything happens as in religion, where, as Marx says, the more
man puts into God, the less he keeps for himself, then you could
say that the exploited puts into play here only his work, while
the exploiter puts his soul. You should probably deplore both,
the slave and the master, as Hegel does; even more, since a “self-
alienation in a product” takes place, as we are told, a worker
could still shake away the deception if he started to run back
into his poverty or wherever in the world. He could return to
his dirt (if he is allowed to have it or if it has not been trans-
formed into a golf course in the meantime). e other one has
sold his soul completely, as it has been seen in so many cases,
for example in so many rich families, where the father is not the
only slave to his goods, but the son must also be modeled, rather
mutilated, according to the requirements of possessions.
However, Marx has no mercy on the poor possessor. In the
historical phase he was in, he had to denounce the exploitation
and the alienation of the individual forced to work. Concerning
him, Marx shows clearly that there are no less than four kinds of
alienation, taking into consideration that the production activ-
ity is also at stake, not only the result of the production work.
First, he says, the eort brought by the worker is something ex-
terior to him, not having to do with his essence, and it repre-
sents the mortication brought about by forced work. Second,
the type of work that industrial capitalism established is such
that it does not allow any freedom to the worker, except the one
for his animalistic functions, or eating, drinking, and procreat-
ing. On the other hand, and third, a common man is a universal
being, a genus, who considers his entire nature to be his inor-
ganic body; however, his work now alienated him from nature.
Similarly, and this is the fourth point, it alienates him from the
human genus. us, a worker, Marx says, is alienated: in relation
to his nature and to his self, and then in relation to nature purely
and simply, and nally in relation to other humans.
Perhaps we simplify things or we summarize them imper-
fectly, but how deep and open this investigation is! is is prob-
ably why it was not included from the beginning in this edition
of the complete works, which I was given to read in translation.
However, even in this version, you fall upon amazing things in
the rst volume. I would have never read — just as its own ad-
herents don’t — the article titled “Debates on the Law of es
of Wood.” I nd its psalmic beauty here, in prison. When the
author says that you possess the tree, but you do not truly pos-
sess its dry branches, when he adds that the poor (who steal
wood for winter from others’ woods everywhere, not only in
Germany) have a certain kinship with the dry branches, which
gives them a genuine right over them, then what will you say
that is to be found on this page? Is it something economical, as
an impulse to revolt, or is it rather the religious poetry of the
psalmist?
Of course, his polemical books, like e Holy Family, e
German Ideology, or e Poverty of Philosophy, lled with heavy
German irony, can no longer be appealing to anyone, if they
ever were. ere are, however, thoughts and entire pages that re-
main imprinted in your mind. Today, how true seems to be the
armation found in the rst work cited, that the class of owners
and the proletarian class represent man’s same alienation from
the self; the former sees itself satised with alienation, while the
latter is annihilated by it. In this thought, we almost have the
pity for the possessors that I have mentioned. Similarly, from
the same work, the idea that “all progress realized by the spirit
has so far been to the detriment of humanity, which arrives at a
situation that is more and more inhuman” is valid for those well
established, but not for the multitudes, if it is about the progress
realized by the European spirit in the line of well-being only.
I would not pass easily, as the ocial commentators do, over
deeply signicant thoughts, like the one (which, it is true, was
deleted by the author) from e German Ideology in which he
declares courageously, “We know only one science, the science
of history, which comprises together the history of nature and
that of humanity.” Isn’t this, aer all, the novelty of Hegel and
then of Marx, that they have placed everything within uid-
ity? en, further in the work, if you are not satised with the
cheap historical-materialist explanations, such as this, “the lack
of sugar and of coee (due to the blockade) raised the Germans
against Napoleon,” you are impressed, instead, by a few pages
long thought to propose that the separation between the city
and the village represents the greatest division of labor. He be-
lieves it can be overcome by the new system, and that this divi-
sion exists only under the conditions of private property, which
leads to the “urban animal” and to the “rural animal”! (But you
wonder, hasn’t the new doctrine actually increased the urban
animality?) I would not just pass over all of these things — for
the bad, but also for the good in Marx’s intuitions — just as I
would not easily go over the stunning, dark prophecy, so close
to conrmation, “ere will be a time when individuals (pre-
cisely the urban ones, my note) will take on themselves also this
product of the species, language.” I don’t know how, but, of all
philosophers, only Marx, as much as he can be called a philoso-
pher, has something of a prophet in him — and this is a novelty.
Plato looks too much into eternity, and Hegel too much into
past history, which he actually integrates admirably. Nobody has
opened the door to the future. Instead, this one, regardless of
how modest of a philosopher he is…
But the most surprising thing — leaving aside so many pages
and places of rst order, starting with the Manifesto, which has
not been surpassed by any other — is that people easily ignore,
almost with compassion and indulgence, the ten years of jour-
nalism at the Tribune in the United States. It’s true that his arti-
cles are not directly edifying for the proposed ideology, but they
are fascinating as cultural and historical documents. ere is
something so complete in them, between and , as they
were written weekly, as a report about the situation in Europe
for the American reader. Also, there is something so tumultu-
ous and alive in them that you could say that they are about
the Intimate Journal of Europe, of a Europe that could spread its
“imperialist” maneuvers over the body of other continents. Be-
ginning with the Gladstones and the Russells of England, with
Napoleon or the Crimean War, passing on to the poverty and
lethargy of India, to the Taiping Rebellion in China, Russia’s ab-
solutism, reactionary Switzerland and the revolutionary United
States, deepening then the struggle of Europe to have something
unique on Terra, with the industrial revolution, but also bring-
ing great risks together with great hopes — what is the dramatic
conscience that this minuscule and incomparable Europe does
not have, as if it were a ery man overwhelmed by the spirit of
adventure! But if continents also have a conscience, then Marx
was, at least for ten years, the devilish chronicler and spokes-
person of this conscience. Whoever does not read the Intimate
Journal of the middle of the last century ignores himself as Eu-
ropean.
I don’t plan on emphasizing everything that I liked in his
pre-classical work, from before Capital, or on trying to encour-
age experiencing it with joy, especially in the case of those who
study it because they are commanded to do so. I would only
mention that the gold in this author is rather found in his small
works, in simple manifests, portraits, or clarications, gold that
he himself wastes in the sand of action.
When multiplied, as he liked to be, beyond specialties, but
with the vocation of the expert, a ghter for all, but in the name
of his ideas about all, suocated in an England which is the only
one that stands him and which was, in fact, the only bearable
one for him, how could he be gathered together in a well cali-
brated work? Aer all, he did not have time to write works and,
as Nietzsche later, he wanted to be a fatality, not an author.
But one can see in him great thoughts and formulations even
in a trie of a speech!
In “Speech at the anniversary of People’s Paper” from , he
says, “It seems that the more humanity subjects nature, the more
man becomes the slave of another man or of his own vileness.”
And then, “All of our inventions seem to take us to only one
result: to endow material forces with spiritual life and to reduce
human life to a simple material force.” Hasn’t this happened in
Marxist states, but also in the consumer society, exactly aer
a century? And here is, nally, Marx’s verdict in this speech-
manifest: “e new forces of the society need only one thing:
new people, who know how to master them, and these are the
workers. Just like the machines, the workers are an invention
of our times… . History is the judge, and the proletariat is the
executioner of the verdict.”
It was not this way, or it was this way — I no longer care now,
as I am behind bars. But I wonder one more time, faced with the
intellectual emotion that his work awakes in me at certain mo-
ments: am I not actually kissing the hand that hits me? But no, I
am clearly interested only in something completely unexpected,
the prophet in Marx, the prophet as upside-down philosopher,
and his monotheism, the man of only one idea, who can still see
with it far in the concreteness of history, and who could say to
someone like Chekhov, it seems (see the article “Herr Vogt”):
“Aer all, it does not matter whether this pathetic Europe disap-
pears — which will actually take place soon, unless there will be
a social revolution — and whether America will exploit, then,
the old system on account of Europe.”
Actually, there is something else that interests me. It is the
fact that I see in him, in this victorious man for a moment, a true
brother Alexander, another one. Pitié pour les forts!,* I feel like
shouting one more time, from here, where I am. Have mercy on
a thinker so great that, in those parts of the world where he is in-
voked too oen and too incorrectly, he has become the laughter
of children. Have mercy on the way in which his victory turns
against him. Give up cheap mockery, those who feel you are his
victims; give up describing him, according to the stories of his
neighbors in London, as a poor common man in his relations
with his wife of noble origin, or mocking him because he grew
a beard in old age (and what a beard), aer he had laughed in
a letter to Engels of the German prophets from the exile aer
, who had grown beards. Have mercy because of the curses
that will accumulate one day over his head, the unhappy victor.
e Russians will curse him because he blocked their histori-
cal armation for so many decades, as no absolutist czar had
succeeded in the th century. e Jews will curse him, his co-
religionists, about whom he declared more infernal things than
any anti-Semitic man. e workers will curse him because he
deceived them for a moment that they are a unitary and supra-
national class, that they have a complete human identity, and
that they are the only ones who can be the salt of the earth and
of history. Even the communists will curse him, because, with
his claim of speaking “scientically,” he forbade them the ac-
* “Mercy for the powerful,” in French in the original.
tive idealism, the power of creation, and the access to novelty.
Nature will curse him, because he has ravished it with his furor
of industrialization, in the rst hour of heavy machinism. e
machines will curse him, as rened as they will become and as
prepared, as brides, to marry the being of man, instead of be-
ing maneuvered by the rough hands of the workers. e gods
with their religions will curse him, because he disdained them
by portraying them as simple opium for the people, when they
were aspiring, and at times succeeding, to bring to the world
everything that he had desired, plus something of which he no
longer knew or no longer wanted to know.
en someone will come to say, “Forgive him, he also lived
under the folly of the Good. Pray for the soul of brother Karl.
Pray for the Big Brother.”*
* “e Big Brother” appears in English and in italics in the Romanian origi-
nal.
I receive paper and pencil again; I have read seventeen volumes
from the complete works of Marx and Engels, and then the ve
of e History of Philosophy published by the Soviets and trans-
lated in Romanian (a lamentable page of European culture, pa-
thetic especially for Marxism), and I have written like crazy four
works, which I transcribed nicely in pen and gave to the charac-
ter who was assigned to watch and “reeducate” me. Months and
years passed this way. Two? ree?
In the meantime (I would nd out later), almost all the other
colleagues in detention were undergoing reeducation. On the
surface, the reeducation seemed very gentle; in reality, it was
very serious for people’s consciences. ey were given some
books concerning the regime’s accomplishments, they were
shown propaganda movies, and they were even, toward the end,
taken out in buses, a whole morning, and brought to see the in-
dustrial units, the new neighborhoods in cities, or the state co-
operatives in the country. As I was to nd out, the serious thing
was that some detainees, who were converted faster, became
propagandists themselves, and thus discussions were forming,
in which people were accusing each other and they were get-
ting into a pathetic situation: either some were exaggerating and
becoming erce defenders of the regime, or others were stub-
born in not acknowledging any change toward the good of the
country, refused everything out of “dignity,” and were getting
ready to come out of the prison more hostile than they were
when they came in.
I was exempted from all of this (I was probably le on the
side, since I was too weak aer the surgery or because I was to
be reeducated — who knows? — in a more special way), so I was
enjoying staying alone in the cell, with the Marxist books that
I received, paper and pencil, and, toward the end, even some
magazines, among which there was one for the popularization
of science, which I loved passionately. From it I found out some
extraordinary novelties that had come out in the world in the
meantime, in the context of the techno-scientic revolution.
I cannot forget, also, my encounter with Russian (an encoun-
ter that, to my shame, I had only then), because I had asked for
a book for learning Russian from the beginning, in my desire to
have a printed book, so the right to read something, anything,
and so the privilege to exercise my memory. I suspected, and
rightly so, that they would not refuse me such a book. But only
when I had it in my hands I realized how our stupid — although
apparently legitimate, at a certain moment — fear of Russians
and of being annexed had made all of us, young and old, not to
learn Russian, but also to not be able to learn this language. I had
seen, when I was free, how even the most eminent students did
not learn this language (which had been taught for eight years
in high school). At the end of high school or college (where Rus-
sian was mandatory as well) they were even saying with some
pride that “they did not know anything.”
As much as I could learn it by myself, Russian seemed to me
extraordinary. I no longer had here the worry I experienced
concerning Marxism, that I ran the risk of praising those who
beat me. is time, it was about the language of a people, not of
a regime, and so I gave way to my linguistic interest for one of
the most powerful and grand armations of human logos. Eve-
rything seemed remarkable and imposing in Russian, beginning
with that force of stressing Russian words, which can receive the
stress even on the fourth syllable, or even on the h before the
last (while in classical languages, the stress could fall only on
the third before the last, and in French the stress falls invariably
on the last, in others on the second, and in others nally on
the rst, which terribly narrows the phonetic domain of speech,
and, in the case of languages with xed stress, it even narrows
the domain of the modern poetical miracle of rhyme); continu-
ing with the quasi-absence of the auxiliary verbs “to be” and “to
have” (the Russian says, “with me gramophone” instead of “I
have a gramophone,” which can easily lead to the feeling that
the gramophone is “with me” by chance, but it could be with
you or with somebody else, and one could infer from here, with
some naivety, of course, the easiness of applying communism to
a people that speaks and feels this way); going, nally, over so
many lexical and grammatical aspects of the language, to end
with that splendid “aspect,” literally, the aspect of the verb, with
the Russian imperfect, which confers, of course, great beauty
for formulating a thought and for narrating facts — everything,
as I say, seemed impressive in Russian. Its good indetermina-
tion (from the absence of some articles to the imperfect) made
me feel the innity of which Gogol, I think, spoke in the Dead
Souls, describing a troika that was advancing in the endlessness
of snows.
◊
Aer some time, they began to interrogate me approximately
once a week, in the interrogation oce, where a distinguished
and intelligent character, who was dressed as civilian (not
knowing how to address him, I called him Mr. Counselor),
came at times alone, and other times with his adjudant, a cap-
tain — whom he was probably teaching directly how to “handle”
people —, and gave me real lectures about the current situation
in the country and in the world. I found out that president Ken-
nedy had been assassinated (“a great misfortune for human-
ity,” the counselor said) and that it was “still us,” so the socialist
concentration camp, who were the rst to launch a man in the
space. It was the hour when the socialist concentration camp
still hoped to nally reach the other world in prosperity, and my
counselor passionately unfolded the perspectives in that direc-
tion.
I was not indisposed by the fact that, according to him, the
rapport was reversed in the favor of the East, nor by the pom-
posity with which he brought arguments and proofs for this, but
rather by the idea that a man, who seemed remarkably intel-
ligent and informed, was wasting his time with me in order to
“indoctrinate” me. Didn’t the regime have something better to
do with “chosen” specimens, such as the counselor?
is feeling that the regime continued to use human intel-
ligence badly, while it valued so impatiently all the other “prime
matters” of the country was conrmed when the counselor
called to ask me how I was feeling, if I had good enough nutri-
tion, and if I wanted, for example, a can with good sardines,
“you know,” he said, “the delicious ones,” and he was licking his
mouth, believing that he would make me crave them. In real-
ity, I have to say that he rather provoked pity, because I could
clearly see how a superiorly gied man was made to do such a
lamentable service of “capturing” victims. Without any ostenta-
tion, I answered that I would rather have a jar of yogurt from
time to time, since I was literally a papă lapte* regarding food.
(I realized on the spot that there was no virtue, no “strength of
character,” in my answer, but the simple fact that a rather ane-
mic nature does not have many appetites. I think that what we
may consider “virtue” is oen connected with a vital deciency
or insuciency and that, in general, you must be very content,
as a moral being, when your weaker human nature or just your
circumstances protect you from temptation. Christianity is per-
fectly right when it says, “avoid temptation,” don’t search for it
so that you can prove to yourself that you are strong. e ascet-
ics knew a few things regarding this, and Nietzsche’s opposite
saying, to look for temptation, gefährlich leben, which I liked so
much in my youth, appeared now in all its ridicule. In order to
not commit adultery, at least as a man, it’s good to not have a
couch — just like in the anecdote with the Jew who, nding his
wife with another man on the couch, sold the couch.† Also, not
* “Milk eater.” is is an expression that is also used for someone who is weak,
who does not follow his interests, who hasn’t grown.
† I am not familiar with the anecdote. In Eastern Europe, people oen tell an-
ecdotes and jokes in which the characters are representatives of “categories”:
a Jew, a Russian, an American, a Christian.
having a studio and not seeing too many beautiful women on
purpose. Otherwise, vivere pericolosamente,* as Mussolini had
translated Nietzsche’s saying, what happens to you on a small
scale is what happened to this dictator on a large scale.)
e counselor did not consider my refusal a deance — it was
done in all modesty, aer all — and moved on to the matter at
hand: he asked me to write something against my friend C. But
how can I write, I asked; here, in prison? e counselor quickly
passed over this problem — which indirectly assured me that
things are getting better, perhaps ever toward freedom — and
added, “he is a great enemy of ours.” I told him that my friend
is a man who is detached from all people and all things, even
from life, and that I was even afraid for years while I knew him
that he would take his own life. “He is a great enemy of ours,” the
counselor ended, emphasizing it.
I returned to my cell, downcast by the entire scene and, I
have to confess, worried that, aer my refusal, they would surely
take back the books, the paper, and the pencil… e next day,
the counselor’s adjudant, the captain, called me. I went, being
resigned at the thought that I would receive the verdict for my
refusal. e captain received me amicably, and he gave me an
orange.
It had been years and years, even before I was imprisoned
(due to the shortages in my country) since I had seen an or-
ange. My hand was shaking when I took it — due to craving?
Due to the feeling that they were resorting to such methods,
almost Chinese, or to “Scottish showers,”† to force us to give in?
I put it into my right pocket, out of shame (rather for them),
so that the guard would not feel it when he would take me by
my le arm to take me back into the cell, having the glasses on
my eyes. I relished the orange in the cell, with the voluptuous-
ness with which the counselor believed I would have relished
* “Living dangerously,” in Italian in original.
† Noica thinks of psychological methods of torture, and he draws a parallel
between the event with the orange and the cold showers that were, at times,
performed in prisons.
the sardines. When I only had the peel in my hand, I wondered
what to do: throw it into the in the corner of the cell, or give
it to the guard through the peephole? I then remembered that,
a long time ago, my mom used to make preserves with orange
peel thinly cut, and so I started to bite small pieces from the
peel, until I ate all of it.
At the end of these happy days, I was called with some solem-
nity and placed before a signicant person, as I was told, who let
me wait in the oce around half an hour. I was in that splendid
state of life when you are indierent, but in a positive sense, not
negative, to anything that may happen to you: it is good if it goes
this way, it is good if it goes another way.
is person was a colonel, actually the chief of the interro-
gators who had taken me in custody years ago. e circle was
closing: I was coming back before him.
“What would you do if you were free?” he asks me abruptly.
For a moment, a thought crossed my mind: “I would read the
th volume from Marx and Engels.” I was afraid, though, that
he would consider me deant. In fact, the question had brought
me into a state of real emotion, so that I asked for a cigarette
from his younger subordinate, who accompanied the colonel
and was smoking. He gave me the cigarette immediately, and
I started saying that, of course, as any other detainee, I had the
illusion that I would be free one day, despite the long conviction
that I had received, and that I asked myself what I would do. I
would do anything, I answered, from a very modest position as
a substitute for elementary mathematics or foreign languages, in
a small, forgotten village, to a higher intellectual use.
Since the cigarette started to give me courage, I began devel-
oping the idea that I could even be used as a “coach” — I dared
to say — of Marxism. Aer all, I pointed out, nobody is interest-
ed in who the coach is: what matters is performance. Just as in
sports, there is need of some instructing in philosophy as well.
Being in the eld to some extent, I knew well that one couldn’t
do Marxism well without Hegel, Kant, Aristotle, and the others.
I could instruct someone in all of these — I praised myself — as
I could also open his appetite for mathematics or some science,
preparing him in this way to be truly receptive, at an adequate
level, to Marx’s philosophical message.
e colonel listened to me, registered my answer positively,
and told me, “you will be free tomorrow.” He added, “Do you
want to remain connected with us? Or is it against your con-
science?”
I remained dumbfounded for a moment. So, they had not
changed: on the one hand, they had the generosity to free us, on
the other hand they were asking us to become their agents. How
could these two match?
I could easily use the door that he had kindly oered me,
“it is against my conscience.” I preferred to tell him something
equally true, that I was not planning on having any social life.
My family had le a long time ago, perhaps they went to Aus-
tralia, and I could no longer have friends, since I harmed the
close ones. “I no longer have a country, colonel,” I answered. “I
am detached from all.”
e colonel went out, but his subordinate remained another
moment. “How can you say you have no country? We make
so many eorts to bring this country to another level, we even
defy the Soviets when they ask things that are not convenient
to the country, and you say that you have no country?” I had a
weak moment — probably because of the stress to which I had
been submitted — and I burst into crying. In fact, weren’t they
the ones who had detached me from anything, even from my
country?
I returned to the cell with the refrain “you will be free to-
morrow” singing in me. e next day, nothing happened; they
only came to take my books, paper, and pencil. I remained this
way another day, two more, four days. e h day, I thought,
“they mocked me; they are using the Scottish showers again.”
e morning of the sixth day, I asked to be taken to the prison’s
commander. I wanted to ask him to give me back paper and
pencil, trying, in fact, to see what my situation was. Aer some
time, I am called to the commander, but I don’t get to formulate
my request when a civilian approaches me and begins taking all
possible measurements. e next day, I am taken out again, and
I am given a new suit and a pair of shoes. When I am taken from
there, aer a last night in the cell, now dressed in new clothes,
to see my luggage in the deposit (everything was worn out, and
this is why they had retained me longer, because I had no pre-
sentable clothes), I take almost nothing from the suitcase, and
I leave it there as well, because it was broken, and I keep only
the coat, also worn, although it was still summer. With the coat
on my arm and with a small bundle of laundry, I come before
the commander, who hands me a banknote, the equivalent of
around ten bus tickets. I look at the prison commander before
I come out of the door. We are both caught in a smile, and I
remember William Blake’s verses:*
ere is a smile of Love
And there is a smile of Deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.†
* e verses appear in English in the original.
† [Romanian editor’s note] In the preceding editions, the text ended here with
the note “.”
Whoever did not have the luck to be imprisoned between im-
mediately aer and immediately aer (of course, as
long as he also came out from there with sane body and mind)
could not have had the shock of the change that had taken place
in the world during that interval and did not fully enjoy the tri-
umph of our era, even if it was risky or evanescent. It was some-
thing without equivalent in known history, something unique
not only regarding the generalized prosperity in one part of the
world (a prosperity that consisted not only in food, drinking,
and sumptuous living, as other times, but also in radio, televi-
sion, electricity, with the entire cortege of benets of the “red
re,” or in tourism, museums, and culture), but also something
unique, especially regarding the technical-scientic revolution.
ere was something that seemed enchanting, as I was com-
ing out of the darkness of the prison, which was still somehow
lit. I was surprised to see that the people I encountered, or those
in the West about whom I was hearing, were not overtaken by
any drunkenness coming from the victory of our era. On the
contrary, they oen met such success in the wrong way. ey
succeeded in consumption or entertainment, but not in contem-
plation.
What a thing to say, that there would be an opposition be-
tween contemplation and action! I would include it among the
great solemn platitudes of humanity. ere is, of course, an op-
position between passivity — the passivity of the spectator or of
the receiver of unexpected gis — and action, but there is no
opposition between contemplation and action. It’s true that the
opposition seems to come from the ancients, with their bios the-
oretikos.* However, understood simply, it is another great stupid
saying, as I said, just like “know yourself” or “self-love,” so the
love of the self which would command all things, as the French
moralists and not only they pretended. (How much self-love can
you have? If a smiling Brigitte Bardot were to come toward me, I
would be delighted for a moment, but then I would set aside any
self-love and I would call someone young and handsome, like
Alec, to take care of her.)
For six months aer coming out of prison, I couldn’t read
any book from my eld (not even Marx’s volume ), but only
books and magazines about the technical-scientic successes
from the middle of the th century. In a few years, the world
had changed or was opening toward extraordinary changes;
however, those who had not had the privilege to be locked up
did not realize this, as a child does not realize that it has grown.
What seemed to me unbelievable and terrically engaging
was that the technical-scientic revolution had succeeded, and
beyond all expectations or imagination (even those of Jules
Verne’s kind). Until this revolution, man had succeeded in noth-
ing. e humanist culture especially, but the scientic one as
well, had not succeeded.
In the case of humanist culture, what had philology promised
around – (the nding of an original language!), and
what did it obtain; what had history promised, when it became
aware that it is a science; or what ordering had philosophy prom-
ised, not only with German idealism but also with the French
ideologists, and what did it succeed? For man and for the spirit,
this failure would be truly a scandal if it were not somehow
grandiose and if it did not leave man open to continue to pose
the problem of the word, of society, and of thought.
What about positive sciences? Of course, they have brought
some results, laws, and knowledge without equal in the history
of the world. However, unfortunately — or fortunately! — they,
even physics, did not succeed in giving the complete and cer-
tain inventory of all knowledge, as they had promised. Around
* Contemplative life.
, the great physicist Lord Kelvin said that there would not
be much to nd in physics (and he even deplored the physi-
cists of the th century), except “perhaps” some aspect of the
problem of X-rays and of radiation. Around , another great
physicist, Rutherford, said that nuclear energy could never be
liberated. And now, the physicists no longer know where their
heads are from so many novelties, so that someone like Heisen-
berg asked at a philosophical congress that others also make an
eort of imagining the new because the physicists are no longer
able to do so.
What is le to say about sciences like astronomy, with its
quasars and pulsars, great dark stellar masses, which decide,
however, by density and attraction the fate of the rest of the
world (so that the astronomers Hoyle and Narlikar showed that
Einstein’s theory of relativity is too narrow, since it does not take
into account the rest of the universe). And what could we say
about biology, “the science of the th century,” where, on the
one hand, the new devices for detection, such as electronic mi-
croscopes, and, on the other hand, the new theories and no-
tions, such as those regarding the genetic code, have resulted
into grandiose answers = questions, so extraordinary open no-
tions for humanity.
However, beyond or parallel with everything that has been
and has not been hoped for, the specter of a sad failure appeared,
just as these admirable mathematics that place everything in or-
der are a kind of failure, or at least are so to you. When they
place at their basis a crass but extremely fecund “theory of sets”
(actually, a kind of theory of heaps), they get to give account to
all mathematical disciplines, to nally get confused themselves,
no longer being able to explain anything. When the same admi-
rable mathematics (the revealed mystery of our world, our God
without beard and rod) attempt to place logic at their basis and
to ensure, by axiomatization and logicalization, that they have
order within themselves (so they don’t only place order among
things), they fall upon paradoxes, such as the ones which, as I
showed, made logician Frege cry last century, or which made
logician Quine today say that, aer all, it is better that the logi-
cization of mathematics did not succeed, because mathematics
would have destroyed mathematicians and, perhaps, with the
perfect machines and devices, all of us…
us, everything is a “failure” in our culture; or, if you prefer,
nothing kept its promise. Only technology has kept it, even more
than it had been asked. It’s true that it also gave some stupidities,
small machines and devices that you don’t really need (the over
twenty devices for cutting the tips of cigars), or some which cre-
ate articial needs, and so they disturb your human nature, but
this is something else. Technology has given miracles, and not
so much for consumption (as another physician said: around
, humanity had everything it needed to be happy materi-
ally), but for contemplation, that is* for the action of thought, as
for a deeper vibration of our spiritual being.
We have registered the amount of light that has appeared in
the world aer the coming out of darkness with such an intel-
lectual voluptuousness. Light allowed itself to be concentrated
in so-called “lasers,” in order to favor all sorts of possible ac-
tivities, such as transmitting information at a distance, trans-
porting energy (with the risk of transporting explosive energy
as well), surgeries of the eye’s retina, etc. But at the same time,
we saw well, only now, that light is no more than a narrow band
on the register of electromagnetic waves, where so many other
waves, and in the rst place radio waves, came to transmit not
only suave or hoarse voices, songs and thoughts, or political
discourses lled with anger and madness, like those from the
s up to the years of my going to prison, but also transmitted
messages toward unknown worlds from the cosmos, or perhaps
brought messages, from extraterrestrial beings, about which we
begin to wonder whether they “look for us” in space with their
waves, with a language that we do not yet understand. I felt as
if I were intoxicated by so many novelties, mechanisms, and de-
vices, which, if we don’t spoil our entire success, may lead one
day to directly capturing solar energy, and thus solving for good
the problem of the need for energy on earth, just as, using pho-
* In English and in italics in the original.
tosynthesis, we would also solve the problem of nourishment
once and for all.
ere are admirable things brought into being by cybernet-
ics, this strange mixture of mechanism (as a nal and subtle ef-
fort of mechanistic conception of solving all problems with only
two values, with yes and no, with and , reducing at times the
noblest chapters in mathematics to a simple question of addi-
tion done vertiginously, with millions of operation on a second,
thanks to the electronic ux) and “systems theory.” Consider the
very evocative structures of any “cybernetic system,” which rep-
resent something of the order of monads, “closed and without
windows,” of which Leibniz, the god invoked by Norbert Wie-
ner, the inventor of cybernetics, spoke.
What is le to say about the ecstasy that had taken hold of
me? When I saw that man could literally implant himself in
machinery by the renement and the miniaturization of ma-
chines — he would obtain an eye that could see infrared, so in
darkness, an electronic ear, an electronic nose — that man would
perceive unquantiably more than today, just as in Antiquity
man dreamt to implant himself into animality, with the sphinx
and the centaur, but not obtaining an expansion of his being,
unless we consider his simple nature. I then realized that poor
Nietzsche did not know well what he was talking about when
he invoked the “supermen” and when he admired the intelli-
gent and gied beasts of the Renaissance as superior specimens.
ere was a new humanity — nally new, aer , years — that
was about to be born. And it was not a humanity created arti-
cially, in a tube, like the human embryo of Daniele Petrucci,
about whose attempt to create man in vitro I heard back then
with emotion, but a perfectly natural humanity, which would
only use the conquests already obtained by technology, in order
to give man, with some extra amino acids, a surplus of memory,
of intelligence, and perhaps of creativity.
But this is no longer science or technology, I thought. is is
theology. While Byzantium was under siege, some theologians
were discussing the problem of the sex of angels, and history
laughed at them. Today, however, it is revealed that the problem
of the sex of angels is one of the most extraordinarily current
problems for humanity. Indeed, what kinds of people will we
colonize on other planets or articial planets: pairs of people,
like in Noah’s Ark, simple men, as could be perfectly possible,
only women (and Joliot Curie says that this could be possible
too, by so-called “parthenogenesis”), or androgens, angels, asex-
ual beings?
I dream about all of this and I read about the experiments
with the Planarian worms while I live at my cousin, being happy
again, in a small room × .*
“You see,” I tell my cousin’s, “we arrived at the point where
we could make a Planarian worm which was submitted to some
electric inuences to obtain a ‘conditioned reex,’ just like Pav-
lov’s dogs. But this is not all. It is extraordinary that if another
Planarian worm eats the rst, it also gets that conditioned reex.
Do you understand what this means?…”
“Leave me alone with your ideas,” my cousin responds, still
with aection. “I am ghting with the bedbugs brought by the
tenant imposed on me by the tenancy oce, and you’re telling
me about the Planarian worms and other scientic follies.”
He’s right, of course. All of those who, outside,† are still ght-
ing the long lines,‡ shortages, a place to live, or adding up years
for retirement are right. But I feel that I no longer get along with
him. I will have to search for my prison colleagues, the only ones
with whom I could still talk — the only ones who have main-
tained, I hope, a door toward dreams.
* × meters, approximately × feet.
† Noica means “outside of prison,” those who did not have the experience of
being imprisoned.
‡ Since resources were scarce, people waited in long lines to buy their food
supplies.
“Why don’t you get new teeth?” my cousin, who takes care of
me like a brother, asks me. (I started giving private lessons, I
found some translations second-hand, so I fare well; I can pay
for my × room in which I am sheltered and I continue con-
templating — having good news from my family, which le long
ago, and being forgiven by my friends who had been imprisoned
because of me, but against my will — the miracle of the world in
the middle of the th century, with its promises.)
“You see,” I say, “there will be a time when man will have
fewer teeth, perhaps even none at all. Even now, wisdom teeth,
which had a great importance for the primitive people, no long-
er matter. We can even accelerate vital processes. Everything has
changed since we gathered the genetic code. I’ll give you to read
Jean Rostand’s study, Génies sur commande? He is a great biolo-
gist, popularizing, but still good. He shows that with “twenty
words,” with the twenty aminoacids, one can fabricate a being.
Man’s memory and intellectual faculties will depend, it seems,
on the quantity of . Man will be able to transform living be-
ings according to his will, and he will transform himself as well.”
“If he wants to!” my cousin exclaims.
“Of course, there are many reasons to waver, but, in gen-
eral, what man can do, he does not delay doing, regardless of
the risks. In fact, I read someone’s study about the so-called
‘inductive substances.’ You know that people talk now about
transplants; those with a kidney have already succeeded. Let’s
see if they will succeed with the others as well, especially with
heart transplants. We don’t need to speak of those for the brain,
because they are very distant and also absurd. If you change a
human’s brain, with his memory and intellectual faculties, then
he is another human for sure. However, something great was
discovered with the inductive substances: the cells taken from
the patient himself and cultivated in the laboratory can give all
the necessary organs. So there is no more need to take organs
from others or from donators. It was even said,” I continue, “that
all moral problems, as well as problems of physiological incom-
patibility, with the rejection of the organ by the organism, would
be solved. A certain doctor, Gurdon, made an experiment to
conrm this, and a frog was born from a frog skin. is thing
made someone say, ‘Any human is virtually composed by some
milliards of specimens of himself.’ Isn’t this beautiful?”
“It’s great,” my cousin answers, “but there also are some
atomic bombs, somewhere, in deposits, and, in fact, even with
these biological experiments there are some risks that are ter-
ribly similar to what is said in the Bible.”
“My dear,” I tell him, “I am the last one to contest the wisdom
of the Bible, let alone its beauty; however, humanity cannot be
stopped from taking a step forward.”
“To stagger…”
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” I answer, “but let me vividly par-
ticipate for the moment, at least as a sports fan, in the festival
that we all experience now. You know that I work with philoso-
phy. Well, I have never believed that one can think and spec-
ulate more fantastically than philosophy has done. But I now
see — and not only in pure science and in technology — how
unexpectedly one can think. You heard, for example, how much
people have discussed in philosophy the subject of analysis and
synthesis: with analysis you decompose something, with syn-
thesis you compose something. Do you know what I nd out
from the physicists now? at there are particles which decom-
pose in sub-particles out of which they have never been com-
posed! at the new particles are born only at the moment of
disintegration. Isn’t this crazy? Which philosopher even thought
of something like this? What should I say about isotopes? at a
great part of chemical elements are composed of a compound of
two or several isotopes? So, that you are not you unless there are
more ‘you’ like you! But have you heard of breeders?* ey are
some devices or atomic piles, which, consuming energy, end by
producing more energy than they consumed, which makes dead
matter become also fertile! In fact, this is also the cosmogonic
theory of the English Hoyle with the Indian Narlikar: they claim
that there is a ‘C-eld’ that permanently replaces the energy that
is lost in the universe by expansion. And what can I say about…”
“À propos,” my cousin interrupts me, “since you speak of the
English… Have you read Orwell’s book, ?”
“I had looked for it earnestly ‘before,’ but I didn’t nd it…”
“Here, I’ll give it to you,” he tells me. “We’ll talk aerwards.”
I give him back the book the next day.
“I could not read more than one or two hours from it. It’s
suocating.”
“It’s suocating with truth, isn’t it?” he asks me.
“Rather with falsity,” I answer. “I would argue this way: either
Orwell is not right, so it will never happen in the world, in the
year , as he says, and this means that he uglied the world’s
face with his book and awoke useless fears, or it will truly be
so, let’s say even here, in our country — where it began to be
this way — and then, with my small experience and with what I
heard from others, I can tell you that the splendid thing about
man is that, some place,† he survives even to such pressures. And
this is the important thing, not man’s disguration! It is impor-
tant what remains out of freedom — not only for the one from
whom it was taken, but also for the one who took it from him.
What remains human in those hours of complete dissolution
of the human matters, just as it matters what man still has as
property when all was taken from him. Aer all, regarding man,
it is as it was said about culture — you know it — that it would
be ‘what remains aer you have forgotten everything’… is is
what seemed extraordinary to me: that something still remains
for man. And it may be that the thing that remains to man is es-
* “Breeders” appears in English in the original.
† Noica’s point is that man can survive in some interior place.
sential; and in this case, Orwell’s book will have to be burned in
the public square in .”
“No one can talk to you,” my cousin answers. “You know one
thing only, even aer everything that happened to you, that ‘the
bad is not that bad,’ even that the bad reveals who knows what
good thing, hidden until then. I will ask you, though, what you
think about Solzhenitsyn; you said you were reading him a few
days go.”
“Yes, it was for Solzhenitsyn that I interrupted my readings
regarding the technical-scientic revolution, because I had
heard good things about him and I did not dislike it, as mate-
rial — at least his rst book, the one about Ivan’s day. Denisov,
or something like this.”*
“Well, and then, did you still like him?”
“In a way, I liked him, I liked him very much, because this
writer has something from the class of the great Russians; but,
in another way, he depressed me, for his sake, I would say, and
for the destiny of culture. He consumes his genius to denounce,
just as simple as that! He somehow remained a physicist and a
positivist.”
“You mean you didn’t like e Cancer Ward?”
“I liked it very much: there are extraordinary characters and
situations there. But the author seems to be unable, or rather he
does not want to make out of them a great work of art, a great
fresco. He is embittered. He has to say something and to de-
nounce something with his work, just like in the other book, In
the First Circle, where he strives to see the last thoughts of Stalin,
and with details for which he certainly had extensive investiga-
tions.”
“Do you want to say that he is wrong to denounce?”
“For himself, yes, because he lowers his talent, if not also his
genius. For the others, perhaps not. I have heard that he is called
‘the good man’ by his people. Probably their better conscience.
But I wonder if he serves them and their cause to the end, the
* Noica speaks of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
cause of any just and good man. You see, culture is done with a
little gratuity, a little detachment.”
“But this man wants to say the truth. What can culture do
without truth? Literature should leave me alone, if it does not
ght for the values of truth and human justice under the pre-
tense that it is interested only in beauty!”
“It’s not that simple,” I try to explain to him and also to my-
self. “When you are interested only in beauty, as a nal piety to
beauty, I don’t know how it happens that you end up — just like
the Ancient Greeks — with good and truth also. But when you
absolutely want the truth and especially exactness…”
“What, do you make a dierence between them?”
“Of course I do, even in Solzhenitsyn’s case. I am worried
that, being a physicist, as I mentioned, and also embittered, as
I also said, this man with so much literary genius looked too
much for exactness rather than truth. For if truth, at least for
modern man, cannot be without exactness, exactness is not by
itself truth.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand too well either,” I confess sincerely, “but
I realize it is this way. Look, we also have an ancient author, a
prince who said, ‘e one who has no stubbornness sees God.’ I
am afraid that Solzhenitsyn does not see God precisely because
he has stubbornness and looks for exactness. Even more, some-
thing else may happen to him due to exactness: he may lose the
entire truth, and thus harm not only his work — and, as it is
right now, I don’t think it will still be read in – years — but
also those he wants to defend.”
“What do you mean by this?”
“I would tell you this way. What if a good Christian today,
in his desire to clarify all the episodes of Christ’s life, wanted
to know ‘exactly’ how Judas Iscariot’s treason took place? What
if he studied all documents of the time and looked objectively
at things, on both sides? What if he arrived at the conclusion
that Judas, denouncing Christ, did it out of love for Him, to save
Him from crucixion, hoping that he would save Him? So, if
this Christian were stubborn about ‘truth’ and said to the whole
world, particularly to the Church, that Judas was not really a
traitor, what would you say then?”
“You would never convince me that this contemporary man
does not ght heroically, and delightfully from a literary per-
spective, for freedom. And even for all people’s freedom, even
yours, if you want to know!”
“I believe this and I am, in a way, obligated to him for this,
but it may be that he ghts more for freedoms, plural, for his,
my, and his people’s freedoms, rather than for freedom.”
“What is this?” my cousin says, exasperated.
“ere are many freedoms,” I answer, “and I am surprised
that, in a country like Norway, where you have all freedoms, you
do not have the freedom to drink alcohol, for example. ere are
many freedoms, but not all are signicant. In any case, I sense
that here, in our country, we have a deeper notion of freedom,
that of neatârnare (indépendance).* is means two things at the
same time: rst, to not depend on another, and second, to not
depend purely and simply (not to be pendent†), to not be too at-
tached to the immediate things, to not be xed into an idea, to
have wings, so ‘to see God.’”
“Listen, dear, I’ll lose the train with your talking.”
My cousin was about to leave for a vacation. Even if he was
retired, he had received a “ticket for the baths” from someone
who was still employed,‡ and he was to leave that day, taking
advantage of favorable conditions to take a treatment.
e luggage for three weeks is already prepared, so in een
minutes we leave together for Gara de Nord,§ taking a trolley-
bus. On the way, I relate to him what I had read in Arthur C.
* “Independence” in English. I kept the Romanian term and the French trans-
lation in the text (they both appear in the original). In Romanian, there is
also the word independenţă, but the literal translation neatârnare has some
avor to it.
† In English in the original.
‡ During Communism, people could receive tickets from work to various
treatment places in the country.
§ North Station, main train station in Bucharest.
Clarke’s book, Proles of the Future.* e author writes about
how travel will be done in the future, focusing on vehicles on
“air cushions.” e wheel will be done for, he says, once what he
calls in English Ground Eect Machines will come into being.
People will create vehicles that will compete with the automobile
as well as with the plane. Roads and highways, which occupy so
much space and for which so much money was spent, will be
obsolete, the author says. e new vehicles will be very useful,
he adds, especially for the continents that do not have a good
network of roads. In any case, it is about a real “road emancipa-
tion.” We will travel smoothly on earth and on sea, above the
waves. e harbors and the channels, such as Suez and Panama,
will be outdated. e delightful thing will be, the author says,
that there will be a perfect continuity between ground travel and
water travel…
Our trolleybus stops abruptly, with a small explosion. It
broke. We must wait for another, at the next station. Of course,
the second trolleybus is overcrowded. Cramped among travel-
ers, holding one suitcase (I hold another one in my hands), my
cousin asks me:
“How is it going with traveling on air cushions?”
I take him to the platform. When he gets into the train, my
cousin tells me:
“When I come back, I want to nd you with new teeth!”
I smile and I leave, walking slowly on the platform of the
station. On the other platform, which was for arrivals, not de-
partures, I see an electrical engine, a new type, at least for me. I
remember all of a sudden that, in high school, I had a colleague
who liked to be here, at Gara de Nord, the main station of the
city, to see the engines which were very varied back then. He
liked them just like someone else would like racing horses. I re-
member that there were some engines called Pacic, with great
wheels and ne spokes, like the legs of a beautiful girl. On the
lateral plaque of the engine, it was written, “ km/h maximum
speed.” I always wondered why and not .
* In English in the original.
Someone grabs me by the shoulders and shouts, “Professor!”
I turn around: it was Alec. A wave of joy builds within me. We
hug, but I do not realize whether he has tears in his eyes, too.
“How are you, professor?” Alec asks me warmly.
“Well, I got out, I live, I am content.”
“I was sure of it,” he responds ironically but with love at the
same time.
We continue on the platform, arm in arm, and I ask him
[what he’s doing there].*
“I am going for an ‘exchange experience,’ as they say here. I
came out of the prison† probably before you, I was reaccepted at
the university, I graduated from the department of architecture,
and now I am sent to East Germany for an exchange with the
specialists in the eld.”
“Do you remember what you told me the day they told you
that you would be accused of treason[?]‡ You claimed that, aer
liberation, you would go into a mountain village to nd a girl
with two cows.”
“at’s what I actually did at the beginning,” Alec attempts to
tell me. “I found the girl, but…”
“I know,” I say nishing his thought, “you did not nd the
combination girl plus two cows. e latter are at the collective
farms.§ In Switzerland you may still nd them.”
Alec does not smile. He becomes serious all of a sudden. He
holds me strongly by my arm and whispers:
* Addition of the Romanian editor.
† In English in the original.
‡ Addition of the Romanian editor.
§ e kolkhoz.
“I’m telling this only to you. I haven’t even told it to my par-
ents. I want to get to the other side,* and I will stay there for
good. I cannot live here.”
“But I understand they allowed you to nish your studies.
You probably have a job and will buy a car one day.”
“Professor, understand that I cannot. ere is nothing from
my past for which I reproach them, not even the condemna-
tion, but there is something unbreathable here, don’t you feel
it? I want to travel, to be free, to have the life I like. I don’t think
I will call for my parents. ey are too attached to the country
and to their friends.”
He turns toward me:
“I’ll get you out too! Yes, I’ll get you out, I’ll buy you from
them. Don’t you wish to? I need an older friend. I will keep you
as a parent. You don’t refuse me, do you?”
He takes me by hands without waiting for an answer, he
hugs me, and then he turns and sees that people have begun
getting into the train. He then drags me to his train car, shakes
my hands one more time, and gets up into the train. He then
appears through the opening of a window.
“Good. But tell me, did you do the third gymnastics exer-
cise?” he asks me, thus showing me that he also remembers all
of the situations from the cell.
I nod my head, smiling at the memory of the exercise that
had provoked the intestinal volvulus.
“It was good, wasn’t it?” he insists.
I hesitate whether to answer him, but the train begins to
move at that moment, and so I shout sincerely, from the bottom
of my heart: “Very good! Very good!”
e emotion rooted me into the platform of the station for
some time, even aer the train had been swallowed into noth-
ingness, or in another galaxy, holding something dear to me
heart. Why did I love Alec? Perhaps because he had the strength
to not accept anything of what I was telling him — and still cred-
* Alec means West Germany, which equaled the free world.
it me. I had felt from the beginning, in the cell, that he needed
me and, at the same time, he had no use for my advice.
ere is something without parallel in the aection of such a
young man who challenges you: it is a call to be better and deep-
er than you are. He looks at you over his shoulder, but you’re
not oended,* for he still looks to you. In turn, you search for
something in him besides what he shows you. Aer all, these
young people are those who truly enrich the world, because they
do not leave it into the satised wisdom of late years, nor into
the satised indierence of the early years.
I needed him, just as he needed me. Of course, I could re-
place him; but could he also replace me? In fact, he did not even
know my address and he assumed me into his life only symboli-
cally, on a platform at a train station. I had to look for him in
other versions, since I loved this free and daring young man,†
this brother Alexander who, precisely because he provokes you,
also bows before what you should be and seems to ask you to
pray for him.
“Don’t you see that it is unbreathable?” he had told me. e
atmosphere here began to seem unbreathable to me as well, but
not so much because the regime was suocating our spirits, but
rather because these people around me allowed themselves to
be suocated. A society that has been oppressed for more than
twenty years should be able to come out of the fear of oppres-
sion, just as the people in prisons had liberated themselves of
fear. But it bored me to see that people continued to be fearful.
I wonder what Ernest is doing, that joyful economist with
whom I spent three days, back to back, in “isolation.” I realize
now, aer I saw Alec for a moment, that I can feel well only with
those who had obtained that detachment brought about by the
* e Romanian here could mean, “he does not oend you” or “you’re not
oended.” I chose the second version.
† e relationship between a mentor and a disciple oen appears in Noica’s
work. One of the most remarkable relationships between a master and a
disciple in the Romanian culture is known as the School from Paltinis. See
Gabriel Liiceanu, The Paltinis Diary (Budapest: Central European Univer-
sity Press, ).
years of detention. Something irresistible sends me from the sta-
tion straight to looking for Ernest.
He had told me that he had a job at the City Hall and that he
was certain he would be retaken there. I go toward the City Hall
without any hope. Of course, at the gate, nobody knows any-
thing about comrade Ernest. I ask to be taken to the economic
department. One clerk knows nothing about him, but another
one says, “Comrade director Ernest? He is in a dierent depart-
ment, .”
What strange names, I tell myself.
I notice the use of “director.” So, not only was he taken back,
but also appointed a director. He may have accepted to be “reed-
ucated” and may have made concessions. I would regret it, for
he was such an independent spirit. Anyway, I must look him up,
and I go to the address of the mentioned department. I nd out
that Ernest is “in the eld,” and I leave my name for him with the
note, “the one to whom you once communicated your theory of
laughter.” I would come back the next day.
“But my dear,” Ernest tells me when he receives me the
next day, giving me a hug in his directorial oce, “there was
no need to specify who you are. I knew it well, not so much in
isolation — because I remember that I was the one who spoke
more — but rather from the others. Just imagine, aer a while, I
happened to be taken in the cell where you had been.”
“What,” I exclaim, “with engineer Goldstein? And with the
theologian?”
“Yes,” he answers. “And with Matei, with the doctor, with…”
“I wonder how the doctor is doing. He was embittered against
all people and all things.”
“But he’s here, in my department, I brought him here as ‘an-
thropologist.’”
“Unbelievable!” I exclaim. “I must see him. But what do you
do? How could you become a director?”
“Do you have any suspicions about me?” Ernest asks jok-
ingly. “Well, I’ll tell you…”
He pushes a button and tells his secretary who was coming
in, “I’m not here for anyone for an hour. I have to make a report
with the professor for the Government’s Department of Health.”
And then he begins:
“I came out early. You know, I had no real guilt, nor a politi-
cal past. However, they did not take me back to the Economic
Department, where I used to work, because they had ‘secrets’
and, anyway, I had been a ‘hostile element.’ At the beginning,
they assigned me as a simple administrator at the medical ser-
vice of the City Hall. ere, I found something that attracted
me: a hygienist doctor had been recently assigned to take care of
the city’s pollution problems. He did not know where to begin,
and so I gave him a few ideas. I told him he had to begin from
odors. Since I have sharp senses, I oered my help, and we be-
came friends. Anytime I smelled a pestilential odor, we both got
into a City Hall car and went in the direction of the odor.”
“How so, against the odor?” I ask, confused and amused.
“Yes, against it, to nd out from which factory it came or
which dump site at the outskirts of the city emanated it.”
“And could you nd it?”
“Most of the time, we could not. But why is that important?
I liked to look for the not-found, just as I told you ‘there’ that I
liked to go nowhere by train.”
“It is admirable,” I say enthusiastically. “Going against the
odor! It is like in the ancient legends, when they went to the
chambers of the wind and the cave of Aeolus, or like in the story
where the prince goes against the dragon. I think it is splendid
to nd in the concrete, in a contemporary urban agglomeration,
the myths of man.”
“Isn’t it so?” Ernest says, becoming passionate. “Now, when
you tell me this, I realize why I liked it. Our civilization is not as
deprived of poetry as it seems. With little imagination, our life
would look dierently. Today’s writers continue to tell us about
the great voids of humans, or about abstraction and nothing-
ness. But I see all around us a plethora of things or of concrete
situations. Aer all, just as we are surrounded by odors, we are
also surrounded by electrical uids, ideologies, traditions, or
futurological anticipations. I sense that we do not live among
inert things — and I did not like to nd simple things, industrial
units from where the odors started, or dump sites. I realized that
the odors and the air pollution are made, I don’t know how, out
of nothing determinate, or out of countless small causes which,
accumulated, make the air be pestilential. But, of course, when
I come back from the ‘mission,’ I gave the report that we found
the cause of pollution or that we were about to detect it.
“en,” he continues, “I got the idea to make a report, show-
ing the importance and the complexity of the problem. Basing
it on the data accumulated in my car expeditions, I added the
points of infection and the possible trajectories to a map of the
city with, and so the possible fronts of pollution (as one speaks
of ‘wave fronts’). My map made an impression, especially be-
cause the menacing arrows were colored in red. In the report,
I asked that they hire meteorologists who would study air cur-
rents in the atmosphere of the capital in order to take measures
for the present state, but also to determine where to place future
industries.
“To be brief, the leadership became convinced that the prob-
lem was extremely serious — especially because it was also un-
clear — and I was assigned to recruit qualied personnel to be-
gin the investigation. Later, I showed that there was need for
other specialists as well — geographers, anthropologists, soci-
ologists, and psychologists — and when I made a new report,
which I began with long quotes from the early writings of Engels
about the pollution of Manchester around , due to the es-
tablishment of the rst textile factories, all were convinced of
the Marxist character of the problem. e was created,
and I was named director.”
“I actually wanted to ask you: what is this, ?”
“It is the Center for the Detection of Pollution and the Con-
trol of its Causes.”
“Impressive,” I say. “And do you believe in its ecacy?”
“My dear,” Ernest answers, “I have no choice, I must believe.
I set in motion so many people — around twenty collaborators,
plus the external ones, plus the relationships with diverse re-
search institutes — and I awoke so many hopes in the leaders
that I have to take things seriously. You know, aer all, if it is
taken seriously by others, even a joke becomes serious. Why
wouldn’t we nd something if we look for it like this?”
“But there are devices to detect pollution, I suppose, aren’t
there?”
“Of course there are,” Ernest responds promptly, knowing the
lesson well. “For the air pollutants, you use ‘chromatography in
gaseous stage’; for the diverse pollutants, you use an electronic
detector, the ‘mass spectroscope’; to detect substances in gener-
al, based on uorescence, the so-called ‘spectroourimeter’ was
invented, which does spectrouorescent analyses.”
“at’s enough,” I say, having a beginning of dizziness, faced
with this technical ecstasy.
“You can also use scintigraphy,” Ernest continues mercilessly,
“for which some devices with radioactive isotopes were invent-
ed. ey indicate the number of alpha, beta, and gamma pulsa-
tions on the second, respectively the quantity of radioactivity…”
I take out a so groan and I rush to stop him, asking:
“But have you bought all of these machines and devices?”
“No,” Ernest replies, “this is where I had the brilliant inspira-
tion. If we bought them, these and others that I won’t mention to
spare you, it would have meant cutting my own carcass: our de-
partment would have been cut down to two–three technicians,
and I would not have counted anymore. I proceeded dierently.
At a meeting with my superiors, I enumerated all of these tech-
nical means of detecting pollution, but I added: they impose
great expenses, ultra-specialized people, which means other
expenses, and they lead to incomplete or inconclusive results.
Every city, I added, has specic conditions: certain currants, a
special regime of rains, a proper ecological system, etc., etc. e
devices can indicate no more than the actual situation of pollu-
tion, but a city in development requires information about its
atmospheric, urban, economic, and human environment. If it
could be said that there are no diseases, but rather sick people,
I added during the meeting, that much more it must be said
that there are no pollutions, but polluted things. Just like every
human breaks his shoe in a certain way, a city breaks its air in a
specic way. We should not spend large sums to make general
investigations, but rather to get the complete picture of the situa-
tion of our patient, which would allow us to make him well and
also to prescribe him the regime for his future life.
“I was congratulated,” Ernest continues, “for the savings I so
obtained and they also gave me, of course, the credits to put
together the scientic group which, from meteorologists to psy-
chologists, would study the special conditions here.”
“Don’t you think it would be more expensive?” I ask.
“At the end, yes, but this is how they like it, to do things indi-
rectly, not directly. Aer all, I also like it this way, not because I
have a good position, but rather because I do something out of
the ordinary and which gives me, I don’t hide it from you, some
power over people. I told you ‘there’ that I liked to make peo-
ple laugh. I evolved: now I like to make them be afraid. In this
case, I bring upon them possible dangers. You should see them
come timidly to consult me: should we plant a factory? Should
we make a residential neighborhood?
“Just like an ancient soothsayer, who told the army com-
mander whether to begin the battle or not, I keep some square-
heads and their decisions in suspension. In this world, the one
who counts is the one who knows or seems to know what others
ignore. I would never exchange this life here for the one from
the ‘free’ world. is is not because imposture would not be pos-
sible there — in fact, I don’t feel at all that I’m an impostor; I’m
telling you again: I may accomplish something. But I say this be-
cause there, with their system of measuring everything in terms
of ‘advantageousness,’ there is no longer place for a sweet irre-
sponsibility, like here. I am grateful to these regimes for making
gratuity possible for man.”
“I understand what you’re saying. e game counts, not
the problem. When I listened to you speaking, I was thinking
about the story with the French bishop who, when he was asked
whether God exists, replied, He exists since I am a bishop.”
“I see you got it,” Ernest says. “And since you got into the
problem, I will ask you to tell me once what philosophy is. I
know that you also are involved in very vague things. We may
hire you here.”
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