In 1975, shortly after his retirement, Constantin Noica moved to an uncomfortable room of eight square metres which he had rented in a chalet in Paltinis, a mountain resort close to Sibiu, 1400 m above sea level, and 330 km from Bucharest. From this moment the most spectacular part of our adventure began. Whenever we had free days, we hurried, three or four of his pupils, to Paltinis. Here, in the total isolation of the mountains, "4000 feet above mankind" as Noica used to say, in the course of walks that went on for hours, and evenings spent in his little room with its wood-fired stove, there took place the most fascinating discussions that I have ever shared, the most passionate confrontations of ideas, accompanied by the most subtle, pointed and friendly observations on our own writings, which each of us submitted to the judgement of the others. Tens of meetings like this took place over a five-year period between 1977 and 1981, and I made a habit of recording them all, at the end of each day. In the vague hope that the pages assembled in this way might be published, I left them with a publisher before leaving for Germany in 1982 to compete for a Humboldt scholarship. They were about 350 in number, and represented the exemplary tale of a becoming in the space of the mind, of a subtle act of pedagogy which began with a constraint accepted by both parties and ended in a liberating rebellion. The book was entitled Paltinis Diary and subtitled Paideic Model in Humanist Culture. It appeared in 1983 and proved to be epoch-making for the younger generation of humanist intellectuals. In a world in which material and moral squalor were almost total, in which the isolation of Romania had begun (and there was increasing talk of its "Albanianization"), in which the daily television schedule lasted two hours, one of which was devoted to the president's family, in which the press, the theatre and the cinema were subject to the most terrible censorship, in which the ideal and sense of life had been lost, the Diary at once opened a window in a world which had the compactness of a blind monad. Any hell could become bearable if the paradise of culture was strong enough to withstand it. And the pages of the Diary were evidence that paradise was strong enough to resist, even in Ceau§escu's Romania. They described the road to this paradise as a way of liberation and inner freedom. The nightmare world at once became bearable; it just took a little Latin, a little Greek, a little German, and the pious reading of the great books of humanity. But culture was not here simply an academic exercise. It was not just a matter of "becoming cultivated," but rather of a transformation at a deep level; it was Bildung, paideia, a birth of the ego, of individuality, of autonomous thinking, plucked from the world of forced and planned imbecilization. What the schools and universities could not do, one man had done single-handed. Beside and beyond the works of Noica himself, the Paltinis Diary created a legend. (This is not to say that this one experience absorbs the whole horizon of Romanian culture, which, in its various forms of expression—literature, painting, music and cinema—strove by all the means in its power to survive, and always succeeded.) And this legend began to function, to have an impact on life. Each year thousands of young people from every corner of Romania set out for Paltinis to find, with the aid of the "coach of minds," a solution to live by. There might be ten visitors at a time in his room (he now had one of normal size), and none of them would leave untouched by the meeting. At least they would all realize that it was possible to be "unwashed" at the level of the mind, not just of the body, and that for a human being culture is not a chance ornament but the very medium of his existence, just as water is for fish and air for birds. He had such a persuasive force when he had to plead the cause of the mind and of culture that he was able to co-opt even the Party's leading cultural officials into serving his ends. This was how he succeeded in bringing into being the edition of Plato's works, for example. In the last years of his life (he died in December 1987), Constantin Noica became a veritable national institution (under close Securitate surveillance, of course), with a following of some tens of pupils whom he had trained directly and some thousands more whose minds had been formed through the spirit of his books.
The "School of Paltinis" made up of the individuals who figure in the Paltinis Diary, came in time to figure as a concept in the history of contemporary Romanian culture. (In a recent book on this theme by an American researcher, the chapter on the "School of Paltinis" is the most massive, taking up 60 pages.) The Paltinis Diary, which described the setting of this paradoxical liberation along the lines of the symbolism of the Symplegades which Mircea Eliade discusses— the escape from hermetically sealed spaces—was printed in an edition of 8,000 copies; Xerox copies sold on the black market soon reached a price of 200 lei, compared with the official retail price of 9 lei. (It is worth mentioning as an anecdote of the times that shortly after its publication, in the winter of 1983, when butter was a rarity in Romania, four packets of butter were being offered for a copy of the Diary) Of course I do not wish to focus attention here on the book as such, still less on the author, but on the experience which is recounted in it, the exceptional character of which attracted such a lively interest.
Constantin Noica left behind an impressive body of work of over 10,000 pages, the full publication of which is beginning this year at the Humanitas publishing house; he is probably the last great metaphysician of the century, and the last author of a Treatise on Ontology. No less important, however, is his other great work, that of a savior of minds in a time marked by levels of oppression the effects of which cannot be measured or even guessed at.
Romania had no movement equivalent to Charter '77 or Solidarity. That such organizations failed to come into existence may be attributed to the effectiveness of the Securitate, or it may be the mark of our own weakness. But the phenomenon and the experience which I have described here seem to be unique in Eastern Europe (although there may have been a somewhat similar phenomenon in Czechoslovakia, associated with the personality of Patocka). The Paltinis model undoubtedly has both its greatness and its inadequacies. On the one hand, in conditions of a spiritual closure and an isolation such as no other Eastern European country experienced, it prevented the systematic and total liquidation of humanistic culture, starting from the idea that the survival of a country threatened by history can only be achieved in the mind. But on the other hand, precisely for the sake of this idea, the Paltinis model turned its back on real history, which was considered "mere meteorology" (sometimes it is rainy, sometimes fine, sometimes stormy), and as such unworthy of a deeper investment. For Noica, dialogue with political figures, the representatives of the forces in power—the "scoundrels of history"—was completely nonsensical, and for this reason he considered dissidents to be victims of an illusion, caught in the grip of non-essentials. Thus the being of a civilization was defended, without any immediate threat to those in power. This model created cultural professionals, even virtuosi, but inhibited any activity of direct contestation. No Havel emerged from the school of Noica, and none of his pupils became adviser to a Romanian Walesa.
Noica believed only in the Last Judgement of culture, and in the credentials with which one might present oneself before it. He was only interested in "race horses," not in the "circus horses" who could evolve in the arena of history. (...)
THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
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