Palatinis Diary - extracts

 In five years of university study, students never once cast their eyes on a text by Plato. One student who was caught in the hostel reading Kant was expelled from the faculty.

(Liiceanu)
*
"I have no biography. I just have books. Graduation at twenty-three, then a year of mathematics and two years as a university librarian. I have lived in deliberate reclusion. I have refused any kind of fulfillment in social life, and I have done so without hypocrisy, with pleasure. At twenty-five I refused assistance from Negulescu; I withdrew to Sinaia and translated eight detective novels for the Herz Press. Of course it was a kind of rebellion. After that I lived on the margins for thirty years; it was a way of life which at the beginning I chose, and then, after 1948, when it was imposed on me, I accepted it as a joy—and I felt the last years in prison equally as a joy. My ten years at the Center for Logic, starting in 1964, were my entry into social life, and were just as much as I needed. Any other fulfillment outside books—a professor's chair, a successful marriage, travel—might have been my perdition. My books are the witness to my sanity, and anything else I might have done, any other fulfillment I might have had would have made me regret not living my life as I have lived it."
*
On page 222 of De l'inconvénient d'être né, Cioran presents a portrait of Noica: "D. is incapable of assimilating Evil. He recognizes its existence, but cannot incorporate it into his thinking. Even if he went to Hell and back, no one would know it, so high does he remain, in all he says, above anything that can harm him.

"You would seek in vain in his ideas for the slightest trace of the trials he has been through. Sometimes he has the reflexes, but they are only reflexes, of a wounded man. Opaque in the face of the negative, he does not realize that all that we possess is nothing but a capital of non-being. And yet a good many of his gestures reveal a demonic spirit. Demonic without knowing it. He is a destroyer dulled and sterilized by Good."

But seen from closer up, his demonism takes on the form of a cultural fanaticism. Noica believes in culture without leftovers. In other words, he cannot accept that ultimately we are only creating a diversion designed to conceal from us the pathetic situation of finding ourselves alone before the absence of God. Suffering from an excess of health, he ends up being mutilated in reverse. By his very nature, Noica is incapable of thinking of the mind in the tension involved in its insertion into the finite, and of thus bringing it down to the worldly proportions of finite conscious beings. He behaves like one who, in his enthusiasm to keep moving, fails to see that the ground on which he was able to tread has come to an end. Closed to the reality of the precipice, he would not even be surprised by the fall, or, faced by its imminent occurrence, he would somehow be able to produce the sophism necessary to transform falling into an exotic form of walking.

Cioran's refusal of thought and the way in which he contests our right to be conscious of the relative and illusory dimension of culture go hand in hand. Noica's authority is real when he sets his culturalism in opposition to the various varieties of the unpolished mind, making culture the supreme form of mental hygiene. But it becomes demonic, tyrannical and negative when it replaces careful lucidity with the calm serenity, troubled by nothing, of a mind which rejoices without having any ultimate motive for doing so.
*
"That Verführerin business reminds me of what a very nice lady said to me after my Hegel book, Stories about Man, came out. I was busy explaining to her that in relation to Hegel I am just a sort of Apostle Paul, going about with a staff in my hand spreading someone else's idea. 'So you're a fancy cocotte,' she whispered in my ear, 'alluring passers-by into Hegel's brothel.' What do you make of that?
*
I remembered that in the train he had told me about his friendship with Cioran, such as it was. They had been together at the Faculty of Philosophy, but had not got to know each other there, because Cioran had a complex about being provincial, and was reclusive. Attendance at lectures was not compulsory, and their occasions for meeting or for working together at seminars were infrequent. It was only after graduating that they had been brought together, when they received a two-month scholarship to Geneva, donated by Radulescu-Pogoneanu, whose father had been a pupil of Maiorescu. They had shared a room there, and Noica, who at that time had only had a good knowledge of Kant, said that in Cioran he had come face to face with a more comprehensive world of culture. "In Geneva I realized that he knew Calvin, and looked at the city differently, with a cultural eye which was not available to me. He approached philosophy differently from me, dealing with boring 19th century German commentators and with the philosophy of culture. This was the start of his disgust with classical philosophy." Then he told me how Cioran had lived all his life on the edge of society—"He wasn't employed for more than a year or two"—living at first on scholarships, which were extended up to the German occupation, and then on small sums given him by a few Romanians in paid employment (Eliade, for example, in Lisbon) and from other such sources. During the war, it amused him to take the "Siegfrieds" to French cabarets; he found a special pleasure in arranging such a marriage of two contrary worlds.
*
First of all there was the theme of the great cultural boulevards, the way in which he had chosen to live his cultural life, digesting the essential, in contrast to Cioran and Mircea Vulcânescu who had given him complexes all through his youth with their broad reading of secondary authors. "I would be reading Chateaubriand, and Cioran would go on for hours about the work of Chateaubriand's brother-in-law. Once in a French restaurant I sat and listened to them talking all evening about Léon Bloy, of whom I hadn't read a line. I tried to keep up with them, but I couldn't do it. Nowadays I am starting to think that I didn't go wrong in choosing the main boulevards of culture. Cioran ended up writing aphorisms, and Vulcânescu, had he lived, would most likely have done encyclopedic, not speculative work. There is a way of losing yourself in culture without any sense of the hierarchical place of things: it just means that someone else has to put on their diving suit later to rescue you and bring you back to the surface. All the same I have retained some essential things from the great secondary thinkers, and the saying that I would have liked to put above the door of my school, 'You can never know who is the giver and who is the receiver,' comes from Un Mendiant Ingrat by Léon Bloy.
*
He gives me a letter from Cioran to read, the one about the "Paraguayan sentiment of being," full of irritation and bitter irony. He gathers that Noica stays in Pâltiniç, 4000 feet above "them," and imagines that breathing the Pâltiniç air for a whole season has induced some sort of delirium in him. The Romanian Sentiment of Being is fine enough, says Cioran, but his advice is that Noica should stick to logic, where he has room to be as delirious as he likes.
*
"I have that ultimate attention of which Goethe spoke, and the flexibility which is necessary in front of l'autre. A healthy detachment is never the same as distance and contempt."— "How far should submission before the being of another be taken?"—"Not to the point of your own effacement. I remember how Cioran, who was very irritable, once ended a discussion with a friend, Stefan Teodorescu ('Uncle' we all called him), by slapping him across the face. How do you think Uncle reacted? He said, 'You're objective.'"
*
He has finished Jaspers's Autobiography, and talks about those incurably flat minds like Jaspers, who can write without the slight-est shame: "Italy is so beautiful!" "A flat mind will always remain flat, even if you send him to Paradise and let him converse with the Good Lord Himself. Even after a trip to Heaven, he will still be coming out with platitudes. Jaspers is surprised that Heidegger sometimes wouldn't answer his questions, but they were the type of questions that no one could be expected to answer: 'What do you think about God?' and things like that."
*
"I addressed a group of ten to fifteen psychiatrists, and tried to use the example of Jaspers to tell them that you cannot arrive at philosophy by a continual progression—psychiatry, psychology, and the next step, philosophy. Philosophy, in its strange madness, requires an overturning, aperiagoge, it requires a Damascus road experience. It is not sufficient to master a certain level of generality, to have general ideas, in order to do philosophy. Philosophy cannot be done around the edges of a science, as the mere extension of the latter into a higher level of thinking. You cannot do philosophy with psychology: you do it with philosophy, which means as a pre-condition blindness, the Damascus experience which presupposes conversion, a break with the past, the passage into another language, which Hegel defined as the language of reason, as opposed to that of intellect. When you enter the world of philosophy you must change your name: you are no longer called Saul or Cephas, but Paul or Peter. It is not easy indeed to explain what it means to have an organ of philosophy. All you can do is to say that Plato, Hegel and Heidegger certainly have it, and that equally certainly someone like Descartes or Leibniz does not. All my life, I have never ceased to wonder whether or not Aristotle had this organ, and I am inclined to believe that he did not, although I recognize that he raises problems which cannot be passed over.
*
Yesterday and today I have been caught up in Eliade's conversations. Having got past the beginning, I am amazed to realize what force his ideas acquire when they are presented in this form, in-stead of being dispersed and buried in the erudition of his books.

All his massive scholarly work, it now becomes evident, is fed by a few ideas of extraordinary scope and depth. I remain with the following: 1) the demonstration of a palaeolithic unity of humanity, on the basis of the religions of the agricultural age; 2) the spiritual mutation which ensues from the passage from hunting to agriculture: the confrontation with plant (as opposed to animal) life gives rise to the integration of humanity in the rhythm of the cosmos, and to the appearance of a consciousness of the unity of life and death, the existential attitude which lies at the roots of the great religions, and which started with the analogy of the birth, growth, death and resurrection of the plant; 3) the contribution of all people (all cultures) to the history of the mind; 4) that the capacity for signifying and symbolizing, specific to human behavior, has its true (initial) root in the religious existential attitude; 5) that the sacred is camouflaged in the profane, just as for Marx and Freud the profane was camouflaged in the sacred: the task is to "decipher the camouflage of the sacred in the desacralized world"; and finally, 6) that culture is in fact a specific condition of man—the political significance of culture lying in its capacity to respond on a different level to a difficult historical moment; the sacred and soteriological value of the book today, when oral teaching and folklore have disappeared; the possibility of surviving through the intermediary of culture (though Noica has experienced all this within himself).

In the evening, Noica makes a final visit to my room. I tell him how caught up I am in my reading of Eliade. He is very pleased, and proposes that I should indicate in a letter to Eliade the ideas which have struck me, telling him it is a pity they should remain dispersed or buried in works of erudition. In other words, I am to propose that he write the great postscript to his work. If I do not write the letter in the next two days, I shall probably never write it.

I tell him that I have had the sensation, reading the conversations, that I am facing a monster of culture. "Both Eliade and Cioran had their ideas in place before they were thirty. They got off to a better start than I did. I felt that my real beginning was after the age of forty. In any case, I hope I have been able to make you see who the man is, and how great he is. Don't make comparisons between us: our destinies have been different. Think what he would have done, with his projects, if he had stayed here. What could he have done without libraries? I have been content with my classics."
*
The words of Heraclitus come into my mind about how "there are gods here too," and I am convinced that the gods who have grown up around the door of Noica's room are more beautiful and more true than those gods who were with Eliade as he sipped from the all-too-human cup of vanity.
*
I have finished reading the latest volume of Eliade's short stories, In the Court of Dionysus, which appeared last year in Caietele Inorogului. This brings our discussion at morning coffee back to Eliade. "What amazes me about Eliade is his ability to take the commonplaces of religions so seriously. You see this when you read his literary work. You know how much I like his idea that there is a concentration of the sacred behind any profane reality. Like Hegel's Idea, this gives you a way of looking on all things with compassion, of ennobling and redeeming them. But there is also the disadvantage that, if you see a revelation of the sacred in every trivial detail, you risk disintegrating the sacred itself. You'll see for example how he ends the second volume of his History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas with the story of 'L'autobus qui s'arrête à Éleusis.' A bus on the Athens to Corinth route pulls in at the bus-stop in Eleusis, and an old woman gets on. She has no money for her ticket, so the driver puts her off the bus. The engine won't start. The other passengers decide to pay for her ticket. The old woman gets on again; the engine starts; there is general consternation; the old dear gives them a ticking off, and disappears. The business of the engine that wouldn't start, and so on, is authentic enough: it caused a bit of a stir in 1940, and got into the Athens newspapers. The trouble is that you get the feeling that Eliade picks up that sort of thing and believes in it. Well, it isn't helpful to see a revelation of the sacred in stories like that: you just dilute the sacred. He does the same with dreams. For the ten years that he and Jung were friends they used to keep telling each other their dreams.
*
"You and Andrei should not pass judgement on Eliade. He has an open-ended egotism: he knows that we all benefit, indirectly, from his self-fulfillment. In fact it is not really an egotism at all, so much as a naive way of rejoicing in his own successes. You will see this in the Entretiens which I will borrow for you this evening from Relu. He is really very childlike: in his youth he enjoyed being high-brow, and he liked telling people so. You can win him over very easily by praising him, so he often fails to distinguish between people of quality and the rest."
*
And now comes Eliade's reply, which is quite extraordinary, a philosophical reply which has the virtue of taking the problem out of the minor, psychologizing terms in which Jung puts it:

"It is possible that it is all a question of language. Perhaps what you term 'injustice' and 'cruelty' in Yahweh are only approximate, imperfect ways of expressing the absolute transcendence of God. Yahweh is 'He who is,' and so above
Good and Evil. It is impossible to include, to understand or to formulate him, so it follows that he is at one and the same time 'merciful' and 'unjust': it is a way of saying that no defi-nition can circumscribe him, and no attribute can sum him up."

But Jung's continuing insistence on the matter is lamentable, and unphilosophical, because it drags the problem down again to the lower level from which Eliade had lifted it:

"I am speaking as a psychologist," the professor continued, "and would emphasize that I am referring to the anthropo-morphism of Yahweh, and not his theological reality. As a psychologist, I observe that Yahweh is contradictory, and I also believe that this contradiction can be interpreted psy-chologically..."

"I wanted to demonstrate to you, from this starting point, that unphilosophical thought is unable to make two distinctions: that between soul and mind, and that between intellect and reason; and that in the end it does not have access to the transcendental. Psychology has always dwelt with the misery of the 'soul' and has never had access to the world of the mind. Although Goethe has a philosophical background, he remained at the level of the intellect, and in contrast, Brancusi, without philosophical instruction, had access to reason. A good part of the history of philosophy stops at the intellect, and is thus unphilosophical. I have always thought this of Aristotle: his philosophy is a philosophy of the intellect and does not have access to reason. Kant, who, historically speaking, is the one who makes the distinction, is criticized by Hegel for remaining, with all his philosophy, at the intellect. (...)
*
I thought what a sorry state some people can finish up in at the end of a life of thought. If your name is Heidegger or Cioran, you have no business lapsing into groans and laments with the terror of some Sicilian peasant. How can you exclaim, like Cioran, 'A quoi bon avoir quitté Coasta Boacii? Or how can you be afraid when you see people on the moon? I imagine it was the same when fire was first discovered. Some pessimistic old fellow or other must have risen from his slumber to say, Can't you see the trouble that is lying in wait for us? If that stuff gets into the hand of a child the whole forest could go up in flames, and what'll we do then, eh?' All these catastrophic visions annoy me. To be quite sincere I don't believe at all in the Great Catastrophe, and I have my arguments. Humanity, this great animal, this great collective individual ought to sense if it's standing at the threshold of the end, or indeed experiencing it already.
When you drown you have a moment of supreme recollection of your life, an illumination which comes to you in the last moment. If we were really drowning, as so many believe, if it were true that 'only a god can save us now' as Heidegger declared, it is impossible that we should not feel something, that we should not experience the convulsion before the end, that we should not recollect our history. But I can look at it another way too. Let us say that, with the year 2000, we are approaching the threshold of the end. If so, we should still be happy. It's quite something to be the last generation of humanity, isn't it?"
*
I amused myself this morning, on the way to the canteen, with alternative versions of Hobbes's saying about homo homini lupus. In the course of a discussion with Herder, who was presenting him with a project for an ideal society, Goethe replied: 'It might be so, but that will mean that each of us is the nurse of the other.' So we have homo homini curator. We have not got there yet, but if you allow me license I can say that we are in the stage of homo homini 'corruptor, ' of man who lives the foolish infinite of consumption. Everything corrupts us nowadays, goods and ideas alike. Even you are corrupting me with the books you brought here. But in contrast, I have no doubt that the 22nd century will be a good one for humanity, after the 21st has been one of purgatory, of recovery through cleansing from fear."
*
I think a closer approach to the Vedas and Upanishads would have been good for Heidegger. He has something of the good side of the oriental sage in him, as well as the element of laying waste: a sort of 'come sit by me' (which is what the word Upanishad' means), 'come sit by me and be silent — I like to think of it as upanishading.' But Heidegger maintained that we need to get to the East via the Greeks, because the Greeks are the door by which the East penetrated into Europe. Well, I'm afraid there is some truth in Beaufret's observation that we have been studying the Greeks for three hundred years and still the East continues to be closed to us."
*
So to return to where we started, the philosopher is not a doctor, as Nietzsche would have it, or as Buddhism teaches when it tells us that the Law is therapeutic. As far as you are concerned, I consider myself a mere tamer. I am trying to moderate your animality, your spoilt nature, your discontent, and to make you pass from the individual self to the enlarged self. I am edifying you to the extent that I am teaching you that living in the mind means entering into the enlarged self, which means integrating others, even the other, the adver-sary. The mind is the place where differences of the mere ego are extinguished. You cannot live in culture and remain with the pettiness of the ego. We have to forget ourselves to a certain extent, to discreetly let ourselves go, to dance, as Nietzsche says, and not tread with heavy steps. But I am not giving you a pre-scription or a dogma. Edification points towards dogma, and gets blocked in giving an answer. But the truth of the spirit, in the rays of which speculation moves, is that every answer points to a question, to a question which is awakened by the answer. Vom Wesen des Grundes every foundation points to another, and finally to Schelling's Un-Grund.
*
'Neti,' it replies, 'not I.' And everything you ask answers, 'Neti.' It is from this void of being that I start, which is quite different from Hegel's grandiose das Nichts, the pure nothingness into which being without determinations is converted. You can start naturally from this humble void of being which is in everything."

**
Then I went over the theory of the three categories of horse with them. 'Horses are of three sorts,' I said. There are draft horses, circus horses, and racehorses. Ninety-nine percent of people remain draft horses. Of the rest, some become circus horses, like Nadia Comaneci or Brigitte Bardot. But as far as I am concerned, I am only interested in racehorses. If you want to be ordained as priests, that is a spiritual matter in which I can have no part to play. But if you want to become racehorses you can come to me again further along your way. However, don't tell me that your failure is the fault of the world you live in. The squalor, if it exists, exists first of all in you, in your inner limits. People have read books by lantern light before now.'"
**
Romania today has twenty-two million inhabitants, and let us say that probably one young person in a million has genius. But for those twenty-two geniuses we need trainers. I have brought a couple of pages to read to you, which I have entitled 'The Twenty-Two: or On Performance Culture.' If you think they work and you let me publish them, I shall send them to Marin Sorescu at Ramuri:

A young French poet sent Valéry a manuscript of verses.
Valéry read it and replied: "Sir, you have no talent. You may have genius, but I have no competence in such matters." But it is precisely in such matters that at least a few people, at the heart of a national culture, should have competence. For if we have performance sport, which delights us as a spectacle and no more, so all the more must we have performance culture, which, whether it delights us or not, shifts the boulders in its path, and us with them. And to the extent that the performances of culture—whether in the realm of great inventions, of great ideas, forms of organization and social manifestation, or great artistic creations—are decisive for the affirmation and survival of peoples, it is well to reflect on the way in which they are produced.

Some performances of culture are obtained without knowing. The Romanian language, along with a few others, is in itself a cultural performance. Certain forms of organization and manifestation of village life represented, in the past, a cultural performance. Folklore is sometimes a cultural performance at the ultimate level of creation. If we are to believe that performances of culture are associated with a quality of inventive and creative genius, then these must be cases of a diffuse genius in action.

But when the performances are no longer anonymous, as in our historical time, then the quality of genius is concentrated in individual people. How are we to discover it and take full advantage of it? In particular, how are we to prepare young brains and make them bear fruit, just as we make oil, gas, reeds and even rubbish profitable?

It is probable that among the twenty-two million Romani-ans currently living there are twenty-two young people, one in a million, who are gifted in an absolutely exceptional way.
We do not need any more than that, in a country in which there is no lack of the intelligence and eagerness necessary to meet all the material and spiritual needs of the present day. But the question is not only how we find those twenty-two, but even more how we turn their virtuality into actuality. It would be simple enough to try the military approach: "All those who think they are exceptional—one step for-ward!" But we would find ourselves with too many candidates, and everything would have to start from the beginning again. And if Paul Valéry is right, and no one is competent in matters of genius, then we have no way of choosing from the many or from the few.

Fortunately, however, Valéry's words are not conclusive— perhaps he himself had only talent and not genius—and other great cultural performers have said more encouraging things about detecting and taking full advantage of exceptional young people. Edison, if I am not mistaken, said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspira-tion. This changes everything. In this case outside interven-tion is not only possible; it even becomes obligatory—enter the coach. For it may be that everything in performance cul-ture happens, as in performance sport, under the guidance of a coach.

The coach indeed knows how to make someone perspire.
Someone once complained to the manager of a great hotel in Switzerland about the person in the next room, who was playing the piano too much, and not even playing properly but just doing scales all the time. "That's Rubinstein," the manager explained. At over seventy, Rubinstein was still playing scales, still making himself perspire.

You feel pity for some young girl or boy athlete who has to spend a good part of their "most beautiful years" (but are they really so beautiful if, as is so often the case, they do not provide a modeling for the rest of life?) as if they were under the rigors of some medieval order. And perhaps we would be filled with pity at the sight of a gifted youth condemned for life to the rigors of culture, especially as there is no certainty of the result, and you have to coach not just twenty-two but several hundred. But this is precisely the difference between the words of Valéry and Edison: the one would like to know at a glance who has genius, while the other says that it is only later, once the person has perspired for a long time,
that the miracle which contributes to the sending ahead of peoples and of history may show itself.

And for this we need coaches. Teachers work with the rule, not the exception, and in any case they cannot devote themselves to a single disciple. And who else, even the incomparable institution of the family, has the competence and daring necessary? "Don't attempt too much," says the family to the young person. "Stay close to the shore if you want to be all right." But the coach is made of different stuff. Fond like a parent, as he is, of the young person, he says, "Throw yourself out into the stream; you won't drown." So where are our coaches? They are here already, aid they are certainly more numerous, in the field of culture, than those to be trained. It is the Romanian's vocation to be a coach. He has stayed on the edge for long enough through-out history and has seen how others have drowned. It is always easier to know how something should be done than to do it yourself. And anyway, good coaches might actually be those who have themselves achieved a performance. Professor Palade, the doctor who won the Nobel Prize, seems to have coached the team of the newly founded Institute of Biology in such a way as to give us the illusion that we might win another Nobel Prize some fine day. And Mircea Eliade could bring great orientalists into the world at any time, if we could convince ourselves that it was the duty of our country—the only one in Europe which is open culturally as much to the East as to the West—to give the world of tomorrow an exceptional team of interpreters; for spiritual interpretation demands a bit of genius too.

But I am not thinking so much of exceptional coaches for exceptional young people, as of those great humble coaches, who are willing to attend to the growth of a stalk of wheat day by day. I once referred to them as the autumn rain which knows nothing of the harvest. If only we could find the good seed: just twenty-two grains!

I listen to this text, in the ideas of which I have been growing for the last fifteen years, assimilating them and transforming them into a way of life, and I know not what spirit urges me to insubordination, like Alcibiades in his desire to escape from under the spell of the eiron of Socrates. A voice which I do not recognize rises in me and I hear myself saying, "Is it for us to withdraw the right to being from those who do not live culturally? You are affirming that the rest of humanity simply is not." "It is not I who withdraw that right: they deny it to themselves. They are content to live in statistics and sub-humanity. And I am not interested in statistics," replies Noica.
"But you cannot reduce 'to be' to 'to live culturally'! That means suppressing the variety of humanity in the name of one ontological model and its ideal saturation. There is a to be' which is given by ethics, a heroism of honesty, not just a heroism of culture, which can end monstrously in the neglect of our obligation to open ourselves to others and to assume analogically the entire sphere of the human. In a moment in which the salvation of humanity as humanity is at issue, you cannot leave things just in the sphere of culture. After the Treatise you ought to write an Ethics, not a Logic.

What we need is to create a new moral state of humanity, and not to save the mind in the niggardly form of those 0.1 percent who live culturally." "You are proposing, as I understand it, a doctrine of Seele and not of Geist." "I cannot see why Geist is unable to incorporate Seele. And why does die schône Seele have to be decreed to be a mere 'little soul' and sent off to the zone of non-being?" "You are speaking to me as Pierre Emmanuel used to do. When I said something similar to him he asked indignantly, 'Mais qu'est-ce que nous faisons avec l'épicier?' Well, allow me to reply that we are not going to do anything with l'épicier, because the grocer is not, and he is not because he did not want to be, because he has done nothing in order to be. Are you going to end up by raising the problem in the ridiculous manner of that theology which at a certain time felt obliged to think about the salvation of mankind be-fore the time of Christ? In the name of the false goodness which assigns the right to be in a universal way, humanity will die suffocated in its own rhythm of growth. What goodness is it that pre-cipitates the world towards its own end?" (...)
**
Then I went over the theory of the three categories of horse with them. 'Horses are of three sorts,' I said. There are draft horses, circus horses, and racehorses. Ninety-nine percent of people remain draft horses. Of the rest, some become circus horses, like Nadia Comaneci or Brigitte Bardot. But as far as I am concerned, I am only interested in racehorses. If you want to be ordained as priests, that is a spiritual matter in which I can have no part to play. But if you want to become racehorses you can come to me again further along your way. However, don't tell me that your failure is the fault of the world you live in. The squalor, if it exists, exists first of all in you, in your inner limits. People have read books by lantern light before now.'"

THE PÄLTINIS DIARY
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
GABRIEL LIICEANU '