Andrei Pleșu: Leo

This month marks 15 years since the death of Alex. Leo Șerban. He was one of the members of the first editorial team of Dilema. His special profile, in which intellectual solidity, passion for beauty, humor, and seriousness coexisted gracefully, ensured him a unique role among the founding team of our publication. I am reissuing, commemoratively, amicably, and melancholically, the article I wrote upon his departure from us (April 2011). The last time I spoke on the phone with Leo (he was hospitalized at Fundeni Hospital), he suggested a good table at a restaurant known only to him. "I can’t wait to get out of here and have dinner together." Leo managed to convey to me his confidence in this reunion, even though I knew that his health was seriously shaken. I would remain for a long time suspended in the anticipation he induced in me. I was supposed to visit him at the hospital last Monday. I visited him, but at the Writers' Union, on the catafalque. He would have been embarrassed. He didn’t like to receive you unprepared, inert, unable to fulfill the duties of a host. His native elegance, his good taste, his good upbringing would have suffered.

Old Dilema is beginning to lose its age. The generation of the "founders" is dwindling, the empty chairs are multiplying. The editorial team in which Lena Boiangiu, Zigu Ornea, Tita Chiper, and Alex. Leo Șerban evolved now has, inevitably, a different sound, a different portrait. I know, it’s normal. Death and institutional "renewal" and forgetfulness are normal. But continuity should also be normal. And continuity needs people of continuity, of natures in which boldness and inventiveness rely on solid accumulations and on tradition. Leo was such a nature. He had no prejudices, no aesthetic or ideological tensions, no "principled" inhibitions. He was ready to experiment, to accept surprise, to laugh. But he did it endowed with a solid culture, with finesse and humor, with style. Rarely have I seen a character in which immediate actuality and timelessness coexist so harmoniously. Leo was simultaneously "up to date" with everything and "nicely old-fashioned," "enfant terrible" and interlocutor "vieux jeu." He had the rare talent of rebellion without stridency, of polite aggression, of undermining the rules without resorting to grossness. Everything, in Leo's composition, was of the order of exception, of nonconformity. He didn’t know how to be either smoky, or indiscreet, or trivial. He was a "rare bird," increasingly rare, in the contemporary world. His readings were abundant and voluptuous, his assiduous attendance to literature did not anesthetize – as usually happens – the passion (and competence) for visual culture. On the contrary. He was an "expert," a "connoisseur," a refined individual. Moreover, he had a delightful sense of humor and a type of good disposition, of affability, that quickly contaminated the society in which he moved. He knew how to be present promptly, gracefully, but without rosy complacency, without compromises. He could also be capricious, unpredictable, acerbic in response, excessive in opinions. But he could neither be cruel nor rude. I feel grateful that I had the chance to know him and regret that I didn’t linger more in his presence. On the face of Dilema, his disappearance leaves an incurable, treacherous scar.

At one point, years later, I had the opportunity for a small debate with Leo on essential themes. The subject of God also came up. I realized I was speaking with someone who bracketed transcendence with a kind of doctrinal radicality. He had the cult of joy, of pleasure, of corporeality, of beauty, in its aesthetic variants. He detested any allusion to physical pain, to suffering in general, to the dark half of destiny. He practiced euphoric amnesia. I tried to tell him that he is the ideal "subject" of divine concern. That it is precisely people like him, exceptional but recalcitrant, who are the "target" of sacred action. Not the sleepy ones in certainties, not those well settled in the "race" of their own salvation, not those "resolved" and serene to the point of insensibility. But the tormented, the hesitant, the lost. I don’t think I convinced him. But I am sure he will reevaluate things from the perspective that his new journey opens for him. Just as I am sure that God knows his fundamental innocence and is amused by the charm of his heart.

As for me, I miss my editorial colleague very much. And I regret, among many other things, that I will never find out the name of that restaurant known only to him, where we were supposed to have dinner together after leaving the hospital…

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/leo