Andrei Pleșu: Notes, States, Days. The Condition of Journalism

Pages of “notes, moods, days,” written since my youth (1968) and published, in fragments, by Humanitas in 2010, I began revisiting in Dilema some time ago as well, not without a tinge of guilt. (That is, I am reprinting old texts, some of them already published...) Nevertheless, for the first time, I tried to justify my decision – sometime in 2024, I believe – in the first part of the text below.

The journalist cannot avoid succumbing to the invasion of the immediate. The ephemeral, the anecdote, and the polychromy of circumstances are his trade, the suffocating substance of his hurried reflectiveness. Sometimes he grows tired, sometimes he searches for his subject with a candle, as vagrants search for food among refuse... Captive in “current affairs,” he risks losing altogether the sense of history, of his own drama, of gratuitousness. He becomes an official of everyday life, a hallucinated observer of the bizarre. Concentrated on what passes, the journalist needs great talent, ever-fresh humor, and an unpredictable movement of intelligence in order to avoid triviality or dull discourse. He can be saved only through style, investigative courage, and hermeneutic digression. But also through certain detoxification maneuvers. From time to time, he must gain altitude, break away from the promiscuities of the moment, in order to breathe purer air. Otherwise, he will dissolve into irrelevance, together with the material he covers.

But all of us, in fact, insofar as we allow ourselves to be lived, insofar as we consent without reserve to current circumstances, have the journalist’s problem. Every day we all forget ourselves, we all linger guiltily in the deceptive splendor of surfaces, in the rain of insignificant details of daily routine. We all bet on accident and anonymous volatility.

I say all this to explain to readers why, from time to time, I will feel the need to stop taking note of the immediate. To be out of date. I will speak about something else, leaf through older notebooks, plunge into the private sphere. Intermittently, I will resume a series begun in the old Dilema, under the title “Notes, moods, days.” In this way, we will remember together another immediate, the immediate of other times, or the timeless immediate of the things that truly matter. Obsessions, questions, readings, attempts to keep one’s head above water, to resist boredom “with thoughts and images”...

April 6–7, 1977

When Renaissance painters discover perspective and succeed in transforming the flat space of a painting into an illusion of three-dimensionality, their technical ingenuity inaugurates a new experience of the soul, foundational for modernity. The flat geometry of the medieval image allowed only vertical movement: rising and falling. The Renaissance image makes possible “flight” into depth. Thus, an unusual dynamic of freedom is formulated, with all its mirages and risks. You can run frenziedly in all four directions, but you can equally become a paradigm of disorientation. You discover what it means to have no limits, but also what it means to have no landmarks. With perspective comes the possibility of indefinite probing, of aimless searching, of losing oneself. You can escape toward indeterminate horizons, but at the same time you discover what it means to be hunted. Through its way of lunging into reality, the Renaissance brings with it the meaning of wandering: man learns what can happen to him when he remains alone with his freedom, before a horizon in which heaven and earth lose themselves in each other. The world is preparing to experience the latent chaos of geometry.

April 21, 1977, Bonn

A television program portrays an ordinary woman, a traditional housewife devoted to her husband and children, but one day seized by an inflexible neurosis: she refuses to eat anymore. She does not abandon her daily duties in any way, but she fasts. She reaches 32 kilograms; all sorts of doctors are called in, but none can make a diagnosis. The “patient” is eventually admitted to a psychiatric clinic. During her hospitalization, she writes a book entitled Hunger for Madness, which a well-known publishing house publishes. The sudden fame she enjoys brings her before the television cameras for an interview. She insists on speaking while accompanying herself on the piano. She utters a multitude of platitudes when she is not veering incomprehensibly off course. Sometimes, however, she makes a spectacular recovery. For instance, a passage from the book is read: “Fasting is my spirit, eating is my body.” Question: “How did you ultimately decide to abstain from food?” Answer: “I wanted to see, at last, who I am.” “Do you consider yourself—or did you consider yourself in the hospital—a sick person?” “I am neither sick nor healthy. I am as I am. Like everyone else.” “How did you feel in relation to the doctors treating you?” “They were strangers to me. They wanted to cure me of something that was, in fact, unknown to them.” It is the most radical definition of medicine I know.

1979

A protocol lunch at the Kremlin, in Stalin’s time (according to Milovan Djilas): black caviar, smoked salmon, trout, fresh cucumbers, eggplants, smoked ham, cold roast pork, hot meat pastries, hard cheeses, borscht, grilled meat and, finally, thirty-centimeter-high cakes and tropical fruits arranged in enormous dishes whose weight bent the tables. Stalin drank red wine mixed with vodka.

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/note-stari-zile_4862