Occident

ParisLes Belles Lettres2003 DES BALKANS A L'OCCIDENTJ'ai tracé, dans leurs grandes lignes, les événements cruciaux de la moitié du siècle, de 1821 à 1866. Mais à la même période s'engage un profond processus qui modifie non seulement les bases politiques,

If I had had the courage to speak freely, directly, without resorting to these pages in front of me, and without caring about the serious language mistakes I may make in French – and which I will definitely make –, if I had the courage to start my free conversation with

excerpts Chapter II: The Romanian Adamism  Oh God! What have we been doing for a thousand years?! All our life, ever since a century ago, is nothing but the process through which we realized we actually did nothing… the comparison with what was accomplished in other countries

The polemic, sustained by two journals, around a problem that is admittedly dated has yet to die down. One of them maintains that we are surrounded by Chinese walls, that we vegetate in an oriental indifference when we are not openly hostile toward the flow of ideas and

excerpts Chapter IV. What path shall we choose for our evolution? 1 The history of modern Romania has registered, periodically, a phenomenon that might seem strange at first glance. That is the discussion, every two or three decades, concerning the development of the country

excerpts Chapter III. Reason and rationalism under accusation  2 The truth is that any objective examination of the ideological phenomenon that we are studying cannot avoid the conclusion that things were quite similar in France and Germany. By entering the territory

excerpt After the year when its first program was launched, namely Mircea Eliade's Spiritual Itinerary, the generation of '27 (or the young generation, the generation of the '30s, the generation that lived life for life's sake, the experiential and Orthodox

The ultimate test for everyone – therefore for nations too – is the capacity to contemplate while suffering. The Asians, the Chinese and the Indians in particular, are definitely superior to us from this point of view. These people give so much importance to contemplation

Heraclitus says that bards, sycophants or mystagogues behave like people asleep when they are awake, looking towards their personal world, while people who are awake only have one single world, which is common to all of them. If this quote had been seen by Constantin Noica

The European nations are divided into two main groups: those which had a glorious Middle Ages period out of whose crises the Renaissance came out, and those which had a minimal, insignificant, derived one. The former created most of the civil, spiritual and cultural history

C'est un fait reconnu depuis longtemps: les plus grands accomplissements culturels des Roumains ont presque toujours transité la culture française dans leur parcours vers le monde. Brancusi, Enescu, Ionesco, Cioran sont les figures de proue de ce que l'on pourrait

For the Romanian cultural psyche, the interwar period still appears, after so many decades of indefatigable exegesis, as a real, alluring and embarrassing hortus conclusus, a closed garden of paradisiacal, yet so venomous intellectual flourishing. Major cultural achievements