In winter, the club met in the Society hall, where the chairman had made special arrangements. But members were never very numerous. Those who remembered the warmth and intimacy of the attic felt uncomfortable in a room so large, impersonal, and cold, with so many chairs, and official paintings between windows. The chairman was distraught at this withering away, which threatened to dissolve the club once and for all. The initiatives of that winter – funds collected by the choir, the festival, and the ball – were endangered. The committee suggested small weekly gatherings, but none of them wanted to take responsibility. Not even the university journal, of which the chairman had put me in charge, managed to rekindle the atmosphere of the Christmas holidays. I had to scour the corridors of the university to find the professor who had promised us a feature article all by myself. I wrote the book review all by myself, proofread it three times all by myself, and set the pages and sent it to press all by myself. I went to bed exhausted, after midnight, in an attic overflowing with draft copies.
The journal did not sell. Being neither anti-Semitic nor philo-Semitic, there was not any interest. People bought the first issue out of curiosity. But subsequent issues sat on the racks.
I did not despair. I had joined forces with an old friend from lycée – Petre, a second-year student of Law and Philosophy, feared at seminars because of his niggling dialectic. He knew everybody in the university. We also had found an accountant: the choirmaster, who bought a ledger and managed to make such a mess of the sums that he recorded a surplus of twelve-thousand lei.
With our third issue an incident occurred, after which the journal survived no longer than a month. We had published an impertinent review of an important book by an old and celebrated professor. The review erred in being well researched. A keen eye would have realised how dear the author of the book was to me, how highly I regarded him, in order to be so severe and unrestrained in the face of such disillusion. It should have been clear that behind the words of the untimely troublemaker lay a disciple’s reproach, expressing more than just disappointment.
No one understood it. The offended party approached my professors, protested, complained, wrote several articles in his newspaper, so obsessed was he with the incident, although he never cited me by my name. Through Petre, rumours reached me that gave me food for thought: the journal was to be banned, and I would be hauled before the disciplinary council, risking expulsion. So as not to lose the journal, I resigned, promising Petre that I would continue to work with him under a pseudonym. The issue containing the news of my resignation was the last. Thanks to the intervention of a diplomatic and benevolent professor, the conflict was never brought before the university senate. In all logic, nor could it have been.
The professor of Literary Aesthetics accused me, in one of his journals, of ignorance and impertinence. I responded sharply. This delighted the author of the reviewed book and embarrassed the diplomatic professor, who intervened once again with the professor of Literary Aesthetics. I was confused by what I had learned. I thought it was natural to criticise, based on argument, an imperfect book, to pass judgement on it in a passionately engaged review, since the author had been a role model to me. The threats did not make me bitter. I was prepared to be sent down for a year from school, if thereby I avoided engaging in flattery. It was around this time that I began to suspect an idea that fully occurred to me only later: the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather heroic accomplishment. Every soul encompasses potential heroism, I thought. But every soul flickers for a few adolescent years with heroic visions, before resigning itself to mediocre values, before submitting to the lives of others, shrivelling, and finally perishing. Why should I not be a soul, which no matter what the sacrifice required, attained heroism? Who could know? Perhaps I would be victorious in my pursuit of heroism. But then the victory itself would no longer have any meaning, but only the tireless striving toward it.
In that warm early springtime, the greatest danger I faced was unpredictable urges. The day I read the article that the professor of Literary Aesthetics wrote against me, I worked like a madman, almost without getting up from my desk for twenty hours. The news came to me in the morning. I gritted my teeth and began to read. I took a fifteen-minute break for lunch. That evening, I contented myself with a glass of warm milk, drinking it at my desk, with my eyes still on the book I was reading. I read through the night until sunrise, lost to the world. Finally, I looked up, with a heavy head. I remembered a single word: ‘Ignorant’. This gave me focus, and motivation. I was shaking in fury and disbelief. I could have screamed at the top of my lungs, still gritting my teeth and still with my eyes on the book I was reading. I fell asleep at daybreak. I bolted the door. On the third day, someone knocked. With my eyes on the book I was reading, I did not answer. My muscles were trembling, my forehead was burning, my brain was throbbing, as if with fever. I was so tense that I was incapable of speaking a single word. On the fourth day, I felt drained, bewildered, weak-limbed, muddle-headed. I closed my eyes and pictured the Literary Aesthetics professor’s lecture hall; ‘He’s soporific’ I heard him say. Soporific? Look at me! Could I be accused of being soporific? My brain became as clear as it had been on the first day of my twenty-hour-a-day regime. And no one suspected a thing. I lied, said I was working on an urgent seminar paper and needed to eat at my desk so as not to lose the thread. But they did not know that I wasn’t sleeping nights. I rose at eight, the same as ever.
A week later, I read a mocking short article in a provincial newspaper. I decided to dispense with sleep altogether. I was devastated by the thought that I might be an ignoramus. After a few hours of work, a stabbing pain shot through my heart. I doubled over. I could not breathe. Even the slightest movement made me feel like my knotted viscera were about to burst. I crawled into bed, pallid and cold. I was furious that I would die stupid, downtrodden, I who had wanted to abolish sleep! My breath was laboured, I was unable to lift my drooping head. I called for help. Panic, tears, cries. The doctor came with his emergency kit. When he lit the spirit lamp, I revived. I started to breathe again, very slowly. After giving me an injection, he took my pulse, which was fast and irregular. The fright and the heart pang had caused palpitations; a situation I never would have anticipated. Within a few hours, the crisis passed completely. I was alarmed at what I saw in the mirror: I was ashen, haggard, my hair slick with sweat, my eyes sunken in their sockets. Thenceforth, I would allow myself four hours of sleep, no matter how many insults I was dealt.
I was driven not only by the things that were said against me, but also, above all, by the things that were not said. They did me good, those months of silence in which I laboured with many a groan to complete that work. I thought to myself: ‘Perhaps the gentlemen refuse to acknowledge my existence? Is it out of stubbornness that they ignore my writing? Then all the better. But soon they will have no choice, because that is what I will!’ For me, to utter the commandment: ‘I will!’ was almost a magical rite. The verb was inextricable from so many years of excruciating adolescence, so many experiences, so many thousands of hours of silent study. My will was a reality to me, whose fruits lined my bookshelves and desk drawers.
The greater the silence around me, the more I wrote and read. I was saddened by the thought that in ten, twenty, thirty years I would no longer encounter the same hostility. To be praised was to be lost. When that happened, I would build a house with a terrace overlooking the sea and live all alone. I would read not one journal or newspaper. And I would work unceasingly. There were so many things yet to be explored: oriental languages, mathematics,
ancient history, religion, the history of science, the sciences, philosophy, art history, occultism, philology. I would need time and self-discipline for all of that, I reckoned. And I would also need to write, but writing was painful and often laborious. How would I be able to accomplish everything without enemies or without silence?
At the time, I was intoxicated by the scent of heroism that blossoms only in disciplined, vast souls, and which reveals itself only in solitude. But heroism – the only justification for life – comes to fruition only through fierce and unrelenting sacrifice. It was not the escape from reality that tortured me, but the will to master it through sacrifice. I was not daunted by temptations. The only way in which I wished to live was to be winnowed by temptations, but also to know how to overcome them. I did not crave peace of mind, or the comfort of the misanthrope. I wanted the unsuppressed, relentless struggle that seeds in the soul a taste for the divine and the diabolical. The relentless struggle can only be found in solitude, where the temptations and memories are myriad.
My life, unbeknown to anyone, was a relentless struggle for heroism. I had an appetite for heroic austerity and despair, the same as one might have an appetite for a piece of fruit or the curve of a white hip. My soul smiled on me only once I accomplished some task that defied humanity. I dreamed of broad plains and harsh winds, and lightning-struck rocky paths leading up into cloud-capped mountains. I saw myself climbing, howling, stumbling, bleeding. I yearned for an austerity that would affright the forces of mediocrity in my city and in my time. Then I would be a hero. I wanted the heroic to live again, through me.
I was more than once defeated. From my soul, from my flesh erupted the temptations of sweet and immediate delights. It was then that a strange voice within my soul would say: Sacrifice entails disfigurement; I am complex, my desires are vast; how am I to choose? How am I to relinquish?
And I did not know what to do.
I honed the sharpness of my willpower through hard work. This much I knew: that I must discover and elevate all the powers of my soul and my mind. I was not afraid of cerebral experiences. But what about other experiences? What of life, the soul? Which should take precedence in me? The will, the mind, or the soul? I vowed always to be loyal to my true self, the self that none could know. But what if my inner life were revealed only through my soul, and not through my mind? Would I have the will to sacrifice my mind, my selfhood, my work, the writing forged in the crucible of my brain?
And I did not know what to do.