“I don’t want to make a saint out of your father, but he was somewhat like that” – Letter to Vivi Vulcănescu
Dear Madam,
In the Hasidic Histories, it is said of Baal-Shem-Tov: “As the souls were all in Adam, the moment he approached the Tree of Knowledge, Baal-Shem-Tov’s soul was freed and so he ate none of the fruit of the Tree.”
The more I think about your father, the more it seems like he was an incredible exception who probably managed to avoid our shared fate by some miracle.
It might seem a bit pointless to say that a truly universal spirit hadn’t tasted the cursed fruit. But this must be the truth, because he had such incredible knowledge and was also so pure. Original sin is something we all have, but you wouldn’t have known it was there in him. He was complete and fulfilled, and yet he was also the one who’d broken free from an icon. No matter what the topic was, whether it was finance or theology, he had a certain power and a kind of light about him that I can’t really put into words.
I don’t want to make your father out to be some kind of saint, but he was pretty close to it. Think about this: he was surrounded by writers, yet he had no desire for fame. He was never tempted by glory. This is something that all of us, except for a few isolated cases, struggle with. It’s the temptation that comes with being human.
I don’t think he ever felt misunderstood. He wasn’t envious and never hated anyone. He even rejected the idea that he was worthy of such a thing. He simply was. One day, when I was ranting about how we hadn’t produced a single saint, he replied with his usual courtesy, which at the time seemed a bit intense: ‘You should have seen this old woman I met in a forgotten village. After saying so many prayers and prostrations, she’d marked the floor of the hut with the marks of her knees.’ Truly holy people don’t need to show themselves and be recognised.”
We’ve never really seen eye to eye on the role of our country, which, for reasons I can’t fathom, I’ve always been reluctant to acknowledge. For me, the most important thing was the Romanian concept of “misfortune”. This is what I talked about at all my meetings, with as much emphasis as I could muster, which I’m sure your father wouldn’t have guessed I was trying to make. I responded in a letter, the last one I wrote to him to thank him for a study he had dedicated to me. In it, he quoted expressions of native resistance that were full of meaning and wisdom. However, I told him, he had omitted the most important and most revealing one: “It was not to be” – in which I saw the summary, the formula, the emblem of our destiny.
Looking back on this debate where our ideas have collided, I’m not so sure we were right after all. It’s a writer’s weakness, a scribal vice, to suffer to the point of turmoil because of one’s own country’s lack of historical importance. Mircea Vulcănescu wasn’t one to be swayed by such things. He valued things for what they were, regardless of whether his country or himself was seen as important by others. And because he was so detached from this unhealthy pride, it was always easy to see that he wasn’t sad or tense.
He lived every moment to the fullest, so anything that was up for discussion became a whole new universe to him. His incredible energy transformed both the issues and the landscapes. We often visited the Park of Versailles, but we only really saw it once, in a definitive, unforgettable way, before the war. Your father explained to Wendy and Dinu Noica, and to me, that the garden we admired from the height of the terrace was designed as a monad, a monad paradoxically endowed with a window, a single window, this gap at the end, between two poplars, through which, from this closed space, we could meet infinity.
He showed us this perfect world with a deep knowledge and passion for his subject. However, he also highlighted a kind of metaphysical divide. He gave us a theory of paradise, and his memory, which was incredibly vivid, undoubtedly left a clear impression. I always had this feeling that he was just out of reach, and that’s what made him so special. It’s impossible to say whether it was this or that.
He was definitely a philosopher. At the same time, he was much more than just a philosopher. He was capable of anything. He covered every subject with great speed and thoroughness. I was pretty surprised when he told me one day that he’d just written a long and detailed text on the First World War for an encyclopaedia!
He’d spent month after month on it, without feeling like he was wasting his time or that he was tackling something unworthy of him. He never looked back, and I could tell that this was a big secret for him. I have to admit, I really wanted to know what it was. “The indeterminate refusal to be what I am”, no, he wouldn’t agree with Valéry’s motto; his was rather: “The indeterminate acceptance of being anything, of being everything.” That’s acceptance or, if you like, joy. I can’t picture your father feeling down in the dumps.
On the other hand, I find it hard to believe he didn’t know what it was like to be tormented. He was open and eager to understand everything, but he wasn’t wired to imagine hell or to experience it. What I want to tell you is that of all the people I’ve loved and admired, none has left me with such a strong memory as your father. Just thinking of him gives me a sense of the madness of being and helps me to accept what is here.
Emil Cioran
Paris, 20 January 1966.
(Translation by Margareta Ioana Vulcănescu – Literary History and Theory Review, year XXXVI, no. 3 – 4, July – December 1988, pp. 193-196 | Online at www.marturisitorii.ro )