When Mark Twain published the elaborate account of his Old World tour, The Innocents Abroad, America was still young, as a nation, and not yet proud of its culture. To avoid any tasteless outcry of admiration, driven by the contact with the vestiges of lost civilizations and with the majestic monuments of the still reigning ones, he adopted an ironic demeanor, expressed in an always amusing, sometimes disparaging, tone. The American preferred to underestimate than to let himself be overwhelmed. The few Romanian globe-trotters did not take such precautions against the culture shock. They were duly impressed by what they saw and openly complained about not having, at home, much to be proud of. Dinicu Golescu's travel memoir is a good example of this attitude, both meek and humble. Later on, Romanians grew conscious of their quick disposition to absorb and to adapt. They had manifested it earlier on, to be sure, in their synthetic approach of architecture, in their sense of matching opposite trends, as well as in the refinement they brought in improving foreign dishes. However, starting only from the mid-nineteenth century, they took the habit of going abroad, determined to learn as much as they possibly could, and, once back home, to transform the knowledge acquired into actions and discourses that would build up a clear and distinct cultural message. Eminescu, as a student at the famous "Friederich Wilhelm" University of Berlin, was no longer the naïve Kümmeltürke (Balkan) Dinicu Golescu had been, while in Vienna, sixty years before. When he playfully employed the term, he did it in a self-disparaging mood that is typical for the Romanian kind of humor, and not as an expression of a complex of inferiority towards a highly accredited culture. He was perfectly apt for a critical approach, but did not go so far as to look down upon what the environment had to offer. As he mentioned in a letter, speaking about Zimmermann, a second-rate Viennese academic: "Had I not come from the Turkish East, the above-mentioned gentleman would not have seemed to me the personification of Wisdom". Likewise, a Romanian scholar abroad, nowadays, is apt to discern and to select and does not either keep boldly defiant, like Twain, or stand permanently in awe, like Golescu. The Romanian abroad, innocent or not, is faced with a new challenge: he is summoned to define his identity in terms of his own culture. The trend towards globalism and multiculturalism has increased the interest in the diversity of cultures. The attraction to self-contained exoticism gave way to a concern for those cultures resulting from the blend of various influences. Moreover, even the representatives of well-matured cultures are keen to see themselves, as mirrored by other cultures, irrespective of their importance, weight or impact. Consequently, one is bound to provide a short, clear-cut description of what one really "is", as part of a cultural community, and to offer his own representation of the community he is temporarily visiting. This is by no means a simple exercise, especially as the romantic concepts related to ethno-psychology are mistrustfully looked down upon. The distance helps a little: looking at Romania from abroad, one gets more easily the general picture. Moreover, knowing from the inside the way things go elsewhere makes one more inclined to consider with indulgence what, at home, he would hardly accept. At the point blank question: "what are your own values, meanings and beliefs, entities – abstract or tangible – you offered the world?" one is, at first, embarrassed and at a loss. But, then, an appropriate answer comes to mind: "maybe we did not invent the color, but we multiplied its shades". We did not make bold assumptions, did not build 'grand' theories, we lacked the guts to assert ourselves, by proposing and promoting something brand new. However, our approach enriched and diversified the intellectual stuff we borrowed from others. We added the touch of refinement that turns a statement into a line, prose into poetry, the commonplace into ingenuity. Unlike 'old' cultures, which set rigid barriers between specialized fields, we still believe in the concept of general knowledge and we know how to blend science and philosophy into an elegant, literary discourse. The vicissitudes we faced developed our ability to practice efficiently the double speak and, if it did not improve our ethics, it certainly exercised our intelligence. Belonging simultaneously to several communities with conflicting values gave us a sense of positioned relativism, which enables us to fit gracefully in the postmodern world. There is another interesting peculiarity of Romanian culture: the rejection of body-soul duality, the tacit assertion of the natural unity of the person as a whole. The first local saint that the Orthodox Church from Romania canonized was Saint John of Wallachia, in the sixteenth century. He was an incredibly handsome young man, who was taken as a slave by the Turks. His Turkish master coveted his body, coaxed him, then tried to force him, but St. John preferred to die than to submit. His attitude shows a respect for one's own body, a body as sacred as the soul, which should not be experimented upon in detachment. The intimate knowledge of the world comes also from the body, not only from the mind; the first is simply the visible part of the latter. The traditional, rigid opposition between spirit and matter is relaxed; the Romanian intellectual space has always been permeable to the impulses that come from the corporal self.
by Adrian Mihalache
