Ed

Ever since I was little, the future was something dark and puzzling to me. I am surprised that I have lived so long, when I was around five (it was then, no question, that I got sick) I could by no means picture myself at fifteen and here I am, dear me, well past those days

political scientist Let us start from the end: thank God Romanians are Orthodox, have not totally renounced the traditional values of the village (where 45% of them are still living, a record in Europe!), do not seem to show an ethnically-grounded morbid penchant for suicide,

excerptTHE CREATION WORK (1715) When he spoke to Aaron Juda Hartman, the rabbi from Spain, the one who had diplomas from Paris and Tripoli, driven to Peloponnesus to look after his poor relatives but also to take care, unimpeded by anyone, in a dusty room heated by the

When the issue of happiness undermines that of knowledge, philosophy abandons its own domain in order to dedicate itself to a strange activity: it starts dealing with the human being… Nowadays it is interested in answering as thoroughly and as seriously as possible questions

A civilization starts decaying when Life becomes its only obsession. Flourishing ages aim to values per se: life is but a means of attaining them; the individual being is not aware that he lives, he just lives – a happy slave of the shallowness that he breeds, nurses and

We insist on staying alive precisely because life has no foundation, because it lacks even the poorest argument. On the other hand, death is too exact; all arguments are for it. Although our instincts perceive it as a mystery, to our reason it reveals itself in its whole

Mouth all bunged up by the clay,With them worms I'm takin' issue –Can't git out of this here grave,Thump you good, forgive you, kiss you…(Gypsy-band song) Let whoever's willing say Of all earthly things death's best. I'll deny that any

If ever I ventured to write a treatise on the savoir vivre, I would not neglect to address, in an entire chapter, the art of whiling away. It seems to me that this type of happiness – which is, equally, an admirable instrument of knowledge – has long been forgotten.

Safta was a victim of her past of love affairs and amorous generosity, but also of the human decay from the madhouse times and from all times. The former chanteuse had decided, the night when she ordered the enamoured shopkeeper to break the fiddles of the fiddlers, to give

CHAPTER 12 – THE PRESENT SPIRITUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ROMANIAN PEOPLE Even when the villager's household doesn't come down to the worst poverty image, the house and the things around have an expression of ephemeral, of provisional. It is made of wood, set

The 'Bulevard' blazes with all its luminous signboards and resembles for just a minute 42nd Street, but it's only playing a game; it just wanted to play at being New York on a 100-meter stretch; in Bucharest, yesterday is quickly forgotten, today doesn't

The English-speaking people do not have a perfect equivalent for the French joie de vivre. The latter conveys the accord between body and soul, the excitement at the prospects of the future (advienne que pourra), the feeling of well-being (se sentir bien dans sa peau).