"He was therefore locked up between 1959 and 1964. Enough for this period of (political) imprisonment to transform him completely; to make an authentic 'homo religiosus' out of an absolute intellectual, rather agnostic and preoccupied with foreign literatures, and – no less significantly – to help him discover the invariants of Romanian spirituality, which, once out of jail, he honored with his inimitable verb and verse (…). Prison equaled academy and altar for N. Steinhardt. Should we be surprised that his testimony is called The Diary of Happiness?"Virgil IERUNCA "Time, the Diary warns, is the most precious gift, but also the most unrelenting foe. There is a paradisiacal moment the fullness of which embraces the Savior himself; but there is also an infernal moment the span of which is so small that the devil only can find a place therein. The horizon of the former may encompass the entire firmament at once; that of the latter narrows down to becoming closure itself. It is not by chance that all these thoughts are marginal to considerations about the specificity of torture through time in prison."Virgil CIOMOŞ
