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Thread: Mircea Eliade

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    Default Mircea Eliade

    Mircea Eliade [meer-chah el-ee-a-deh]: Ti-dominant (Ne-INTj); or ENTj/ENFj

    - From Youth Without Youth by Mircea Eliade (translated by Mac Ricketts); pages 3-11:

    Only when he heard the bell of the Metropolitan Church did he remember that it was the night of Easter. And suddenly the rain seemed unnatural — the rain which had greeted him as he had emerged from the railway station and which threatened to become torrential. He made his way forward hastily with the umbrella brought down to his shoulders, his eyes downcast, trying to avoid the rivulets. Without realizing it, he began to run, holding the umbrella close to his chest, like a shield. But after some twenty meters he saw the traffic signal turn red, and he had to stop. He waited nervously, standing on tiptoe, hopping from one foot to the other continually, looking in consternation at the little pond that covered a good part of the boulevard directly in front of him.

    The traffic light changed, and in the next moment he was shaken, blinded by an explosion of white incandescent light. He felt as though he had been sucked up by a fiery cyclone that had exploded at some mysterious moment on top of his head. A close strike of lightning, he said to himself, blinking with difficulty to unseal his eyelids. He did not understand why he was clutching the handle of his umbrella so hard. The rain lashed at him wildly from all sides at once, and yet he felt nothing. Then he heard the bell at the Metropolitan again, and all the other bells, and very close by still another, striking in a solitary, desperate way.

    I've had a fright, he said to himself, and he began to shiver. It's because of the water, he realized a few moments later, becoming aware of the fact that he was lying in the puddle near the curb. I've taken a chill. . . .

    "I saw the lightning strike him," he heard the breathless voice of a frightened man saying. "I don't know if he's still alive or not. I was looking over there, where he was standing under the traffic signal, and I saw him light up from head to toe — umbrella, hat, coat, all at once! If it hadn't been for the rain, he would have been burnt to a crisp. I don't know if he's still alive or not."

    "And even if he's still alive, what can we do with him?" The voice seemed to come from far away and it sounded to him tired, bitter.

    "Who knows what sins he's committed, that God would strike him on the very night of Easter, right behind a church!" Then, after a pause, he added, "Let's see what the intern says about it."

    It seemed strange to him that he felt nothing, that he did not, in fact, feel his body at all. He knew from the conversation of those around him that he had been moved. But how had he been transported? In their arms? On a stretcher? On a cart of some sort? . . .

    "I don't believe he has a chance," he heard another voice saying later, also far away. "Not a single centimeter of his skin is untouched. I don't understand how he stays alive. Normally, he would have been ... "

    Of course, everybody knows that. If you have lost more than fifty percent of your skin, you die of asphyxia. But he realized quickly that it was ridiculous and humiliating to reply mentally to the people bustling around him. He would have liked not to have had to hear them, just as, with his eyes shut tight, he did not see them. And at the same moment he found himself far away, happy, as he had been then.



    “And then, what else happened,” she asked him in jest, smiling. “What other tragedy?”

    “I didn’t say it was a tragedy, but in a sense it was that: to conceive a passion for science, to have but one desire—to dedicate your life to science.”

    “To which science are you referring?” she interrupted him. “To mathematics or to the Chinese language?”

    “To both—and to all the others I’ve discovered and fallen in love with, insofar as I’ve learned about them.”

    She put her hand on his arm to keep him from getting angry at being interrupted again. “Mathematics I understand, because if you didn’t have a vocation for it, it would be useless to persevere. But Chinese?”

    He didn’t know why he burst into laughter. Probably he was amused by the way she had said, “But Chinese?”

    “I thought I’d told you. Two years ago in the fall when I was in Paris I went to a lecture by Chavannes. I saw him after class in his office; he asked me how long I’d been studying Chinese and how many other Oriental languages I knew. No need to repeat the whole conversation. I understood just one thing: that if I didn’t master in a few years—in a few years—Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Japanese, I would never become a great orientalist.”

    “All right, but you must have told him that you wanted to study onlythe Chinese language.”

    “That’s what I said, but I didn’t persuade him. Because even in that case I’d still have to learn Japanese and a lot of South Asian languages and dialects. . . . But this wasn’t the important thing; it was something else. When I told him I’d been studying Chinese for five months, he stepped to a blackboard and wrote some twenty characters. He asked me to pronounce them one by one, and then to translate the passage. I pronounced them as best I could, and I translated some, but not all, of them. He smiled amiably. ‘That’s not bad,’ he said, ‘But if after five months . . . How many hours a day?’ ‘At least six hours,’ I replied. ‘Then the Chinese language is not for you. Probably you don’t have the necessary visual memory. . . . My dear sir,’ he added with a smile that was ambiguous, affectionate, and ironic at the same time, ‘My dear sir, in order to master Chinese you must have the memory of a Mandarin, a photographic memory. If you don’t have it, you will be obliged to make an effort three or four times as great. I don’t believe it’s worth it.’ ‘So, basically it’s a matter of memory.’ ‘Of a photographic memory,’ he repeated gravely, emphasizing the words.”



    He heard the door opening and closing several times and other noises, including strange voices.

    “Let’s see what the Professor says. If you ask me, I’d say that frankly . . .”

    The same thing, over and over again! But he liked the voice; it was, no doubt, that of a young doctor, clever and enthusiastic about his profession, generous.

    “. . . His skin was burned one hundred percent, and yet he’s survived twelve hours, and so far as we can tell, he’s not in pain. . . . Have you given him any shots?”

    “One, this morning. I thought he groaned. But maybe he was just moaning in his sleep.”

    “Do you know anything about him? Was anything found beside him?” “Just the handle of the umbrella. The rest was incinerated. Curious—the handle, of all things, a wooden handle. . . . The clothes were turned to ashes. What the rain didn’t wash away was saved in the ambulance.”

    He knew it would have had to be that way, and yet hearing the intern say it lifted his spirits. So, the two envelopes in his pocket had been incinerated, too. . . .



    Without intending to, because he had not been careful to close the door completely behind him, he had overheard: “The Old Man’s getting quite decrepit! He told us the same thing three or four times.”

    It was true. He had been impressed by the news he had read in La Fiera Letteraria, that Papini was almost blind and no surgeon dared to operate on him. For a ravenous and indefatigable reader like Papini, this was an unparalleled tragedy. That is why he kept talking about it all the time. But perhaps Vaian was right: I am beginning to get decrepit.

    Then he heard the voice again. “And what other tragedy befell you? You gave up the Chinese language. What else?”

    “As a matter of fact, I didn’t give it up; I continued to learn ten or fifteen characters per day, but this was mostly for my pleasure and because it helped me to understand the translations of the texts I read. Actually, I was a dilettante.”

    “So much the better,” Laura interrupted him, placing her hand on his arm again. “There have to be a few intelligent men with enough imagination to enjoy the discoveries made by your great scholars. It’s a good thing you dropped Chinese. . . . But what are the other tragedies you referred to?”

    He looked at her a long time. She was far from being the best-looking female student he had known, but she was different. He did not understand what attracted him, why he sought her continually, going through the lecture halls where he had not walked for three or four years, since he had taken his Degree. He knew he would always find her at Titu Maiorescu’s class. There he had met her an hour ago, and, as usualy, when he escorted her to her home, they had stopped to sit on a bench beside a lake in Cişmigiu.

    “What are the other tragedies?” she repeated, maintaining her calm, smiling gaze.

    “I told you that while I was still in the lycée, I was fond of mathematics and music, but I also liked history, archeology, and philosophy. I wanted to study them all; obviously, not as a specialist, but still rigorously, working directly from texts, because I have a horror of improvisation and hearsay learning.”

    She interrupted him, raising her arms in a boyish gesture.

    “You’re the most ambitious man I’ve ever met! The most ambitious and the most driven! Driven, especially!”

    ….

    He knew the voices well, and had learned to distinguish them. There were three nurses by day and two at night.

    “If he had any luck, he’d die now. Because they say that whoever dies during the Week of Light goes straight to Paradise.”

    She has a good soul; she pities me. She’s better than the others because she’s thinking about my salvation. . . . But what if she gets the idea of pulling the I.V. needle out of my vein? Probably I’d survive till morning when the intern comes. And if he doesn’t notice it, the Professor will. The Professor is the only one who’s in despair and humiliated over the fact that he doesn’t understand; the only one who wants at all costs to keep me alive, to find out what happened. He had heard him one day—no use asking when—he had heard him talking after he had touched his eyelids with infinite care:

    “The eye seems intact, but if he’s blind or not, I don’t know. I don’t know anything, in fact. . . .”

    He had heard this also: “I don’t even know if he’s conscious or not, if he hears or if he understands what he hears.” It wasn’t his fault. Several times before that he had recognized the voice and had understood it perfectly. “If you understand what I say,” the Professor shouted, “squeeze my finger.” But he could not feel his finger. He would have liked to squeeze it, but he didn’t know how.

    That time the Professor added, “If we can succeed in keeping him alive another five days . . .”

    In five days, one of his assistants found out, the great specialist from Paris, Professor Gilbert Bernard, would come to Bucharest en route to Athens.

    ….

    “Especially, ambitious!” Laura repeated. “You want to be what all those other people are: philologist, orientalist, archeologist, historian, and who knows what else. That is, you want to live a strange life, a different life, instead of being yourself, Dominic Matei, and cultivating your own genius exclusively.”

    “My genius?” he exclaimed with a pretended modesty in order to hide his delight. “That presupposes I have genius!”

    “In a sense, certainly, you do have it. You don’t resemble anyone I have ever met. You live life and understand it differently from us.”

    “But up to now, at age twenty-six, I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve just taken all the exams and passed with good marks. I haven’t discovered anything, not even an original interpretation of Canto XI of Purgatorio, which I have translated and written a commentary on.

    “Why would you have to discover something? Your genius ought to be to fulfill yourself in the life you live, not in original analyses, discoveries, and interpretations. Your model ought to be Socrates or Goethe; but imagine a Goethe without a written opus!”

    “I don’t exactly understand,” he said.



    - From Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Eliade; page 201:

    In principle, the Buddhist tantras are divided into four classes: kriya-tantras, carya-tantras, yoga-tantras, and anuttara-tantras, the first two being concerned with rituals and the others with yogic procedures for attaining supreme truth. In fact, howeover, nearly all tantric texts include ritual matter as well as yogic instruction and passages of philosophy. According to Tibetan tradition, the four classes of tantras are related to the principal human types and temperaments: the kriya-tantra texts are suitable for Brahmans and, in general, for all those whose cast of mind is ritualistic; the carya-tantras are for businessmen, and so on.


    - From Autiobiography (Volume I: 1907-1937) [Journey East, Journey West] (translated by Mac Ricketts); pages 117-8:

    During recent months I had become good friends with Rica; sometimes I even wondered if I weren’t in love with her. I always managed to convince myself to the contrary because, for me, in my conception of myself and my ambitions, love seemed to be an ill-omened weakness. I had promised myself, as I used to say, a series of “vital experiences”: among other things, I would make a trip to the Orient or maybe even travel around the world, accepting any job I might be offered in order to earn my living from one stopover to another. If I were in love, I would no longer be myself, I would no longer be “free,” “available.”

    On the other hand, I knew myself well enough to realize that I was really expecting to fall in love. In the first place, I could not imagine “student life” without a great love affair. Also, I hoped that by being in love I might become free from those attacks of melancholy, or that they might at least become bearable. This ambivalent attitude toward love was to remain with me until late in life. Rica managed marvelously to encourage it. Sometimes I felt that she regarded me as something more than a “good friend,” that she was trying to attract and charm me (her incomprehensible silences, the happiness that came over her face when she saw me, and the like). At other times, on the contrary, she seemed distant, or she would declare that she had never had such a good friend as I, a true “confidant.” And yet I knew very little about her or her past. I would encounter her frequently at the library of the King Carol I Foundation, surrounded by books, preparing papers for the Romance languages seminar. Even though she always passed her examinations, I never had the impression that she was really enthused over philology, literary history, or folklore. She was studying conscientiously for her degree and in order to become a teacher of Romanian language and literature. At first I had thought she was different from all the other girls because she had read several books by Romain Rolland and Remy de Gourmont. In time, however, I discovered lacunae which seemed to me inadmissible, and I would force her to read Dostoevsky, Novalis, and Knut Hamsun. Certain articles I wrote were intended to teach her and encourage her to like the authors I liked. Among other things, I published in Cuvântul a series of pieces entitled “Men from Books,” which was about several characters who interested me at some point: Sixtine, Brand, Martin Eden—and even Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis!


    - Pages 297-304:

    I met rather often with Liviu Rebreanu, who liked Maitreyi, but liked Întoarcerea din Rai even better, despite the fact he considered it imperfect from an artistic point of view. “It’s a shame,” he said to me once, “that you turned it loose as fast as you wrote it. If you’d worked on it a year or two, if you’d copied it over several times, it would have been a great book.”

    It saddened me to hear him say this, because I knew he was right. I recalled his sleepless nights, the pains he took to write, correct, and recopy, never hurrying, never agreeing to submit a manuscript until the day he was truly satisfied with it. I knew, on the other hand, that I could not write except in a fever, hastily, amost in a frenzy; that, in itself, this kind of writing is not improper to literary creativity (Dostoevsky wrote, or dictated, several novels in the same manner); that if my productions did not attain to a high plane it was not the fault of my haste, but of my deficiencies. Then, too, I knew one thing more: that we did not have much time ahead of us. At that time I had plans for some twenty books: novels (three or four volumes in the Întoarcerea din Rai cycle; the novel I had “seen” on the way home from Germany); several books of literature in the fantastic genre; La Mandragore; a book about myth; another on religious symbolism; Muntele magic (The Magic Mountain, about archaic symbolism); Comentarii la legenda Meşterului Manole (Commentaries on the Legend of Master Manole); the completion of the work on Oriental alchemy; a history of Indian philosophy; a monograph on Hasdeu and the encyclopedic tradition in Romanian culture (from Cantemir to Nicolae Iorga); a book on the conception of death in the beliefs and customs of Romania; and others which I have forgotten. Some of them I was unable to undertake until after leaving Romania, but instead I wrote others that I did not then have in mind to write (for instance, Şarpele, Mitul Reintegrării, Nuntă î Cer, etc.).

    And so I hurried. Not only because I always needed money, but also because I wanted to succeed in presenting the beginning of an oeuvre—that is, a series of books from which it would be possible to understand what I thought, what I loved, what I believed and hoped would become the Romanian cutlure—if we should be given time, if we should be left in peace. But I was afraid I would not be able to repesent the oeuvre in its entirety. I wondered often if it would not be necessary for me to proceed in this fashion: to concentrate on one, or at the most two, books. But this would have meant abandoning the whole, selecting just a few fragments from a work that would not be fully understood unless judged in its totality. On the other hand, I was not at all certain that, even by making an effort to “concentrate,” I should be able to write a masterpiece. Insofar as a writer of my age then is capable of understanding the structure and intention of his own creativity, I was inclined to believe that no formal perfection could save my writings from being merely transitory. I preferred to be guided by instinct, that is, to write as I had written up till then, whatever the risk might be. And I knew the risk was considerable.

    I asked myself, how would Goethe’s oeuvre look if he had not lived past forty? And what would the oeuvre of Eminescu or that of Hasdeu be like if one or the other of them had been creative for another twenty years? (Hasdeu’s creativity was mutilated if not actually paralyzed by the death of Julia when Hasdeu was scarcely fifty.) Of course, any oeuvre, however complete and “rounded out” it may be, is “saved “only by the exceptional worth of a few of the writings that constitute it. Had it not been for ten or twenty masterpieces, Balzac’s La Comedie humaine would long since have been forgotten. We read with interest Physiologie du mariage or Les Employes because of the existence of Le Cousine Bette, Le Pere Goriot, and a few other such great novels. And in the case of Goethe, we are interested in The Metamorphosis of Plants and texts about minerals and theories of color, and even Egmont, only because he also wrote Faust, Iphigenie auf Tauris, and poetic masterpieces. Thanks to these summits, any fragment from the vast and polymorphous oeuvre of Goethe gains weight and significance. I told myself that if I could succeed in writing a single exceptional book, whether a novel or a work of philosophy or history, my whole production could be “saved,” in the sense that it would continue to be read, at least by a handful of people, who in this case would be able to decipher the message revealed by the whole.

    The risks, of course, I knew very well. I had not forgotten, for instance, the long period of literary sterility that Goethe had experienced in the midst of his maturity, probably owing to his excessive preoccupation with scientific problems. It was Goethe’s great luck to have lived after that for another thirty years, during which time he recovered his creativity and wrote several additional masterworks. I asked myself if the passion, time, and energy I had expended on my extra-literary researches would not, eventually, nullify my potential as a writer. I could not answer; but I knew that whatever the answer might be, there was nothing to be done. I could not abandon these aspects of my oeuvre, even as Goethe could never abandon his scientific researches. There was also the chance that I might die before my time, as had happened in the case of many Romanian writers and scholars. (And among the scholars I was thinking not only of Pârvan, dead at an early age—though after he had published Getica and Memoriale; but also of V. Bogrea, “the most learned Romanian,” as Iorga called him, who died at forty without having published a single book—he had published only extraordinarily erudite book reviews and short articles.) But in my case, there was nothing to be done. I only hoped that I should be more fortunate than a great many of my predecessors.

    There was one thing I knew, however: that I had to write at least one “great book.” Unfortunately, every time I would start writing a new book, I would say to myself: It won’t be this one. Not this one, but the next. . . .




    As soon as I finished with my course at the university, I set to work on Yoga. General Condeescu had spoken to King Carol, who knew about the years I had spent in India and who had, it seems, read Maitreyi enthusiastically. The King suggested that Yoga be published by the Royal Foundations. I had planned to have it published in France, and had written to this effect to Paul Geuthner. But Alexandru Rossetti assured me that everything could be arranged: the book would be printed by the Royal Foundations and distributed abroad by Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner. In a few additional weeks of work I completed the manuscript. The final chapters remained to be translated, however. Since I was in a hurry and since I didn’t dare ask Wendy Noica and Lydia Lax to work during their summer vacations, I had recourse to S. Rivaian, who had been recommended to me by Alcalay. Rivaian had lived in France for several years and had even wanted to translate Maitreyi. He translated the last 150 pages in less than a month—and I sent the manuscript to the printer with a sigh of relief. I had worked on that book, off and on, for almost six years.

    As we did every summer, we went with a group of friends to the Bucegi and set up residence for ten days at Casa Pestera. We returned early in August, and I began immediately on Huliganii. I knew the plot in broad outline, but there were still a considerable number of details to be specified. Only the reactions, ideas, and adventures of Petru Anicet were clear to me, from the scene with which the novel opens—the piano lesson in Vila Tycho Brahe—to the last, at the cemetery, after the burial of Petru’s mother. The action, moreover, is centered on Petru and his friend Alexandru Pleşa. Each of them illustrates, in his way, a mode of being in the world that I designated “hooliganic,” because it implies at once an unconscious impulse to brutality and an absolute self-confidence. In the then-current meaning of the term, “hooligans” referred to groups of young antisemites, ready to break windows or heads, to attack or loot synagogues, to burn books. None of this happened in my novel. The political context—that is, more precisely, the antisemitic connotation of hooliganism—was entirely absent. Nevertheless, the behavior of the principal characters was quite as violent and irresponsible as that of any ordinary hooligan. What distinguished the characters of my novel from other young people before them or contemporaneous with them was, on the one hand, the brutal way they entered into life, and on the other hand, their certainty that if they were “victorious,” they would be in the right.

    Of course, it was not a matter of an external victory obtained by methods of a parvenu or by political opportunism, but by the fulfillment of the characters’ own destiny. For Petru Anicet, for example, “victory” meant the realization of his musical genius and at the same time his social triumph. He believed in his creative possibilities, and if one day he should have discovered he was a second-rate composer, probably he would have given up composing. But precisely because he did not doubt his genius, he would not agree to live the modest life of an “artist.” When his opera would begin to be written and then recognized, he would have to have all he believed a genius deserved to have: glory, notoriety, and wealth. Meanwhile, he was still very young and he made his living by giving piano lessons and by various other expedients. He did not shrink from taking money from a semi-prostitute whom he called Nora, and he accepted without hesitation gold coins and jewels that Anişoara Lecca, a girl who loved him, had stolen from her home.

    This strident amoralism made some critics, in particular G. Călinescu, speak about my “Gidism.” I don’t believe they were justified. Like all young people of my age, I had read several books by Andre Gide, but for my part I admired him more as the critic and essayist of Pretextes et nouveaux pretextes than as the author of immoral novels. Rather, the behavior of Petru Anicet is explained by my recent personal experiences and by ideas I held then with respect to Romanian culture. Two years previously, I had passed through a great ordeal that I had resolved by assuming a certain responsibility. I did not in the least regret my action, but I wanted to present several characters in whose eyes such an act as mine would have seemed ridiculous. On the other hand, I wanted to give a certain existential and axiological prestige to a type of Romanian behavior that, until then, either had been interpreted sociologically or else condemned moralistically in literature. There were plenty of “immoralists” and opportunists around who had triumphed, but their triumph was almost exclusively of a political, social, or economic order. Moreover, with rare exceptions, these conquerors had not cared about anyone else. Notions of destiny, work, interior freedom, were matters of indifference or else inaccessible to them. My “hooligans,” however, existed on a different plane. What mattered to them above all was the obtaining of a mode of being that would allow them on the one hand to “create,” and on the other to “triumph in History.” My hooligans bore more resemblance to heroes of the Italian Renaissance than to heroes of Gide’s novels.

    I believed in the possibility of a Romanian Renaissance, and for that reason I allowed myself to portray such heroes. But I was also afraid that “History” would prevent us from bringing it into being. In desperation, I tried to imagine what might be done. Of one thing I was certain: the excessive intellectualism of the characters in Întoarcerea din Rai, their obsessions and idiosyncrasies, their fear of “failure”—all these were obsolete. Retreat from confrontation with History, the acceptance of the traditional destiny of the Romanian intellectual—to “fail” or to survive humbly on the periphery of society—did not seem to me a solution. The eternal defeat of the poet, the eternal victory of the politician—the leitmotif of the Romanian novel from Vlahuţa to Cezar Petrescu—depressed me, although I knew that sociologically the presentation was correct. I said to myself that, for the present, I must break out of this vicious circle: the “intellectual” who cannot “win” because a victory would imply the nullification of his mode of being as “intellectual.” My hooligans succeeded in resolving the dilemma through what I called then the “Gordian solution.” They showed in this way that they participated in another mode of Romanian existence than that of the intellectuals of Cezar Petrescu’s novels.

    ….

    I wrote from 2:00 to 8:00 in the afternoons and again at night from 11:00 P.M. to 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Sometimes I would produce as many as twenty or thirty pages in twelve hours, and the chapters written at that rate seem to me today to be the most successful ones. But there came days and nights of sterile torpor, when I didn’t know how to extricate some character from the predicament into which I had projected him by leading him into unforeseen and absurd adventures.

    Mihail Sebastian often came to dinner and would ask, “How’s it going?” He marveled and envied me when he heard that twenty or thirty pages had been written in the past twenty-four hours. He himself wrote with difficulty, sighing, often getting up from the table and pacing the floor desperately, continually crossing out and correcting. I, on the contrary, if I saw after a few hours of effort that I had not gotten beyond the first page—which, on rereading, proved to be rather mediocre—would tear up the paper and give up trying to write any more that day. It was not just a matter of “inspiration,” but more especially of the presence, intensified to the point of hallucination, of the characters. I could not write well except when I felt the characters, with an almost physical intensity, present before me, beside me.

    After four or five weeks, I found myself in the middle of the novel. I knew that it would be a somewhat longer book than Întoarcerea din Rai. Only if I allowed my characters to “exist” for five to six hundred pages did I feel they would succeed in becoming “incarnate.” Since the majority of them were intellectuals, ready at the drop of a hat to analyze themselves or break into a long discussion, such characters would have seemed artificial if I had limited the novel to three hundred pages. They could obtain depth and autonomy only if I let them remain on stage for a long time. On the other hand, I tried to present four groups of characters, moving in different worlds that, at least in the beginning, were unrelated. Toward the end of the book, these groups would have to meet and certain characters be drawn into common actions. This implied duration—that is, many hundreds of pages. (And no doubt the novel would have profited considerably by being two or three hundred pages longer than it is.)

    The last part I wrote with difficulty, while almost ill. The brutality of certain scenes, the cruelty of some of the characters, sickened me. But it was impossible for me to jettison them or to attenuate their savagery. I had set out to write a novel of “the hooligans,” and I could not retreat. All those atrocities would have to be avenged later, in Viaţa nouă. It was the price some characters paid in order to become themselves.

    I finished the novel with a great effort, tortured—as it has been my fate to conclude the writing of almost all my books.


    - From The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell by Robert Ellwood; pages 80-2:

    The son of a career officer in the Romanian army, Eliade spent his childhood in various towns where his father was stationed before retiring to Bucharest. In that capital city Eliade emerged in his lycée years as something of a teenage prodigy, reading assiduously, learning languages, writing articles for popular young people’s magazines. He kept well-packed journals and even penned an autobiographical novel, Romanul adolescentului miop [The Novel of a Near-Sighted Adolescent; composed 1924]. Eliade thought that it was the first novel about adolescence by an adolescent. He had more than a hundred published articles to his credit by his eighteenth birthday. Commencing a struggle against time, a battle which came to have metaphysical as well as psychological dimensions, the near-sighted student systematically reduced his hours of sleep to allow time for reading and writing, as well as socializing and Boy Scout activities. Mac Ricketts remarks: “And about all these things—his readings, his intellectual discoveries, his friends, his scouting adventures, his biological field trips, his recurring bouts of melancholy, his running battles with his lycée teachers, and even his innermost thoughts, struggles and ambitions—he wrote. Probably there are few adolescences so thoroughly documented as that of Mircea Eliade.”

    Beginning studies at the University of Bucharest in 1925, he kept up the frenetic pace, attending lectures less often than educating himself, trying to do everything all at once under the compulsion of an overwhelming sense that there was not and would never be enough time. He received his degree in philosophy only three years later. During those undergraduate days he had become a regular columnist for a daily newspaper, and was recognized as the “leader” of the younger generation, full of bold and provocative thoughts on literature and the regeneration of Romanian culture.

    Mircea Eliade emerged from the university with two great interests for continuing study—Renaissance thought and Indian philosophy. He was able to spend three months in Rome in 1928 pursuing the former. At the same time he noted, in a book by the distinguished historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta, an acknowledgment of the patronage of the Maharaja of Kassimbazar, the tribute even giving that potentate’s address. Impulsively, the young Eliade wrote the Maharaja, expressing his own interest in India. Three months later he received a reply inviting him to come and study at the ruler’s expense. Arrangements were made for him to live in the Dasgupta home in Calcutta. In late November 1928 Eliade set sail for India, where he remained until 1931.

    The budding historian of religion kept busy in several spheres. He did research that laid the foundation for his 1933 Bucharest Ph.D. thesis on Yoga. He sent letters and articles back to Romania excoriating the brutality of British rule in India and expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s nonviolent, spiritual revolution against it. He also found time for an indiscreet romantic relationship with Dasgupta’s young daughter, Maitreyi, which led to his being abruptly expelled from the home—but which also provided grist for his ultraromantic short novel of intercultural love, Maitreyi (1933). Exile from Calcutta enabled him to spend several months at the famous city of yogis, Rishikesh, so the disgrace was not a complete loss. He was compelled to return to Romania in 1931 for army service, but the duty was not arduous, affording him time to complete his doctorate and establish himself anew as a journalist and writer. He also quickly became a dynamic young lecturer at the university as assistant to his mentor, the existentialist philosopher and later extreme nationalist Nae Ionescu.

    Like Ionescu, Eliade, for all his world-spanning intellectual interests, was intensely conscious of being a Romanian at a critical moment in his country’s cultural history. Long provincialized but now much enlarged territorially by its World War I victory, Romania was wondering if it was ready to find a place on the world stage. Some young Romanians, including the playwright Eugene Ionesco and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, had migrated to Paris to become major figures in the European avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s. They had already became role models for young Romanians. Eliade now saw himself in a position to do the same at home in Bucharest, assuring his nation’s intellectual youth that their country had an important role in addressing both Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism. Romania was, he and others believed, in a unique situation between East and West, on the traditional frontier between Latin civilization and the Byzantine, Islamic, or “mystical” East.


    - From Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe) by Mircea Eliade (translated by Willard Trask); pages 1-5 (“The Dacians and Wolves”):

    RELIGIOUS MEANINGS OF ETHNIC NAMES

    According to Strabo, the original name of the Dacians was daoi . . . A tradition preserved by Hesychius informs us that daos was the Phrygian word for “wolf.” P. Kretschmer had explained daos by the root *dhau, “to press, to squeeze, to strangle.” Among the words derved from this root we may note the Lydian Kandaules, the name of the Thracian war god, Kandaon, the Illyrian dhaunos (wolf), the god Daunus, and so on. The city of Daous-dava, in Lower Moesia, between the Danube and Mount Haemus, literally meant "village of wolves.” [ . . . Tomaschek connected Daci, dai with dava . . . In other words, he took the ethnic name of the Dacians to mean “inhabitants of the davae.”]

    Formerly, then, the Dacians called themselves "wolves" or "those who are like wolves," who resemble wolves. [Altheim observes that the name daci is formed, like luperci, with an adjectival suffix . . .] Still according to Strabo, certain nomadic Scythians to the east of the Caspian Sea were also called daoi. The Latin authors called them Dahae, and some Greek historians daai. In all probability their ethnic name was derived from Iranian (Saka) dahae, "wolf." But similar names were not unusual among the Indo-Europeans. South of the Caspian Sea lay Hyrcania, that is, in Eastern Iranian "Vehrkana," in Western Iranian "Varkana," literally the "country of wolves" (from the Iranian root vehrka, "wolf”). The nomadic tribes that inhabited it were called Hyrkanoi, "the wolves," by Greco-Latin authors. In Phrygia there was the tribe of the Orka (Orkoi) [R. Eisler, Man into Wolf, p. 137.].

    We may further cite the Lycaones of Arcadia [p. 133], and Lycaonia or Lucaonia in Asia Minor, and especially the Arcadian Zeus Lykaios and Apollo Lykagenes; the latter surname has been explained as "he of the she-wolf," "he born of the she-wolf," that is, born of Leto in the shape of a she-wolf. According to Heraclides Ponticus (Fragm. Hist. Gr. 218), the name of the Samnite tribe of the Lucani came from Lykos, "wolf." Their neighbors, the Hirpini, took their name from hirpus, the Samnite word for "wolf." Their neighbors, the Hirpini, took their name from hirpus, the Samnite word for “wolf.” At the foot of Mount Soracte lived the Hirpi Sorani, the "wolves of Sora" (the Volscian city). According to the tradition transmitted by Servius, an oracle had advised the Hirpi Sorani to live "like wolves," that is, by rapine (lupos imitarentur, i.e., rapto viverent) [On the hirpi Sorani now see Altheim, Roman Religion, pp. 252 ff.] And in fact they were exempt from taxes and from military service, for their biennial rite—which consisted in walking barefoot over burning coals—was believed to ensure the fertility of the country. Both this shamanic rite and their living "like wolves" reflect religious concepts of considerable antiquity. There is no need to cite other examples. We will note only that tribes with wolf names are documented in places as distant as Spain (Loukentioi and Lucenses in Celtiberian Calaecia), Ireland, and England. Nor, indeed, is the phenomenon confined to the Indo-Europeans.


    The fact that a people takes its ethnic name from the name of an animal always has a religious meaning. More precisely, the fact cannot be understood except as the expression of an archaic religious concept. In the case with which we are concerned, several hypotheses can be considered. First, we may suppose that the people derives its name from a god or mythical ancestor in the shape of a wolf or who manifested himself lycomorphically. The myth of a supernatural wolf coupling with a princess, who gives birth either to a people or a dynasty, occurs in various forms in Central Asia. But we have no testimony to its existence among the Dacians.

    A second hypothesis comes to mind: the Dacians may have taken their name from a band of fugitives—either immigrants from other regions, or young men at odds with the law, haunting the outskirts of villages like wolves or bandits and living by rapine. The phenomenon is amply documented from earliest antiquity, and it survived in the Middle Ages. It is necessary to distinguish among: (1) adolescents who, during their initiatory probation, had to hide far from their villages and live by rapine; (2) immigrants seeking a new territory to settle in; (3) outlaws or fugitives seeking a place of refuge. But all these young men behaved "like wolves", were called "wolves", or enjoyed the protection of a wolf-god.

    During his probation the Lacedaemonian kouros led the life of a wolf for an entire year: hidden in the mountains, he lived on what he could steal, taking care that no one saw him. Among a number of lndo-European peoples, emigrants, exiles, and fugitives were called "wolves." The Hittite laws already said of a proscribed man that he had "become a wolf.'' And in the laws of Edward the Confessor (ca. AD. 1000), the proscribed man had to wear a wolf headed mask (wolfhede). The wolf was the symbol of the fugitive, and many gods who protected exiles and outlaws had wolf deities or attributes. Examples are Zeus Lykoreius or Apollo Lykeios. [Altheim, Roman Religion, pp. 260 ff.] Romulus and Remus, sons of the wolf-god Mars and suckled by the she-wolf of the Capitol, had been "fugitives." According to the legend, Romulus established a place of refuge for exiles and outlaws on the Capitol. Servius informs us that this asylum was under the protection of the god Lucoris. And Lucoris was identified with Lykoreus of Delphi, himself a wolf-god. Finally, a third hypothesis that may explain the name of the Dacians centers on the ability to change into a wolf by the power of certain rituals. Such a transformation may be connected with lycanthropy properly speaking—an extremely widespread phenomenon, but more especially documented in the Balkano-Carpathian region—or with a ritual imitation of the behavior and outward appearance of the wolf. Ritual imitation of the wolf is a specific characteristic of military initiations and hence of the Männerbünde, the secret brotherhoods of warriors. There are reasons to think that such rites and beliefs, bound up with a martial ideology, are what made it possible to assimilate fugitives, exiles, and proscribed men to wolves. To subsist, all these outlaws behaved like bands of young warriors, that is, like real "wolves."











    - From Youth Without Youth by Mircea Eliade (translated by Mac Ricketts); pages 3-11:

    Only when he heard the bell of the Metropolitan Church did he remember that it was the night of Easter. And suddenly the rain seemed unnatural — the rain which had greeted him as he had emerged from the railway station and which threatened to become torrential. He made his way forward hastily with the umbrella brought down to his shoulders, his eyes downcast, trying to avoid the rivulets. Without realizing it, he began to run, holding the umbrella close to his chest, like a shield. But after some twenty meters he saw the traffic signal turn red, and he had to stop. He waited nervously, standing on tiptoe, hopping from one foot to the other continually, looking in consternation at the little pond that covered a good part of the boulevard directly in front of him.

    The traffic light changed, and in the next moment he was shaken, blinded by an explosion of white incandescent light. He felt as though he had been sucked up by a fiery cyclone that had exploded at some mysterious moment on top of his head. A close strike of lightning, he said to himself, blinking with difficulty to unseal his eyelids. He did not understand why he was clutching the handle of his umbrella so hard. The rain lashed at him wildly from all sides at once, and yet he felt nothing. Then he heard the bell at the Metropolitan again, and all the other bells, and very close by still another, striking in a solitary, desperate way.

    I've had a fright, he said to himself, and he began to shiver. It's because of the water, he realized a few moments later, becoming aware of the fact that he was lying in the puddle near the curb. I've taken a chill. . . .

    "I saw the lightning strike him," he heard the breathless voice of a frightened man saying. "I don't know if he's still alive or not. I was looking over there, where he was standing under the traffic signal, and I saw him light up from head to toe — umbrella, hat, coat, all at once! If it hadn't been for the rain, he would have been burnt to a crisp. I don't know if he's still alive or not."

    "And even if he's still alive, what can we do with him?" The voice seemed to come from far away and it sounded to him tired, bitter.

    "Who knows what sins he's committed, that God would strike him on the very night of Easter, right behind a church!" Then, after a pause, he added, "Let's see what the intern says about it."

    It seemed strange to him that he felt nothing, that he did not, in fact, feel his body at all. He knew from the conversation of those around him that he had been moved. But how had he been transported? In their arms? On a stretcher? On a cart of some sort? . . .

    "I don't believe he has a chance," he heard another voice saying later, also far away. "Not a single centimeter of his skin is untouched. I don't understand how he stays alive. Normally, he would have been ... "

    Of course, everybody knows that. If you have lost more than fifty percent of your skin, you die of asphyxia. But he realized quickly that it was ridiculous and humiliating to reply mentally to the people bustling around him. He would have liked not to have had to hear them, just as, with his eyes shut tight, he did not see them. And at the same moment he found himself far away, happy, as he had been then.



    “And then, what else happened,” she asked him in jest, smiling. “What other tragedy?”

    “I didn’t say it was a tragedy, but in a sense it was that: to conceive a passion for science, to have but one desire—to dedicate your life to science.”

    “To which science are you referring?” she interrupted him. “To mathematics or to the Chinese language?”

    “To both—and to all the others I’ve discovered and fallen in love with, insofar as I’ve learned about them.”

    She put her hand on his arm to keep him from getting angry at being interrupted again. “Mathematics I understand, because if you didn’t have a vocation for it, it would be useless to persevere. But Chinese?”

    He didn’t know why he burst into laughter. Probably he was amused by the way she had said, “But Chinese?”

    “I thought I’d told you. Two years ago in the fall when I was in Paris I went to a lecture by Chavannes. I saw him after class in his office; he asked me how long I’d been studying Chinese and how many other Oriental languages I knew. No need to repeat the whole conversation. I understood just one thing: that if I didn’t master in a few years—in a few years—Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Japanese, I would never become a great orientalist.”

    “All right, but you must have told him that you wanted to study only the Chinese language.”

    “That’s what I said, but I didn’t persuade him. Because even in that case I’d still have to learn Japanese and a lot of South Asian languages and dialects. . . . But this wasn’t the important thing; it was something else. When I told him I’d been studying Chinese for five months, he stepped to a blackboard and wrote some twenty characters. He asked me to pronounce them one by one, and then to translate the passage. I pronounced them as best I could, and I translated some, but not all, of them. He smiled amiably. ‘That’s not bad,’ he said, ‘But if after five months . . . How many hours a day?’ ‘At least six hours,’ I replied. ‘Then the Chinese language is not for you. Probably you don’t have the necessary visual memory. . . . My dear sir,’ he added with a smile that was ambiguous, affectionate, and ironic at the same time, ‘My dear sir, in order to master Chinese you must have the memory of a Mandarin, a photographic memory. If you don’t have it, you will be obliged to make an effort three or four times as great. I don’t believe it’s worth it.’ ‘So, basically it’s a matter of memory.’ ‘Of a photographic memory,’ he repeated gravely, emphasizing the words.”



    He heard the door opening and closing several times and other noises, including strange voices.

    “Let’s see what the Professor says. If you ask me, I’d say that frankly . . .”

    The same thing, over and over again! But he liked the voice; it was, no doubt, that of a young doctor, clever and enthusiastic about his profession, generous.

    “. . . His skin was burned one hundred percent, and yet he’s survived twelve hours, and so far as we can tell, he’s not in pain. . . . Have you given him any shots?”

    “One, this morning. I thought he groaned. But maybe he was just moaning in his sleep.”

    “Do you know anything about him? Was anything found beside him?” “Just the handle of the umbrella. The rest was incinerated. Curious—the handle, of all things, a wooden handle. . . . The clothes were turned to ashes. What the rain didn’t wash away was saved in the ambulance.”

    He knew it would have had to be that way, and yet hearing the intern say it lifted his spirits. So, the two envelopes in his pocket had been incinerated, too. . . .



    Without intending to, because he had not been careful to close the door completely behind him, he had overheard: “The Old Man’s getting quite decrepit! He told us the same thing three or four times.”

    It was true. He had been impressed by the news he had read in La Fiera Letteraria, that Papini was almost blind and no surgeon dared to operate on him. For a ravenous and indefatigable reader like Papini, this was an unparalleled tragedy. That is why he kept talking about it all the time. But perhaps Vaian was right: I am beginning to get decrepit.

    Then he heard the voice again. “And what other tragedy befell you? You gave up the Chinese language. What else?”

    “As a matter of fact, I didn’t give it up; I continued to learn ten or fifteen characters per day, but this was mostly for my pleasure and because it helped me to understand the translations of the texts I read. Actually, I was a dilettante.”

    “So much the better,” Laura interrupted him, placing her hand on his arm again. “There have to be a few intelligent men with enough imagination to enjoy the discoveries made by your great scholars. It’s a good thing you dropped Chinese. . . . But what are the other tragedies you referred to?”

    He looked at her a long time. She was far from being the best-looking female student he had known, but she was different. He did not understand what attracted him, why he sought her continually, going through the lecture halls where he had not walked for three or four years, since he had taken his Degree. He knew he would always find her at Titu Maiorescu’s class. There he had met her an hour ago, and, as usualy, when he escorted her to her home, they had stopped to sit on a bench beside a lake in Cişmigiu.

    “What are the other tragedies?” she repeated, maintaining her calm, smiling gaze.

    “I told you that while I was still in the lycée, I was fond of mathematics and music, but I also liked history, archeology, and philosophy. I wanted to study them all; obviously, not as a specialist, but still rigorously, working directly from texts, because I have a horror of improvisation and hearsay learning.”

    She interrupted him, raising her arms in a boyish gesture.

    “You’re the most ambitious man I’ve ever met! The most ambitious and the most driven! Driven, especially!”

    ….

    He knew the voices well, and had learned to distinguish them. There were three nurses by day and two at night.

    “If he had any luck, he’d die now. Because they say that whoever dies during the Week of Light goes straight to Paradise.”

    She has a good soul; she pities me. She’s better than the others because she’s thinking about my salvation. . . . But what if she gets the idea of pulling the I.V. needle out of my vein? Probably I’d survive till morning when the intern comes. And if he doesn’t notice it, the Professor will. The Professor is the only one who’s in despair and humiliated over the fact that he doesn’t understand; the only one who wants at all costs to keep me alive, to find out what happened. He had heard him one day—no use asking when—he had heard him talking after he had touched his eyelids with infinite care:

    “The eye seems intact, but if he’s blind or not, I don’t know. I don’t know anything, in fact. . . .”

    He had heard this also: “I don’t even know if he’s conscious or not, if he hears or if he understands what he hears.” It wasn’t his fault. Several times before that he had recognized the voice and had understood it perfectly. “If you understand what I say,” the Professor shouted, “squeeze my finger.” But he could not feel his finger. He would have liked to squeeze it, but he didn’t know how.

    That time the Professor added, “If we can succeed in keeping him alive another five days . . .”

    In five days, one of his assistants found out, the great specialist from Paris, Professor Gilbert Bernard, would come to Bucharest en route to Athens.

    ….

    “Especially, ambitious!” Laura repeated. “You want to be what all those other people are: philologist, orientalist, archeologist, historian, and who knows what else. That is, you want to live a strange life, a different life, instead of being yourself, Dominic Matei, and cultivating your own genius exclusively.”

    “My genius?” he exclaimed with a pretended modesty in order to hide his delight. “That presupposes I have genius!”

    “In a sense, certainly, you do have it. You don’t resemble anyone I have ever met. You live life and understand it differently from us.”

    “But up to now, at age twenty-six, I haven’t accomplished anything. I’ve just taken all the exams and passed with good marks. I haven’t discovered anything, not even an original interpretation of Canto XI of Purgatorio, which I have translated and written a commentary on.

    “Why would you have to discover something? Your genius ought to be to fulfill yourself in the life you live, not in original analyses, discoveries, and interpretations. Your model ought to be Socrates or Goethe; but imagine a Goethe without a written opus!”

    “I don’t exactly understand,” he said.



    - From Yoga: Immortality and Freedom by Mircea Eliade; page 201:

    In principle, the Buddhist tantras are divided into four classes: kriya-tantras, carya-tantras, yoga-tantras, and anuttara-tantras, the first two being concerned with rituals and the others with yogic procedures for attaining supreme truth. In fact, howeover, nearly all tantric texts include ritual matter as well as yogic instruction and passages of philosophy. According to Tibetan tradition, the four classes of tantras are related to the principal human types and temperaments: the kriya-tantra texts are suitable for Brahmans and, in general, for all those whose cast of mind is ritualistic; the carya-tantras are for businessmen, and so on.


    - From Autiobiography (Volume I: 1907-1937) [Journey East, Journey West] (translated by Mac Ricketts); pages 117-8:

    During recent months I had become good friends with Rica; sometimes I even wondered if I weren’t in love with her. I always managed to convince myself to the contrary because, for me, in my conception of myself and my ambitions, love seemed to be an ill-omened weakness. I had promised myself, as I used to say, a series of “vital experiences”: among other things, I would make a trip to the Orient or maybe even travel around the world, accepting any job I might be offered in order to earn my living from one stopover to another. If I were in love, I would no longer be myself, I would no longer be “free,” “available.”

    On the other hand, I knew myself well enough to realize that I was really expecting to fall in love. In the first place, I could not imagine “student life” without a great love affair. Also, I hoped that by being in love I might become free from those attacks of melancholy, or that they might at least become bearable. This ambivalent attitude toward love was to remain with me until late in life. Rica managed marvelously to encourage it. Sometimes I felt that she regarded me as something more than a “good friend,” that she was trying to attract and charm me (her incomprehensible silences, the happiness that came over her face when she saw me, and the like). At other times, on the contrary, she seemed distant, or she would declare that she had never had such a good friend as I, a true “confidant.” And yet I knew very little about her or her past. I would encounter her frequently at the library of the King Carol I Foundation, surrounded by books, preparing papers for the Romance languages seminar. Even though she always passed her examinations, I never had the impression that she was really enthused over philology, literary history, or folklore. She was studying conscientiously for her degree and in order to become a teacher of Romanian language and literature. At first I had thought she was different from all the other girls because she had read several books by Romain Rolland and Remy de Gourmont. In time, however, I discovered lacunae which seemed to me inadmissible, and I would force her to read Dostoevsky, Novalis, and Knut Hamsun. Certain articles I wrote were intended to teach her and encourage her to like the authors I liked. Among other things, I published in Cuvântul a series of pieces entitled “Men from Books,” which was about several characters who interested me at some point: Sixtine, Brand, Martin Eden—and even Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis!


    - Pages 297-304:

    I met rather often with Liviu Rebreanu, who liked Maitreyi, but liked Întoarcerea din Rai even better, despite the fact he considered it imperfect from an artistic point of view. “It’s a shame,” he said to me once, “that you turned it loose as fast as you wrote it. If you’d worked on it a year or two, if you’d copied it over several times, it would have been a great book.”

    It saddened me to hear him say this, because I knew he was right. I recalled his sleepless nights, the pains he took to write, correct, and recopy, never hurrying, never agreeing to submit a manuscript until the day he was truly satisfied with it. I knew, on the other hand, that I could not write except in a fever, hastily, amost in a frenzy; that, in itself, this kind of writing is not improper to literary creativity (Dostoevsky wrote, or dictated, several novels in the same manner); that if my productions did not attain to a high plane it was not the fault of my haste, but of my deficiencies. Then, too, I knew one thing more: that we did not have much time ahead of us. At that time I had plans for some twenty books: novels (three or four volumes in the Întoarcerea din Rai cycle; the novel I had “seen” on the way home from Germany); several books of literature in the fantastic genre; La Mandragore; a book about myth; another on religious symbolism; Muntele magic (The Magic Mountain, about archaic symbolism); Comentarii la legenda Meşterului Manole (Commentaries on the Legend of Master Manole); the completion of the work on Oriental alchemy; a history of Indian philosophy; a monograph on Hasdeu and the encyclopedic tradition in Romanian culture (from Cantemir to Nicolae Iorga); a book on the conception of death in the beliefs and customs of Romania; and others which I have forgotten. Some of them I was unable to undertake until after leaving Romania, but instead I wrote others that I did not then have in mind to write (for instance, Şarpele, Mitul Reintegrării, Nuntă î Cer, etc.).

    And so I hurried. Not only because I always needed money, but also because I wanted to succeed in presenting the beginning of an oeuvre—that is, a series of books from which it would be possible to understand what I thought, what I loved, what I believed and hoped would become the Romanian cutlure—if we should be given time, if we should be left in peace. But I was afraid I would not be able to repesent the oeuvre in its entirety. I wondered often if it would not be necessary for me to proceed in this fashion: to concentrate on one, or at the most two, books. But this would have meant abandoning the whole, selecting just a few fragments from a work that would not be fully understood unless judged in its totality. On the other hand, I was not at all certain that, even by making an effort to “concentrate,” I should be able to write a masterpiece. Insofar as a writer of my age then is capable of understanding the structure and intention of his own creativity, I was inclined to believe that no formal perfection could save my writings from being merely transitory. I preferred to be guided by instinct, that is, to write as I had written up till then, whatever the risk might be. And I knew the risk was considerable.

    I asked myself, how would Goethe’s oeuvre look if he had not lived past forty? And what would the oeuvre of Eminescu or that of Hasdeu be like if one or the other of them had been creative for another twenty years? (Hasdeu’s creativity was mutilated if not actually paralyzed by the death of Julia when Hasdeu was scarcely fifty.) Of course, any oeuvre, however complete and “rounded out” it may be, is “saved “only by the exceptional worth of a few of the writings that constitute it. Had it not been for ten or twenty masterpieces, Balzac’s La Comedie humaine would long since have been forgotten. We read with interest Physiologie du mariage or Les Employes because of the existence of Le Cousine Bette, Le Pere Goriot, and a few other such great novels. And in the case of Goethe, we are interested in The Metamorphosis of Plants and texts about minerals and theories of color, and even Egmont, only because he also wrote Faust, Iphigenie auf Tauris, and poetic masterpieces. Thanks to these summits, any fragment from the vast and polymorphous oeuvre of Goethe gains weight and significance. I told myself that if I could succeed in writing a single exceptional book, whether a novel or a work of philosophy or history, my whole production could be “saved,” in the sense that it would continue to be read, at least by a handful of people, who in this case would be able to decipher the message revealed by the whole.

    The risks, of course, I knew very well. I had not forgotten, for instance, the long period of literary sterility that Goethe had experienced in the midst of his maturity, probably owing to his excessive preoccupation with scientific problems. It was Goethe’s great luck to have lived after that for another thirty years, during which time he recovered his creativity and wrote several additional masterworks. I asked myself if the passion, time, and energy I had expended on my extra-literary researches would not, eventually, nullify my potential as a writer. I could not answer; but I knew that whatever the answer might be, there was nothing to be done. I could not abandon these aspects of my oeuvre, even as Goethe could never abandon his scientific researches. There was also the chance that I might die before my time, as had happened in the case of many Romanian writers and scholars. (And among the scholars I was thinking not only of Pârvan, dead at an early age—though after he had published Getica and Memoriale; but also of V. Bogrea, “the most learned Romanian,” as Iorga called him, who died at forty without having published a single book—he had published only extraordinarily erudite book reviews and short articles.) But in my case, there was nothing to be done. I only hoped that I should be more fortunate than a great many of my predecessors.

    There was one thing I knew, however: that I had to write at least one “great book.” Unfortunately, every time I would start writing a new book, I would say to myself: It won’t be this one. Not this one, but the next. . . .




    As soon as I finished with my course at the university, I set to work on Yoga. General Condeescu had spoken to King Carol, who knew about the years I had spent in India and who had, it seems, read Maitreyi enthusiastically. The King suggested that Yoga be published by the Royal Foundations. I had planned to have it published in France, and had written to this effect to Paul Geuthner. But Alexandru Rossetti assured me that everything could be arranged: the book would be printed by the Royal Foundations and distributed abroad by Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner. In a few additional weeks of work I completed the manuscript. The final chapters remained to be translated, however. Since I was in a hurry and since I didn’t dare ask Wendy Noica and Lydia Lax to work during their summer vacations, I had recourse to S. Rivaian, who had been recommended to me by Alcalay. Rivaian had lived in France for several years and had even wanted to translate Maitreyi. He translated the last 150 pages in less than a month—and I sent the manuscript to the printer with a sigh of relief. I had worked on that book, off and on, for almost six years.

    As we did every summer, we went with a group of friends to the Bucegi and set up residence for ten days at Casa Pestera. We returned early in August, and I began immediately on Huliganii. I knew the plot in broad outline, but there were still a considerable number of details to be specified. Only the reactions, ideas, and adventures of Petru Anicet were clear to me, from the scene with which the novel opens—the piano lesson in Vila Tycho Brahe—to the last, at the cemetery, after the burial of Petru’s mother. The action, moreover, is centered on Petru and his friend Alexandru Pleşa. Each of them illustrates, in his way, a mode of being in the world that I designated “hooliganic,” because it implies at once an unconscious impulse to brutality and an absolute self-confidence. In the then-current meaning of the term, “hooligans” referred to groups of young antisemites, ready to break windows or heads, to attack or loot synagogues, to burn books. None of this happened in my novel. The political context—that is, more precisely, the antisemitic connotation of hooliganism—was entirely absent. Nevertheless, the behavior of the principal characters was quite as violent and irresponsible as that of any ordinary hooligan. What distinguished the characters of my novel from other young people before them or contemporaneous with them was, on the one hand, the brutal way they entered into life, and on the other hand, their certainty that if they were “victorious,” they would be in the right.

    Of course, it was not a matter of an external victory obtained by methods of a parvenu or by political opportunism, but by the fulfillment of the characters’ own destiny. For Petru Anicet, for example, “victory” meant the realization of his musical genius and at the same time his social triumph. He believed in his creative possibilities, and if one day he should have discovered he was a second-rate composer, probably he would have given up composing. But precisely because he did not doubt his genius, he would not agree to live the modest life of an “artist.” When his opera would begin to be written and then recognized, he would have to have all he believed a genius deserved to have: glory, notoriety, and wealth. Meanwhile, he was still very young and he made his living by giving piano lessons and by various other expedients. He did not shrink from taking money from a semi-prostitute whom he called Nora, and he accepted without hesitation gold coins and jewels that Anişoara Lecca, a girl who loved him, had stolen from her home.

    This strident amoralism made some critics, in particular G. Călinescu, speak about my “Gidism.” I don’t believe they were justified. Like all young people of my age, I had read several books by Andre Gide, but for my part I admired him more as the critic and essayist of Pretextes et nouveaux pretextes than as the author of immoral novels. Rather, the behavior of Petru Anicet is explained by my recent personal experiences and by ideas I held then with respect to Romanian culture. Two years previously, I had passed through a great ordeal that I had resolved by assuming a certain responsibility. I did not in the least regret my action, but I wanted to present several characters in whose eyes such an act as mine would have seemed ridiculous. On the other hand, I wanted to give a certain existential and axiological prestige to a type of Romanian behavior that, until then, either had been interpreted sociologically or else condemned moralistically in literature. There were plenty of “immoralists” and opportunists around who had triumphed, but their triumph was almost exclusively of a political, social, or economic order. Moreover, with rare exceptions, these conquerors had not cared about anyone else. Notions of destiny, work, interior freedom, were matters of indifference or else inaccessible to them. My “hooligans,” however, existed on a different plane. What mattered to them above all was the obtaining of a mode of being that would allow them on the one hand to “create,” and on the other to “triumph in History.” My hooligans bore more resemblance to heroes of the Italian Renaissance than to heroes of Gide’s novels.

    I believed in the possibility of a Romanian Renaissance, and for that reason I allowed myself to portray such heroes. But I was also afraid that “History” would prevent us from bringing it into being. In desperation, I tried to imagine what might be done. Of one thing I was certain: the excessive intellectualism of the characters in Întoarcerea din Rai, their obsessions and idiosyncrasies, their fear of “failure”—all these were obsolete. Retreat from confrontation with History, the acceptance of the traditional destiny of the Romanian intellectual—to “fail” or to survive humbly on the periphery of society—did not seem to me a solution. The eternal defeat of the poet, the eternal victory of the politician—the leitmotif of the Romanian novel from Vlahuţa to Cezar Petrescu—depressed me, although I knew that sociologically the presentation was correct. I said to myself that, for the present, I must break out of this vicious circle: the “intellectual” who cannot “win” because a victory would imply the nullification of his mode of being as “intellectual.” My hooligans succeeded in resolving the dilemma through what I called then the “Gordian solution.” They showed in this way that they participated in another mode of Romanian existence than that of the intellectuals of Cezar Petrescu’s novels.

    ….

    I wrote from 2:00 to 8:00 in the afternoons and again at night from 11:00 P.M. to 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Sometimes I would produce as many as twenty or thirty pages in twelve hours, and the chapters written at that rate seem to me today to be the most successful ones. But there came days and nights of sterile torpor, when I didn’t know how to extricate some character from the predicament into which I had projected him by leading him into unforeseen and absurd adventures.

    Mihail Sebastian often came to dinner and would ask, “How’s it going?” He marveled and envied me when he heard that twenty or thirty pages had been written in the past twenty-four hours. He himself wrote with difficulty, sighing, often getting up from the table and pacing the floor desperately, continually crossing out and correcting. I, on the contrary, if I saw after a few hours of effort that I had not gotten beyond the first page—which, on rereading, proved to be rather mediocre—would tear up the paper and give up trying to write any more that day. It was not just a matter of “inspiration,” but more especially of the presence, intensified to the point of hallucination, of the characters. I could not write well except when I felt the characters, with an almost physical intensity, present before me, beside me.

    After four or five weeks, I found myself in the middle of the novel. I knew that it would be a somewhat longer book than Întoarcerea din Rai. Only if I allowed my characters to “exist” for five to six hundred pages did I feel they would succeed in becoming “incarnate.” Since the majority of them were intellectuals, ready at the drop of a hat to analyze themselves or break into a long discussion, such characters would have seemed artificial if I had limited the novel to three hundred pages. They could obtain depth and autonomy only if I let them remain on stage for a long time. On the other hand, I tried to present four groups of characters, moving in different worlds that, at least in the beginning, were unrelated. Toward the end of the book, these groups would have to meet and certain characters be drawn into common actions. This implied duration—that is, many hundreds of pages. (And no doubt the novel would have profited considerably by being two or three hundred pages longer than it is.)

    The last part I wrote with difficulty, while almost ill. The brutality of certain scenes, the cruelty of some of the characters, sickened me. But it was impossible for me to jettison them or to attenuate their savagery. I had set out to write a novel of “the hooligans,” and I could not retreat. All those atrocities would have to be avenged later, in Viaţa nouă. It was the price some characters paid in order to become themselves.

    I finished the novel with a great effort, tortured—as it has been my fate to conclude the writing of almost all my books.


    - From The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell by Robert Ellwood; pages 80-2:

    The son of a career officer in the Romanian army, Eliade spent his childhood in various towns where his father was stationed before retiring to Bucharest. In that capital city Eliade emerged in his lycée years as something of a teenage prodigy, reading assiduously, learning languages, writing articles for popular young people’s magazines. He kept well-packed journals and even penned an autobiographical novel, Romanul adolescentului miop [The Novel of a Near-Sighted Adolescent; composed 1924]. Eliade thought that it was the first novel about adolescence by an adolescent. He had more than a hundred published articles to his credit by his eighteenth birthday. Commencing a struggle against time, a battle which came to have metaphysical as well as psychological dimensions, the near-sighted student systematically reduced his hours of sleep to allow time for reading and writing, as well as socializing and Boy Scout activities. Mac Ricketts remarks: “And about all these things—his readings, his intellectual discoveries, his friends, his scouting adventures, his biological field trips, his recurring bouts of melancholy, his running battles with his lycée teachers, and even his innermost thoughts, struggles and ambitions—he wrote. Probably there are few adolescences so thoroughly documented as that of Mircea Eliade.”

    Beginning studies at the University of Bucharest in 1925, he kept up the frenetic pace, attending lectures less often than educating himself, trying to do everything all at once under the compulsion of an overwhelming sense that there was not and would never be enough time. He received his degree in philosophy only three years later. During those undergraduate days he had become a regular columnist for a daily newspaper, and was recognized as the “leader” of the younger generation, full of bold and provocative thoughts on literature and the regeneration of Romanian culture.

    Mircea Eliade emerged from the university with two great interests for continuing study—Renaissance thought and Indian philosophy. He was able to spend three months in Rome in 1928 pursuing the former. At the same time he noted, in a book by the distinguished historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta, an acknowledgment of the patronage of the Maharaja of Kassimbazar, the tribute even giving that potentate’s address. Impulsively, the young Eliade wrote the Maharaja, expressing his own interest in India. Three months later he received a reply inviting him to come and study at the ruler’s expense. Arrangements were made for him to live in the Dasgupta home in Calcutta. In late November 1928 Eliade set sail for India, where he remained until 1931.

    The budding historian of religion kept busy in several spheres. He did research that laid the foundation for his 1933 Bucharest Ph.D. thesis on Yoga. He sent letters and articles back to Romania excoriating the brutality of British rule in India and expressing his admiration for Gandhi’s nonviolent, spiritual revolution against it. He also found time for an indiscreet romantic relationship with Dasgupta’s young daughter, Maitreyi, which led to his being abruptly expelled from the home—but which also provided grist for his ultraromantic short novel of intercultural love, Maitreyi (1933). Exile from Calcutta enabled him to spend several months at the famous city of yogis, Rishikesh, so the disgrace was not a complete loss. He was compelled to return to Romania in 1931 for army service, but the duty was not arduous, affording him time to complete his doctorate and establish himself anew as a journalist and writer. He also quickly became a dynamic young lecturer at the university as assistant to his mentor, the existentialist philosopher and later extreme nationalist Nae Ionescu.

    Like Ionescu, Eliade, for all his world-spanning intellectual interests, was intensely conscious of being a Romanian at a critical moment in his country’s cultural history. Long provincialized but now much enlarged territorially by its World War I victory, Romania was wondering if it was ready to find a place on the world stage. Some young Romanians, including the playwright Eugene Ionesco and the sculptor Constantin Brancusi, had migrated to Paris to become major figures in the European avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s. They had already became role models for young Romanians. Eliade now saw himself in a position to do the same at home in Bucharest, assuring his nation’s intellectual youth that their country had an important role in addressing both Eastern mysticism and Western rationalism. Romania was, he and others believed, in a unique situation between East and West, on the traditional frontier between Latin civilization and the Byzantine, Islamic, or “mystical” East.


    - From Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe) by Mircea Eliade (translated by Willard Trask); pages 1-5 (“The Dacians and Wolves”):

    RELIGIOUS MEANINGS OF ETHNIC NAMES

    According to Strabo, the original name of the Dacians was daoi . . . A tradition preserved by Hesychius informs us that daos was the Phrygian word for “wolf.” P. Kretschmer had explained daos by the root *dhau, “to press, to squeeze, to strangle.” Among the words derved from this root we may note the Lydian Kandaules, the name of the Thracian war god, Kandaon, the Illyrian dhaunos (wolf), the god Daunus, and so on. The city of Daous-dava, in Lower Moesia, between the Danube and Mount Haemus, literally meant "village of wolves.” [ . . . Tomaschek connected Daci, dai with dava . . . In other words, he took the ethnic name of the Dacians to mean “inhabitants of the davae.”]

    Formerly, then, the Dacians called themselves "wolves" or "those who are like wolves," who resemble wolves. [Altheim observes that the name daci is formed, like luperci, with an adjectival suffix . . .] Still according to Strabo, certain nomadic Scythians to the east of the Caspian Sea were also called daoi. The Latin authors called them Dahae, and some Greek historians daai. In all probability their ethnic name was derived from Iranian (Saka) dahae, "wolf." But similar names were not unusual among the Indo-Europeans. South of the Caspian Sea lay Hyrcania, that is, in Eastern Iranian "Vehrkana," in Western Iranian "Varkana," literally the "country of wolves" (from the Iranian root vehrka, "wolf”). The nomadic tribes that inhabited it were called Hyrkanoi, "the wolves," by Greco-Latin authors. In Phrygia there was the tribe of the Orka (Orkoi) [R. Eisler, Man into Wolf, p. 137.].

    We may further cite the Lycaones of Arcadia [p. 133], and Lycaonia or Lucaonia in Asia Minor, and especially the Arcadian Zeus Lykaios and Apollo Lykagenes; the latter surname has been explained as "he of the she-wolf," "he born of the she-wolf," that is, born of Leto in the shape of a she-wolf. According to Heraclides Ponticus (Fragm. Hist. Gr. 218), the name of the Samnite tribe of the Lucani came from Lykos, "wolf." Their neighbors, the Hirpini, took their name from hirpus, the Samnite word for "wolf." Their neighbors, the Hirpini, took their name from hirpus, the Samnite word for “wolf.” At the foot of Mount Soracte lived the Hirpi Sorani, the "wolves of Sora" (the Volscian city). According to the tradition transmitted by Servius, an oracle had advised the Hirpi Sorani to live "like wolves," that is, by rapine (lupos imitarentur, i.e., rapto viverent) [On the hirpi Sorani now see Altheim, Roman Religion, pp. 252 ff.] And in fact they were exempt from taxes and from military service, for their biennial rite—which consisted in walking barefoot over burning coals—was believed to ensure the fertility of the country. Both this shamanic rite and their living "like wolves" reflect religious concepts of considerable antiquity. There is no need to cite other examples. We will note only that tribes with wolf names are documented in places as distant as Spain (Loukentioi and Lucenses in Celtiberian Calaecia), Ireland, and England. Nor, indeed, is the phenomenon confined to the Indo-Europeans.


    The fact that a people takes its ethnic name from the name of an animal always has a religious meaning. More precisely, the fact cannot be understood except as the expression of an archaic religious concept. In the case with which we are concerned, several hypotheses can be considered. First, we may suppose that the people derives its name from a god or mythical ancestor in the shape of a wolf or who manifested himself lycomorphically. The myth of a supernatural wolf coupling with a princess, who gives birth either to a people or a dynasty, occurs in various forms in Central Asia. But we have no testimony to its existence among the Dacians.

    A second hypothesis comes to mind: the Dacians may have taken their name from a band of fugitives—either immigrants from other regions, or young men at odds with the law, haunting the outskirts of villages like wolves or bandits and living by rapine. The phenomenon is amply documented from earliest antiquity, and it survived in the Middle Ages. It is necessary to distinguish among: (1) adolescents who, during their initiatory probation, had to hide far from their villages and live by rapine; (2) immigrants seeking a new territory to settle in; (3) outlaws or fugitives seeking a place of refuge. But all these young men behaved "like wolves", were called "wolves", or enjoyed the protection of a wolf-god.

    During his probation the Lacedaemonian kouros led the life of a wolf for an entire year: hidden in the mountains, he lived on what he could steal, taking care that no one saw him. Among a number of lndo-European peoples, emigrants, exiles, and fugitives were called "wolves." The Hittite laws already said of a proscribed man that he had "become a wolf.'' And in the laws of Edward the Confessor (ca. AD. 1000), the proscribed man had to wear a wolf headed mask (wolfhede). The wolf was the symbol of the fugitive, and many gods who protected exiles and outlaws had wolf deities or attributes. Examples are Zeus Lykoreius or Apollo Lykeios. [Altheim, Roman Religion, pp. 260 ff.] Romulus and Remus, sons of the wolf-god Mars and suckled by the she-wolf of the Capitol, had been "fugitives." According to the legend, Romulus established a place of refuge for exiles and outlaws on the Capitol. Servius informs us that this asylum was under the protection of the god Lucoris. And Lucoris was identified with Lykoreus of Delphi, himself a wolf-god. Finally, a third hypothesis that may explain the name of the Dacians centers on the ability to change into a wolf by the power of certain rituals. Such a transformation may be connected with lycanthropy properly speaking—an extremely widespread phenomenon, but more especially documented in the Balkano-Carpathian region—or with a ritual imitation of the behavior and outward appearance of the wolf. Ritual imitation of the wolf is a specific characteristic of military initiations and hence of the Männerbünde, the secret brotherhoods of warriors. There are reasons to think that such rites and beliefs, bound up with a martial ideology, are what made it possible to assimilate fugitives, exiles, and proscribed men to wolves. To subsist, all these outlaws behaved like bands of young warriors, that is, like real "wolves."




    Last edited by HERO; 03-10-2018 at 01:21 AM.

  2. #2
    Dauphin's Avatar
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    My guess, based on a glance at his personality and how he comes across in the interview given, is EIE-Ni. Though LIE-Ni is also likely.

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    I have always thought Se-SEE.

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    reminder to read the sacred and prophane soon, thank you!

    https://www.realheathenry.com/downlo...ane-Eliade.pdf

    Tons of Ni anyway ~

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    Mircea Eliade - INFJ - Dostoyevsky


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    On the other hand, I knew myself well enough to realize that I was really expecting to fall in love. In the first place, I could not imagine “student life” without a great love affair. Also, I hoped that by being in love I might become free from those attacks of melancholy, or that they might at least become bearable. This ambivalent attitude toward love was to remain with me until late in life. Rica managed marvelously to encourage it. Sometimes I felt that she regarded me as something more than a “good friend,” that she was trying to attract and charm me (her incomprehensible silences, the happiness that came over her face when she saw me, and the like). At other times, on the contrary, she seemed distant, or she would declare that she had never had such a good friend as I, a true “confidant.” And yet I knew very little about her or her past. I would encounter her frequently at the library of the King Carol I Foundation, surrounded by books, preparing papers for the Romance languages seminar. Even though she always passed her examinations, I never had the impression that she was really enthused over philology, literary history, or folklore. She was studying conscientiously for her degree and in order to become a teacher of Romanian language and literature. At first I had thought she was different from all the other girls because she had read several books by Romain Rolland and Remy de Gourmont. In time, however, I discovered lacunae which seemed to me inadmissible, and I would force her to read Dostoevsky, Novalis, and Knut Hamsun. Certain articles I wrote were intended to teach her and encourage her to like the authors I liked. Among other things, I published in Cuvântul a series of pieces entitled “Men from Books,” which was about several characters who interested me at some point: Sixtine, Brand, Martin Eden—and even Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis!
    This sounds like something an Ni-EIE would write

    3w4 synflow with a link to type 9

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