Without taking the slightest notice of our presence, Herr Alexianu opined that this suppleness of the finger joints pointed to a generous character.
Fräulein Iliuţ gave a quiet, somewhat melancholic laugh between her piled-up shoulders, in the painfully transparent aura of those used to abstinence and self-denial.
“Don’t say a word,” Herr Alexianu objected resolutely. “I know what you’re going to answer. But that doesn’t contradict what I’m getting at. Because you can be the most generous person precisely because you are the poorest. My friend Năstase, who, if he only wanted to, could be our country’s greatest writer — perhaps not as a poet, but as a novelist, or an essayist, because his insights are astounding — my friend Năstase says that the only fully convincing proof of love that he knows is cash. ‘I’ve held many women in my arms,’ he says — and he’s not showing off, his triumphs in this field are common knowledge. Năstase believes that the assertion I love you forever is true in the throes of happiness, when the present moment merges with eternity, when time is rescinded. Are you following me? Philosophically speaking, this is extraordinarily interesting. Happiness is the equivalent of time that has been extinguished. It is in the present moment, fleeting and timeless like eternity. Practically speaking, happiness and eternity are one and the same. So for Năstase the assertion that I love you forever is completely true, precisely for that moment of highest happiness, when our earthly self is dissolved in the act of love, which makes this related to death, according to Năstase. But where time comes into play, so does matter. Without matter time is unthinkable, just as matter is unthinkable outside of time. Thus the only guarantee for love inside of time is through matter. Money, according to Năstase, symbolizes both matter as well as the immaterial value of happiness. Hence true proof of love is money.”
Fräulein Iliuţ nodded with kind understanding, as her delicate spider hands busied themselves with sewing.
“His assertion is unassailable, except from the standpoint of a most banal, popular concept of morality,” Herr Alexianu declared, countering an objection that no one had raised. “Năstase is by no means amoral, quite the contrary. He stands against every bogus and hypocritical convention. And not from the flippant position of a libertine, but rather out of a profound new morality. For instance, when he decides not to pay a bill from his tailor and tears it up with the words “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” he is making an ironic — I’m tempted to say pedagogical — statement, pour épater les bourgeois. What has outlived its time must be destroyed if you are going to create something new. We are in the process of founding a newspaper, a political-literary journal. But politics for us has nothing to do with what usually passes for politics. We understand the word in its original and broadest sense, as in polis—the city. Our goal is to found cities. Not in a literal sense, mind you — just a metaphorical one. Because human thought is metaphoric. The image is the root of everything spiritual, of life itself. And this can be proved mathematically. All beginning is additive, Năstase says, and human beings mere masters of calculation. We are dealing with fundamentals. We have absolutely no intention of revising the world as it is. We don’t believe in the value of reform. We are starting an entirely new world. We are establishing new foundations. The world consists of how we see the world, according to Năstase. Where existing forms are outdated, new ones need to be created … And it’s obvious,” added Herr Alexianu with a scornful frostiness that caught our attention, “that the reason for our program has nothing to do with class struggle. I don’t need to demonstrate that we are completely unbiased in this regard. Those kinds of things take care of themselves. I have the proof.”
He was conspicuously silent for a few seconds. Of course we hadn’t understood a word he was saying, but we had no doubt that his last words and his silence were directed at us. We could clearly feel the effort it cost him not to look in our direction, and Fräulein Iliuţ seemed to sense it as well, because she, too, had glanced up to him instinctively, and her beautiful eyes reflected the exertion present in his own.
What he was saying was disconcerting to us in many ways — primarily because we couldn’t make any overriding sense out of all the strange words and unfamiliar concepts, and whenever we thought we understood what he was getting at, we soon discovered that we were on the wrong track. Now, however, when there was no doubt that he was alluding to us, Herr Alexianu’s statements were excruciating. Because we then assumed that everything else was directed toward us, and so the strain on our concentration was exacerbated by the embarrassment of our inability to understand — that bitter combination that so irritates us as children, and grinds down our beautiful curiosity.
Just as we suffered, for example, because we couldn’t understand how the streetcar’s bow collector could pass through the branching of the electrical wires without getting caught — we had seen it with our own eyes during our walks! — because our imagination wasn’t developed enough to convince us that it didn’t run above the overhead wires but rather glided along their undersides, held up by a flexible spring pressure, so we were also bothered by Herr Alexianu’s inconsiderate monologues, which we couldn’t understand, and which left us feeling that behind the visible and tangible phenomena of the world were hidden secrets to which we had no key, and perhaps never would. Today I’m positive that this scornful cheating of our curiosity was exactly what Herr Alexianu was after, a malicious revenge, because for children curiosity is both hunger and nourishment for life all in one, and to pique it like that and then refuse to satisfy it is tantamount to committing a psychological crime.
But Herr Alexianu seemed to actually savor his tempered-steel disdain. He went on expounding rigorously, but now with greater confidence, more commandingly:
“When I say forms, I mean the spiritual patterns and designs that make up the basis of how we think and perceive, of everything we undertake. But what is passed down to us no longer fits the modern human being. Năstase, however, perceives things in a truly modern way. His thesis is that modern man is far more cerebrally determined than his predecessors. Take careful note of this, because it is enormously significant. It describes in a nutshell how our existence is becoming progressively more abstract. Bear in mind the fact that man no longer has free control over his own instincts, which automatically enabled him to do whatever was necessary to maintain his existence in accord with the demands of nature. Instead he has become dependent on experience that has been handed down — in other words, on education. Until now we have relied on religions to deliver the basic substance of our life feeling. As institutions of convention, constructs that housed the oldest traditions, they were able to impart a certain body of knowledge, which, while perhaps no longer pure, did address a wealth of psychological states that human beings must experience for their well-being on earth. In other words, we are talking about plain and simple mental hygiene. Our ongoing alienation from nature, from a life filled with natural — i.e., violent — situations, causes certain mental functions to wither away. And the entire organism suffers along with the mind. The entire organism. To take a specific example: the way you sit at your work, day in, day out, means that your lungs are never sufficiently oxygenated. Consequently your psyche, too, can only atrophy due to insufficient exercise. Even if you walked upright it wouldn’t help much. You need to work your lungs to the limits of their capacity, precisely what this organ experiences in the wild — during a dangerous hunt, fleeing and pursuing. You need to run, to jump, to box. You also need to be able to hold your breath, three minutes at least, though if you train correctly you can hold it for much longer. Only then — and this requires a daily regimen of gymnastics — would your body reach the natural condition it would have if you had to hunt down all your sustenance.”