Bewildered,
despairing, perplexed by the stupidities of society in Ceaușescu’s Romania,
that chaotic prison camp, an artificial, brutal world, agonisingly situated
beyond any means of understanding. I could find no way to get to grips with
that world. I could not mould myself to it, because that would have meant
making too many compromises. Rather than banal happiness in semi-complicity
with an aggressive and stultifying regime, I preferred to attempt to construct
a world of my own, as far away as possible from the exterior world. Little by
little, I began to take refuge in my own thoughts, in my own imagination, and
ultimately in my own memory. For, memory was, I believed, what ultimately
remained, the fundament, the firm ground in which I rooted myself when buffeted
by disquietudes and desperate lack, by the paradoxes and antinomies that
continually assailed me.
But what kind of
memory can you construct for yourself in times constrained by fate and by
forces beyond your will? Life itself was changed, it had to follow a particular
path, flanked on either side by unscalable walls. I had to try to slip sideways
through life, eluding life, because I was always aware that I did not have
access to life’s most elementary, fundamental aspect: freedom. Only when you
live in such wretched, even surreal, conditions, which verge on the ridiculous
and the terrifying at the same time, do you begin to appreciate, in your unhappy
lucidity, that the right to freedom is perhaps the most important
characteristic and necessity of the human spirit. It was then that I discovered
what freedom meant: the elementary right to live in an authentic way, to choose
the experiences that can lead to the fulfilment of that absolutely necessary
sentiment of what it is to be human—the negation of one’s own nothingness. It
is probably the authentic and preeminent right to enter the sacred space of
spirituality, in other words, the sole chance to live in the presence of a
“presence”,
regardless of what kind of spirituality it might be: God or the Absolute, the
Platonic ideas or Aristotelian essence, Cartesian self-awareness or Kantian
transcendental logic, the Hegelian Idea or Heidegger’s Being. It is whatever
might be beyond the unbearable constraints of the immanence of my being, of my
banal everyday life. But I understood once again that in the
communist world even the right to negate one’s other nothingness was utterly
forbidden.
