I haven’t yet discovered a good technique for conversing with him. There’s so much I’d like to say and it is only with difficulty I manage to speak. Sometimes, at home or on the way to his place, I make a plan, studiously, of the things I should say to him, but, once I’m there with him, it all falls apart, as though he’s one of those people who makes the rules for everybody else, obliging you to submit to their temper and style as well as to their arguments. There is so much passion in this subtly constructed man, he hides so many storms with self-control and his rigorous thinking. He is the only man to whom I have ever felt it necessary to submit myself, but I do it with a sense of fulfilment and reintegration rather than of surrender.

*

I asked him a few days ago if he thought architecture condemned me to overly specific concerns and limited me to a field of entirely professional problems. And if I wouldn’t be distracted, whatever my job, by what seems to me paramount and essential; to be connected with the ferment of my times, sensitive to it, to its preoccupations and its general thrust.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘you can’t talk in terms of limitations. Architecture, medicine, music and economics are all planets in the same solar system. Whatever we’re involved in or working at individually, we reach our conclusions using guiding principles which are common to us all. The various truths and ideas about life in any period compose an organic unity, like members of a family.

‘It’s naive to think that a revolution which starts in one place, in one discipline, stops there. History is made from within rather than without, from the centre rather than the periphery. Crudely, we only pick up on the immediate, visible changes that impinge upon our lives. As a result we imagine that a revolution is first and foremost a political or economic upheaval. This is blissful naivety. A revolution can begin in physics, economics, astronomy, mathematics or anywhere else. It’s enough for something to be changed in the structure of a single thought or human life, because from that moment virtually everything is going to be changed. Everything in this world is connected; there are no isolated facts or preoccupations. Everything participates in a cycle. Why would you wish architecture to be absent from this chain? Relax and do your work there: whether you wish it or not, we’ll meet up eventually, you practising architecture, me in political economy, someone else doing anthropology, someone else again doing algebra. The vehicles vary: the road is the same.’

*

One evening recently, returning from Ghiţă Blidaru’s, I recalled how brutal my first conversation with him had been. Conversation! If you could call it that. I’d stopped him to complain about being thrown out of his course. How smartly he brushed me off! He didn’t even want to look straight at me. And today, remembering, I shudder with shame. How I suffered then. I spoke to him about that day and, though I feared he would see this as some kind of impudent reproach, I couldn’t refrain from asking:

‘Don’t you want to tell me what happened then, why you were so abrupt, so cutting?’

‘I don’t know, I can’t remember. Maybe I was bored, or upset. I don’t recall. But, to tell you the truth, I’m not sorry. I’ve never liked being too amiable with people, even with those I’m fond of. Particularly not with them. I tell myself, out of a hundred times you prod a person, perhaps twice you’ll get their attention usefully. When I walk through the grass, I don’t watch out for the blades of grass or beetles getting walked on.