But to be an individual means embodying your own truths, suffering your own experiences, and inventing your own style. But these things can only occur by renouncing facility, and the most unfortunate facility comes from these so-called national characters, formed by the sedimentation of collective mediocrity, which lies there ready-made. National character is by definition that which remains in a culture after you have removed the personal effort involved in thinking, the personal experience of life and the triumph of individual creation. That’s all.

Two weeks of abuse, polemics and revulsion ensued, to which Vieru did not respond. But from Berlin, where he was delivering a paper at the Institute of Current Affairs, Professor Ghiţă sent him a blunt telegram:

Read your views in The Universe. You’re a wretched fool.

To which he replied:

Wretched fool, perhaps. But not of the common kind. My style’s my own.

3

Yesterday, the professor’s opening lecture. The atmosphere of an important happening, with a note of festivity and tension in the air, as in an arena where, from one moment to the next, something decisive will be thrashed out. The banging of the desktops, voices calling out from one end of the hall to the other, people noisily taking leave of one another, familiar faces, unfamiliar faces – all mixed together confusedly, humming with curiosity and impatience.

Vieru, on his own in the back row, irritated, was drumming his fingers on the bench. I was afraid he’d be recognized, which would have caused a rather tiresome commotion during a lecture that would discuss him enough as it was.

Marin Dronţu was absent. ‘I’m not coming. It makes me sick. Look, I admit I can’t be objective when it comes to the master. I’m not a critic and I don’t know about that sort of thing. I love the master and believe in his destiny. So what do you expect me to gain from Ghiţă Blidaru’s lecture? Whatever he says, whether he’s right or not, it’ll just make me bitter. And I don’t want to be bitter.’

Basically the professor’s lecture – though he advertised it as vehement – was not vehement. It was clear that it was merely the threshold of an entire system of explanations and categorization going well beyond the particular case of Uioara.

I transcribe here from the notes I managed to jot in haste.

Let’s be clear: the issue here is not the value of the architect Vieru’s project in Uioara. Perhaps it shows the mark of genius. What is questionable, however, is its significance in relation to the Romanian spirit and, for this lecture, to the Romanian economy. My question is whether a person has the right to exercise genius when this goes against the needs of the land on which he lives. Further: if someone, as an individual, may interfere in the latent process of the collective life-force, modifying it, imposing upon it an alien, though perhaps superior, project. In fact, the claim to superiority becomes entirely spurious when two differing structures are involved. A shower of rain isn’t superior to a drainpipe, nor a drainpipe superior to a fork. You cannot establish a scale of values between differing phenomena. The crime of an idiot tiger aspiring to be a paramecium would not be less than the crime of a genius paramecium dreaming of being a tiger. A betrayal, a degradation, is involved in both cases, and you won’t find it written anywhere that, from the point of view of life, the degradation of a paramecium is less tragic than that of a tiger.

At Uioara, in five years, a daring man has replaced a settlement of viticulturists with an industrial complex. Based on what calculation? For the sake of the prejudice that values a smokestack above a grapevine. Well, this is a monstrous judgement. Neither a smokestack nor a grapevine, taken alone, mean anything. They only become meaningful when brought into a family, a structure. Outside of this structure, they remain discrete, dead abstractions.