If you really require a definition, try this one: logic is the systemization of intuition.

And laugh.

*

The lecture on Adam Smith:

If you were to ask me what we are doing here, in a class in which the parentheses are longer than the treatment given to the subject of the course, I might respond as follows: we are disposing of values. Clearing them away like dead wood. Intelligence, individualism, free choice, positivism … And we are looking for a single ‘value’, one that contains them all. That is called, if I am not mistaken, life.

*

Mondays and Fridays, from six to seven, Blidaru’s course. We’re a small group of regulars, and we know each other but don’t talk. Sometimes, a new figure appears and takes a seat at the back. I like to look around from time to time and observe, as the lecture progresses, the growing surprise on the face of the new arrival.

*

He spoke today of the superiority of the physiocrats over all the modern schools of economic thinking. Too broad for me to transcribe my course notes here. He spoke stridently, aggressively, with sudden twists in the movement of the argument. (The effect is that of an intelligent agitator working a crowd.) We were waiting, intrigued, for the denouement – when a military march struck up outside our window. A passing company with its colours.

He jumped from the lectern, sprang towards the window, opened it and stood there watching, nodding his head to the rhythm of the big drum.

He then turned to us.

‘Isn’t the street wonderful?’

*

The third lecture on the physiocrats. Blidaru’s course rearranges hierarchies with the greatest of ease. Only a couple of words on what the textbook considers sacrosanct, then ten furious lectures on what the textbook despises most.

There is an element in physiocrat economics which is more powerful than any of their naiveties. Of course, those old men of 1750 had no idea of the mechanism by which goods circulated and what they imagined in this realm is romantic and fantastic as well as false. But for all these errors, there remains one intuition worth incomparably more than any dry statistic. Their economics starts with the earth and returns to the earth. Behold a peasant idea, a simple idea of life, an idea that comes from nature, from the most natural everyday human intuitions. Nothing can demolish such a simple, clear truth.

Disoriented as we are, we will perhaps one day find the truth that returns us to the soil, simplifying everything and installing a new order. One not invented by us, but grown by us.

*

They’re talking again of closing the university. The fighting has intensified. The faculty has been under military occupation for a week.

What remains is Ghiţă Blidaru’s course, hidden in that obscure room on the second floor, where nobody goes because nobody knows about it.

Evening. The dorms as silent as a snowy wasteland. From time to time, in the corridor, tired footfalls, a door closing, a cry that goes unanswered.

You can work well in this silence. I re-read an economic treatise with Ghiţă’s notes in my hand. An impassioned confrontation.

*

It’s worrying. There were too many people at the lecture. Strange hostile faces in the front rows.

Blidaru, brilliant. Success is ultimately achievable, perhaps. But if things don’t work out? We’ll see.

No, this is one thing I won’t give up. I’ve left civil law, left the aesthetics course, left and will leave any course you want, history, sociology, Chinese or German, but I will not give up Ghiţă Blidaru’s course.

I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.

Some of them stopped me at the door.

‘Student ID.’

It would have been stupid to present it. I tried to rush past them.