Читать книгу Gaudeamus - Mircea Eliade - Страница 8

FOUR: INTERMEZZO

It was a dark and restless winter for me. For two months, from when I first met the chairman to the night I parted with Nonora, I had been a stranger to myself. I felt, at an organic level, how I had changed under the influence of the visitors to my attic.

I had grown incoherent, disoriented, beset by weaknesses, like all the other members of the choir. I spent too much time thinking about Nonora, and these thoughts did nothing to enrich my soul, but rather upset it, sucked it dry, coarsened it.

The walk home was excruciating. I had felt so wonderful, every evening, in a full attic. Warmth, cigarette smoke, young voices, Nonora’s nearness, Radu’s friendship, Gaidaroff’s jokes – but now, silence. I had forgotten about the temptations that overwhelm the soul on solitary evenings. I rediscovered the austere voluptuousness of a day concluded in silence, at a wooden table, unknown and unwanted by anyone. The nostalgic serenity printed on my brow by temptations overcome, by a society life left behind once and for all, by the joys the soul had tasted, savoured, and never revealed to another soul.

Day after day I forced myself back onto my old path. I sank into difficult questions, fretted about the decisions I had to make, without having the courage to do so. Once again my nights were disturbed by insomnia-induced anxiety. I promised myself that I would not avoid the deepest self-scrutiny.

My first decision: to repair the deficiencies I had discovered in the autumn. I rediscovered the discipline of morning study in my attic, writing notes and abstracts. But such work neither drained nor soothed me. Torment came in the form of Nonora and the experiences I foresaw with the continuation of our relationship. I told myself: that was life, this is reading; that was courage, freshness, novelty, this is undemanding cowardice and vicariousness. And I was not sure whether I should congratulate myself on the step I had taken, one that provided me with a purpose and focus, but which had, perhaps, separated me from life.

I attempted a return to asceticism. Insincere, and subject to Radu’s temptations, my asceticism would soon fail. I had resigned myself to submit to biology, without sentimentality and without wasting any more time. I did not want to squander myself on pointless sexual liaisons. What could Nonora have offered me in exchange for my self-denial? A few months of sexual companionship, and even then her promises were doubtful. But I would have welcomed those months, genuinely and with arms flung wide, on a purely sexual basis, as befits two creatures with different souls and minds. But the danger lay elsewhere: in the derivatives of the carnal act, in the sentimentalism and posturing. I was afraid we would lie to ourselves and waste time in cheap and idle talk. The time of my youth, dedicated to struggle or delight. Time, which I fiercely desired and fecundated with my blood and brains, would drain away to nothing with Nonora, as with any other thoughtless and mediocre youth.

The sincerity I had struggled stubbornly to maintain would have been destroyed, all the experiences of adolescence annulled. I would have become a statistic, a marionette, a frame animated by the life of other bodies.

If I only loved her.

The hours were more and more my own, and yet they brought me no solace. I waited for it; a tranquillity as cold and serene as the clarity of the sea after a storm. But my soul was murky, murky.

Difficult days followed, in a snowed-in attic. My decision to remain alone made its impression on my new friends. The chairman found another headquarters, in a room at some company. I was so sad the day they took away the files, the leftovers from the raffle, the library. Nothing remained but shadows in an empty room and memories in my soul. An autumn and a past started to coalesce. Oh Nonora, Nonora – if only her lips and her curves had never tempted me, I would have remained close to everyone else. I would have come to know mediocre happiness and the dull grey of a life lived, without any significant steps forward. I would have acquired the cynical, sentimental bitterness of those who say: I was so alive when I was young! Why do people confuse wasting youth with living it? Why do my peers not understand that a certain kind of personality, guided by a certain kind of mind, can, over the course of a few vivid and intense weeks, experience whole years’ worth of their hopes and dreams? And why do they not understand that the imperative of youth is always to move on?

I waited, waited for the quiet and calm of winter thaw. But once my troubles with Nonora had departed, other troubles took hold of me. I was not trying to find out who I was. None of the people who endured the flesh and the spirit alongside me knew themselves, so I told myself. I would never succeed in knowing myself as well as I knew my library. But sometimes, I surprised myself. I had moments of clarity; I was struck by the feeling that this was me, and anything I did or said differently came not from me, but from someone else inside me. I tried to make sense of these experiences. But I found little success; they were mutually exclusive, contradictory, and cancelled each other out.

I decided to choose certain of my personal traits and declare: this is me! I correlated these features and commanded myself not to live inwardly except to nourish them and help them to grow. I wanted to create a unified whole, no matter the risk of self-­denial and self-mortification. Otherwise, I would never accomplish any of the things I had postponed until full adulthood. Maturity meant oneness, I decided.

My youth had to have some meaning outside of books. I needed to start maturing, to prepare my soul for the revelations that would soon bestow life upon me. And this new life would take place only inside me, without anyone suspecting a thing. Soon, all my supervision and fostering of my inner life would release into my mind and soul a flood, whose source no one would be able to comprehend.

After a winter that had begun violently and ended in darkness, I knew and felt a single truth: that I would live two lives, one hidden, the other in full light.

The subterranean life would dominate, and when put to the test, in times of crisis, I would know which to choose.