Читать книгу Gaudeamus - Mircea Eliade - Страница 9

FIVE: THE PROFESSOR

After the holidays, philosophy lectures were less well attended. I met students who did not understand a thing the professor said, whether in lectures or to them personally. They had assumed philosophy was a discipline that began, like any other, with an exposition of the fundamentals: atoms, chemical processes, basic theories. But at the university, philosophy was neither a science, nor a methodology, but a conglomerate of courses. And for every course there was a professor who lectured on whatever was of interest to him.

None of these students really understood what philosophy was. In seminars, they had learned that it covered a wide range of varied and interesting topics. In History of Philosophy, they had discovered fascinating things about the pre-Socratics. But in Logic, nothing; because the professor spoke too clearly and too convincingly, after a few lessons the audience had lost the thread of the course and the professor had found five others.

Those students who had enrolled for Philosophy without prior studies or experience found themselves disoriented and missed lectures, preferring to attend the History of Modern Romanian Literature, where the professor was witty and the class was always in high spirits. In the Literature Faculty there was a custom that no student could go into journalism without engaging in vulgar polemics with the Professor of Romanian Literature and Literary Aesthetics or fawning over him in seminars. The professor was middle-aged, plump, myopic and kind. His speech was irresistible, slightly rambling, with excusable grammatical mistakes. He lived only for literature, and as such, an institute and academic discipline had been entrusted to him, thanks to the kindness of the government and student donations. But he did not have any real followers. In reality, the plight of the professor was tragic and somewhat pitiful; he was admired and respected only by those students who had books to print but too little courage to look for their own publisher. Or students who aspired to departmental chairs, conferences, academic posts, or literary scholarships. The professor had a strange and perverse naiveté. He understood practically nothing, he spoke and wrote in such a way that nobody might understand him, and yet he was thought of as the country’s only real critic of aesthetics, and regarded as a genius, because he was mocked, was good, was kind, and smiled.

Seemingly innocuous, he nonetheless contributed year after year to lies and the suspension of literary common sense. He fanatically – perhaps regretfully – persecuted all those who opposed him or his system of aesthetics. The few who had the courage to stand up to him, suffered the consequences for years: this or that publishing house would be forever barred to them; various obscure journals insulted or ignored them; and at the University they would encounter mistrust and animosity. The Professor of Literary Aesthetics was both feared and ridiculed. He was despotic and rejected doctoral theses that failed to make reference to his system. No other man in the country was the target of such furious abuse, but he took no offense. His ripostes were pitiful, his attempts at polemic met with little success. He was the most celebrated professor at the University, with the largest and most distinguished lecture hall. Students from every year and from every college attended his lectures.

His voice was irresistible. Only the young women were incapable of understanding why the maestro was persecuted. They listened to him, and since they could not understand him, they concluded that he must be profound. The girls had read his nebulous, interminable course, which only increased their respect for him, since they were unable to learn it by heart. These young women listened in delight to the verbal attacks launched by the young men, but disagreed with them, unless the speaker happened to be dark and handsome.

Then there were the French Literature and Philology lectures. These were attended mainly by sentimental couples: girls who worked at the Academy Library, and boys with a romantic or nationalist bent. The students of French Literature were overwhelmingly female. Fragrances and rustling gowns descended on the lecture hall, the same as in a salon. The couples seated themselves at the back, by the windows.

Art History lectures were given in a cosy auditorium, where the professor used a riding crop to point at the works of art projected onto the walls. In the dark, the lecture hall was like a body breathing passionately, but warily. Fashionably modern couples attended: girls who scorned sentimentalism, and young men who knew how to take advantage of the bits the girls did not scorn. They sat next to each other, with briefcases and furs on their knees. Gritting their teeth, they all repeated the same move, which they had discovered in some novel then en vogue. In time, inhibition faded. Each knew that his or her neighbour was equally distracted, and many an all too genuine gasp failed to shock anyone. When the lights came back on, they would be revealed, blushing, flustered, overheated.

Rumours of the particular advantages of the Art History course spread astonishingly far and wide. Consequently, as we left the lecture hall, we would meet students from the Polytechnic and girls from Pharmacology. A law student friend always attended with a beautiful, impish girl, who had not yet finished school. The few demure girls in class sought refuge in the front rows or seated themselves on folding chairs along the walls. The boys arrived ready for action.

The professors knew what went on in the lecture hall. But the Art History course could only be taught in the dark. And thus, the vice was as inoffensive as the practice was universal.

In philosophy seminars one short, blond, articulate, well-dressed third-year student always spoke. The students at the back nicknamed him Ghița, while those in the front called him La Fontaine, and girls referred to him as Gigi, because he was charming and bold.

He would stand up and begin:

‘To highlight from a strictly pedagogical and rigorously scholastic standpoint contingently relative to time, place and persons’ – here he smiled – ‘and to attempt to subsume those elements directly fecundated by the formal exercise of methods that do not rule out an interest in the gnoseological, accessible via a new structuration.’

Nobody ever understood what Ghița was trying to say. The professors meekly put up with him. None of his classmates dared challenge him. If challenged, he would respond promptly and obscurely:

‘Kantian ideation and rationalisation though recurrence …’

He was always in search of original ways of putting things. Even when paying a compliment he would employ dozens of epithets.

‘You display accessible flair in your ethical symptoms, or rather in your neurologico-spiritual manifestations, or in the equation of your inevitable capitulations …’

One evening a student came to class who was just as short, erudite, and well-dressed. He was known as the Galvanometer or Little Kant. He spoke with the voice of an adolescent and pounded his fists on his bench.

‘You’re a subversive!’ he accused Ghița.

‘You’re dicotyledonous!’

‘Who, me?’

‘You’re amphibiously metaphysical!’

‘Place that definition on the plane of coherency and obvious logic.’

‘I do not accept methodological advice in the form of personal dialectical rejoinders.’

‘You’re impertinent.’

‘Peripherally corrosive.’

The professor, dumbfounded, intervened.

‘Gentlemen, please!’

‘Please retract your words.’

‘I retract them, very well, imputing to myself only my inevitable organic predilection towards …’

The listeners in the back moaned.

‘Ghița!’

Astonished:

‘Who, me?’

Philosophy courses were attended by serious, hard-working, half-educated students. The uninitiated had no hope of understanding, while the half-educated matured in their awareness and understanding of the subject through self-study. The only course students attended even if they stood no chance of following the discussion was Logic and Metaphysics. The young professor had a swarthy, furrowed face, and oddly blinking deep-set eyes, with blue irises rimmed by dark circles.

The professor would enter smiling, his shoulders slightly stooped. He sat himself comfortably on his chair, without the usual academic gravitas, and began to speak naturally and clearly, surveying the class. Each sentence seemed to be conceived then and there. He took pleasure in a newly coined expression, and would repeat it, modulate it, convey it while leaning forward across his desk, he would articulate it with perfect emphasis, strip it naked. The syntagma would lead him down a line of reasoning the results of which were impossible to anticipate. The classroom ran forward with him for a few steps and then listened as he retreated, tormented by the darkness still enveloping the new formula, saddened by his listeners’ mental darkness. He was tempted all the while to leave the thought unfinished and to revert to a more familiar means of expressing it, one more accessible to the students. And so the hour passed with the tormented professor at his desk, and a stunned audience in their seats, seduced by the agony conveyed by his irises, the dark circles under his eyes, his stooped posture, his gestures, and his probing questions: ‘Is it not so? Is it not so?’

When his class remained inert for too long, the professor revived them with sallies against philosophy textbooks and against Kant. The professor divulged what was missing from the logic textbooks was logic.

‘But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to read them. Read them, but don’t believe them.’

The girls concealed their smiles behind their handkerchiefs. After he left, they commented on the professor’s eyes and his seductive ugliness; the boys voiced their misgivings. The literature students could not understand how he had been awarded a PhD for a thesis that was on mathematics. The polytechnic college students could not understand how he could be an Orthodox mystic. The theology students could not forgive his jokes or his secular leanings.

To me, all these things seemed natural and commendable. I had long since learned not be surprised by a geometer poet, a musical philologist, or a mystical professor of anatomy. But I was troubled by his Orthodox fanaticism. I understood that his religious experience could be both authentic and outside the bounds of logic. But what about his respect for dogmas, taken to be not only nuclei of potentiated faith, but also actual truths that could be rationally proven? Was his Orthodox faith actually or implicitly the result of some need for pure spirituality? Or was it based on theological conclusions?

The life of the Logic Professor provided me with the certainty that answers to the crises originating in my adolescence would eventually become clear to me. If that life was the one he allowed to be glimpsed. And, in particular, if he did not believe in the primacy of grace. But what about his state of eternal temptation, now vanquished, now victorious, glinting in triumph within blue pupils framed by dark rings? Disquiet, which was more than mere logic clashing with metaphysics and theology, could not exist in the mind of one who had found God. What if the professor did not believe in God, as I did not believe in Him, despite the callings that trouble the soul? If he did not believe, then what hope did I have of finding peace on the path I walked, led by destiny and self-sacrifice? What other path was open to me, if the Logic Professor had not already followed it ahead of me?

And despite everything, what if he still believed? How could I tell him that I was a Christian who did not believe in God? How could I tell him that Jesus was sometime made manifest to me, in myself and from myself? Could I logically say that God did not exist, because ignorant and prideful sinner that I was, I had not yet had the opportunity to make his acquaintance? And this relationship with God – something I knew nothing about – how could I discuss it with him? Could I speak with him honestly, or try to test him with questions? But how could I test him, the university’s most astute dialectician?

With every new logic lecture I grew more and more troubled. Over the last few years, I had been plunged into confusion and desperation every time I had tried to follow the problem through to its logical conclusion. I was dissatisfied with classic solution once I realised the subjectivity inherent in the divisions of concepts, judgements, and reasoning; as soon as I understood for myself that judgements were not always the product of relationships having been established between two concepts, or between a concept and an object, or between two objects, I abandoned it. I reached the point where I could not distinguish a concept from a judgement. The helped me to understand the only distinction: the existential element; the difference between the noun ‘thunder’ and the verb ‘to thunder’. From there, I was able to move forward by myself. But I became so confused that I had to refer back to the textbook. I studied the logic of Benedetto Croce. And in the first few chapters, I found snatches of my own observations, which were rarely different to other conclusions. Croce was both clear and obscure. It was therefore necessary that I should gain a better understanding of Hegelian logic. From Hegel, whom I did not always understand, I came back to the moderns. I spent excruciating weeks with Gentile, Goblot, Enriques. One morning, confused, depressed, exhausted, I hid the books away on a shelf, without having come to any firm conclusions.

I decided to speak to the professor. He smiled encouragingly all the while. Sheepishly, I rambled on, without managing to reveal to him my disquiet. He interrupted.

‘What a happy age, nineteen – so much ahead of you, no reason to rush. How should I put it? One understands such matters only after not understanding them for a very long time. It took me seven years to find an answer, although I have yet to understand the problem of induction. And there are questions I hope I shall never fully comprehend.’

We walked side by side, next to the university building. The professor spoke to me in a kind and friendly tone. I almost asked:

‘Do you believe?’

But I knew that he could not answer me.

‘We can’t understand anything on our own. It comes to us, at a certain age, like the sexual urge or arthritis.’

‘But I want to find an answer, through logic.’

‘I suggest you first become completely and utterly confused. Afterwards, you’ll begin to see clearly, to understand organically, effortlessly, without torment.’

‘What should I do?’

‘Waste your time L do you even know how to waste time? Grab a piece of paper and doodle on it with a pencil until evening. Then visit a tavern! But whatever you do, don’t show off, and don’t talk about philosophy – you’d ruin everything. Drink, my boy!’

I looked at him, stunned. The professor’s blue eyes twinkled in their dark sockets. He was pale, very pale, with devilishly arched eyebrows.

‘You are precocious. But what’s worse, at your age, I drank all the time and I still turned out badly, a university professor. But what about you? Do you drink coffee?’

‘Sometimes.’

I was hesitant.

‘Don’t be shy. I don’t walk around on stilts, unlike some of my honourable colleagues. You don’t seem to be completely disinterested, and my position doesn’t forbid me from offering a cup of coffee and a cigarette to a young friend.’

What did he talk to me about at the coffee shop? About Mach, Pas-cal, the Italians, Poincaré, Descartes. About Descartes in particular.

‘When you go to Germany, you’ll understand Descartes. Over there, the people walk down the street differently. Do you realise how much you can learn in a city where people walk differently than they do here?’

For every author he had an exclamation, an epithet, a parenthetical aside, praise or invective. Whenever he gave me a friendly look, I was tempted to ask:

‘Do you believe?’

He avoided the subject of religion. But he did make one regretful observation.

‘I know a Christian who has two atheist daughters. Even though he’s ascetic and spiritual, he still hasn’t kicked them out. Whether or not he realises it, he’s either insane or God …’

We parted ways that evening. As he shook my hand, he advised:

‘If you want to understand religion, study logic, medicine and biology, textbooks on biology in particular. Religion wins the case only in absentia.’

On the way home, alone and confused, I fell to thinking.

My professor was a genius, or perhaps a practical joker, but how was I supposed to know which?

When I arrived home, I postponed my search for an answer, sine die. On my table were plenty of other books and blank paper to tempt me. On my table were also many incomplete thoughts, a burning desire in my soul, and black ink, lots of black ink.

When I told Radu about my meeting with the Logic professor, I made a surprising discovery: my friend and drinking companion felt a need for Philosophy.

After bragging about Nonora – who had still not let him get any higher than her thighs – he asked me the kind of questions that I, and all those not content with platitudes, could never answer.

I had never heard him talk about ‘salvation’ before.

‘It’s strange, but I’ve actually been thinking about it for a while. Through prayer, I learned that I’m going to be saved.’

‘How exactly is it that you will be saved?’

‘I’m not exactly sure. Maybe by being immortal? I know that even though I’m physically going to die, my soul isn’t going to die. I’m sure of it; although, I can’t offer you any proof, but I tell you I’m not making it up, it’s not a lie. I know that even as a sinner, I will live forever. I’m not scared of death, but I am scared of death without Jesus.’

I was surprised as I listened to him. This insight into my friend’s soul troubled me. I had never suspected that mysticism, which I had regarded as second-hand and jumbled, could contain such Christian simplicity. Radu was so Christian; and also so sinful.

‘Please don’t let any of our friends find out about this, or Nonora.’

I waged the bitter struggle of one who strives, against all odds, to bring his dreams to fruition. Winter came to a close with my soul having endured the storms of autumn and the promises of spring.

*

Now, as I write, I see all the disquiet: the impatience, the desire to know and master myself spread out before me. I am aware of my actions, my work, my fears, my joys, my sorrows. But I understand nothing, and the uncertainty torments me, and no one can see the glowing embers in my soul, not even the professor with blue twinkling eyes and arched, devilish eyebrows. The professor was the only one who could help me. But he was also the one who told me to be disquieted.

This advice was more sincere and more profound than I could yet realise.