Vol. 4 No. 3 · 18 February 1982
pages 23-24 | 3067 words

One of a Kind

Julian Barnes

I always had this theory about Romania. Well, not a proper theory: more an observation, I suppose. Have you ever realised how, in various fields, Romania has managed to produce one – but only one – significant artist? It’s as if the race only has enough strength for one of anything, like those plants which channel all their energy into a single bloom. So: one great sculptor – Brancusi. One playwright – lonesco. One composer – Enescu. One cartoonist – Steinberg. Even one great popular myth – Dracula.

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Letters

Vol. 4 No. 11 · 17 June 1982

From Jan Smith

SIR: In response to Julian Barnes’s story about Rumanians (LRB, Vol. 4, No 3) may I nominate the one Rumanian aphorist (and exile’s exile), E. M. Cioran. Actually, he is everyone’s nearly invisible guide through the last decades of the 20th century: ‘Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.’ ‘What makes destruction suspect is its facility: anyone who comes along can excel in it.’ ‘All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.’ ‘Terror of the future is always grafted onto the desire to experience that terror.’ So it seems.

Jan Smith
Buffalo, New York

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