Andersen

It is a delightful spring: the birds warble, but you do not understand their song? Well, hear it in a free translation."Get on my back," says the stork, our green island's sacred bird, "and I will carry thee over the Sound. Sweden also has fresh and fragrant beech woods, green meadows and corn-fields. In Scania, with the flowering apple-trees behind the peasant's house, you will think that you are still in Denmark." "Fly with me," says the swallow; "I fly over Holland's mountain ridge, where the beech-trees cease to grow; I fly further towards the north than the stork. You shall see the vegetable mould pass over into rocky ground; see snug, neat towns, old churches and mansions, where all is good and comfortable, where the family stand in a circle around the table and say grace at meals, where the least of the children says a prayer, and, morning and evening, sings a psalm. I have heard it, I have seen it, when little, from my nest under the eaves." "Come with me! come with me!" screams the restless sea-gull, and flies in an expecting circle. "Come with me to the Skjaergaards, where rocky isles by thousands, with fir and pine, lie like flower-beds along the coast; where the fishermen draw the well-filled nets!" "Rest thee between our extended wings," sing the wild swans. "Let us bear thee up to the great lakes, the perpetually roaring elvs (rivers), that rush on with arrowy swiftness; where the oak forest has long ceased, and the birch-tree becomes stunted. Rest thee between our extended wings: we fly up to Sulitelma, the island's eye, as the mountain is called; we fly from the vernal green valley, up over the snow-drifts, to the mountain's top, whence thou canst see the North Sea, on yonder side of Norway. "We fly to Jemteland, where the rocky mountains are high and blue........

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Precépt

"Poţi, dar nu mai are nici un haz. Indiferent ce i-ai spune, nu-l mai scoţi din sărite. Ba se mai uită şi lumea chiorîş la tine, că-i tulburi odihna. Să-i răspunzi de dragul adevărului? Pe cine mai interesează adevărul, cînd la noi ceea ce contează e cine-o zice mai usturător?
Ideea lui Adrian Marino de a le-o zice, cum ar veni, postum celor despre care avea o părere proastă, pe drept sau pe nedrept, reia tradiţia autohtonă a memoriilor cu efect întîrziat. Cu anumite deosebiri.
Liviu Rebreanu a cerut ca Jurnalul său să nu fie publicat decît la 50 de ani de la moartea lui. Avea şi el cîţiva clienţi pe care i-a făcut de două parale, dar îndeobşte persoane care l-au atacat de nenumărate ori, răscolindu-i răuvoitor trecutul. Nu i-a căşunat pe nimeni din senin, iar atitudinea lui era mai degrabă una de tip constatativ „Iar m-a atacat cutare” şi cu cîte un epitet, în coada constatării.
Adrian Marino îi ia la tocat şi pe cei cu care i s-a întîmplat să polemizeze, dar şi pe unii cu care a avut relaţii bune, pe care îi acuză de păcate prin ricoşeu. Cred că cei care au preferat să nu comenteze caracterizările pe care li le-a consacrat Marino au făcut mai bine decît Mircea Dinescu, cel care a declarat pentru EVZ că „Marino minte şi mort” şi că memorialistul ar fi fost informator la SIE. Dinescu n-ar fi trebuit să profite de funcţia lui la CNSAS pentru a-i da o contralovitură, postum, lui Adrian Marino. Chiar dacă teoreticianul literar l-a atacat aiurea la disidenţă, preluînd murdării apărute prin România mare. Văd că după apariţia în EVZ a fragmentelor din cartea lui Adrian Marino a reînviat şi vechea discuţie despre dreptul la contestare. Asta cu trimitere, evident, la aşa-numiţii boieri ai minţii. Ca şi cum Pleşu şi ceilalţi boieri contemporani ai intelectualităţii autohtone ar sta netulburaţi pe niscai socluri,........."..
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Accepții

Aristotel si arta
Instinctele, sentimentele, pasiunile, gândurile, erorile sunt oglindite În opera de artă purificatoare, mai ales în spectacol. Şi folclorul cuprinde elemente artistice şi morale de rangul întâi, înţelepciunea, rafinamentul şi puterea plăsmuirii fiind extinse până în magic şi mitic. Lui Lucian Blaga i-a plăcut să spună că veşnicia s-a născut la sat. Versurile populare culese de el exprimă un rafinament sufletesc pe care nu-l poate depăşi nici cea mai rafinată sensibilitate a unui poet din orice timp. "Dorul transobiectic şi transorizontic, jalea transobiectică şi transorizontică şi urâtul transobiectic şi transorizontic", cum interpretează aşa de inspirat Blaga, acest "în sine" poetic
Eu nu am o poziţie antimodernă - folosesc aci comoda teorie a epocilor, legate de timp şi de stiluri, ca desfăşurări istorice ale spiritului în spaţiu - fiindcă doresc ca omul să devină stâpân raţional al naturii. De aceea, concep o artă modernă În care să nu existe neştiinţa, zănăticia, improprietatea termenilor, impostura, inadvertenţa, murdăria, trivialitatea, josnicia şi revărsările informe ale sufletelor inşilor dezechilibraţi, vicioşi, obosiţi şi neputincioşi. Tristeţea metafizică nu trebuie să nască pofta pentru putred şi deşeu. Sufletele bolnave nu pot crea artă adevărată, construcţiile lor prezentând interes pentru descompuşi. Nu-mi place decadenţa pseudoartistică, aşa cum n-o suport pe cea morală de extracţie joasă, a inşilor care nu pot ieşi din pielea lor, iar când ies în lumea lucrurilor şi a ideilor, le desfigurează. Cum spune Goethe:
"Şi ce-i înalt, se face jos,
Şi ce e drept, se face strâmb,
De văd pe dos, sunt sănătos.
Numai urâtul e frumos."(Faust, Zoilo-Tersit, traducere de Lucian Blaga)
Purii citadini ai vremii noastre îşi înfăşoară vidul lăuntric într-o simbolică obscură, care poate fi numită impostură.
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Urmuz

Fabulă

Cică nişte cronicari
Duceau lipsă de şalvari.
Şi-au rugat pe Rapaport
Să le dea un paşaport.
Rapaport cel drăgălaş
Juca un carambolaj,
Neştiind că-Aristotel
Nu văzuse ostropel.
„Galileu! O, Galileu!
Strigă el atunci mereu –
Nu mai trage de urechi
Ale tale ghete vechi.”
Galileu scoate-o sinteză
Din redingota franceză,
Şi exclamă: „Sarafoff,
Serveşte-te de cartof!”

Morală

Pelicanul sau babiţa.

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The Bee

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be nearly sixty years. Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is because all the important bees are of that sex. In the hive there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the rest are daughters. Some of the daughters are young maids, some are old maids, and all are virgins and remain so. Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away with one of her sons and marries him. The honeymoon lasts only an hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returns home competent to lay two million eggs. This will be enough to last the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of bees are drowned every day, and other hundreds are eaten by birds, and it is the queen's business to keep the population up to standard --say, fifty thousand. She must always have that many children on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, or winter would catch the community short of food. She lays from two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to the demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than are required in a prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and elect a queen that has more sense..... .
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The Titan

When Frank Algernon Cowperwood emerged from the Eastern District Penitentiary in Philadelphia he realized that the old life he had
lived in that city since boyhood was ended. His youth was gone,
and with it had been lost the great business prospects of his
earlier manhood. He must begin again.
It would be useless to repeat how a second panic following upon a tremendous failure--that of Jay Cooke & Co.--had placed a second fortune in his hands. This restored wealth softened him in some degree. Fate seemed to have his personal welfare in charge. He was sick of the stock-exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now decided that he would leave it once and for all. He would get in something else--street-railways, land deals, some of the boundless opportunities of the far West. Philadelphia was no longer pleasing to him. Though now free and rich, he was still a scandal to the pretenders, and the financial and social world was not prepared to accept him. He must go his way alone, unaided, or only secretly so, while his quondam friends watched his career from afar. So, thinking of this, he took the train one day, his charming mistress, now only twenty-six, coming to the station to see him off. He looked at her quite tenderly, for she was the quintessence of a certain type of feminine beauty.
"By-by, dearie," he smiled, as the train-bell signaled the approaching departure. "You and I will get out of this shortly. Don't grieve. I'll be back in two or three weeks, or I'll send for you. I'd take you now, only I don't know how that country is out there. We'll fix on some place, and then you watch me settle this fortune question. We'll not live under a cloud always. I'll get a divorce, and we'll marry, and things will come right with a bang. Money will do that."....

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The Beauties

I REMEMBER, when I was a high school boy in the fifth or sixth class, I was driving with my grandfather from the village of Bolshoe Kryepkoe in the Don region to Rostov-on-the-Don. It was a sultry, languidly dreary day of August. Our eyes were glued together, and our mouths were parched from the heat and the dry burning wind which drove clouds of dust to meet us; one did not want to look or speak or think, and when our drowsy driver, a Little Russian called Karpo, swung his whip at the horses and lashed me on my cap, I did not protest or utter a sound, but only, rousing myself from half-slumber, gazed mildly and dejectedly into the distance to see whether there was a village visible through the dust. We stopped to feed the horses in a big Armenian village at a rich Armenian's whom my grandfather knew. Never in my life have I seen a greater caricature than that Armenian. Imagine a little shaven head with thick overhanging eyebrows, a beak of a nose, long gray mustaches, and a wide mouth with a long cherry-wood chibouk sticking out of it. This little head was clumsily attached to a lean hunch-back carcass attired in a fantastic garb, a short red jacket, and full bright blue trousers. This figure walked straddling its legs and shuffling with its slippers, spoke without taking the chibouk out of its mouth, and behaved with truly Armenian dignity, not smiling, but staring with wide-open eyes and trying to take as little notice as possible of its guests.

There was neither wind nor dust in the Armenian's rooms, but it was just as unpleasant, stifling, and dreary as in the steppe and on the road. I remember, dusty and exhausted by the heat, I sat in the corner on a green box. The unpainted wooden walls, the furniture, and the floors colored with yellow ocher smelt of dry wood baked by the sun. Wherever I looked there were flies and flies and flies. . . . Grandfather and the Armenian were talking about grazing, about manure, and about oats. . . . I knew that they would be a good hour getting the samovar; that grandfather would be not less than an hour drinking his tea, and then would lie down to sleep for two or three hours; that I should waste a quarter of the day waiting, after which.....
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Old Age

UZELKOV, an architect with the rank of civil councillor, arrived in his native town, to which he had been invited to restore the church in the cemetery. He had been born in the town, had been at school, had grown up and married in it. But when he got out of the train he scarcely recognized it. Everything was changed. . . . Eighteen years ago when he had moved to Petersburg the street-boys used to catch marmots, for instance, on the spot where now the station was standing; now when one drove into the chief street, a hotel of four storeys stood facing one; in old days there was an ugly grey fence just there; but nothing--neither fences nor houses --had changed as much as the people. From his enquiries of the hotel waiter Uzelkov learned that more than half of the people he remembered were dead, reduced to poverty, forgotten.

"And do you remember Uzelkov?" he asked the old waiter about himself. "Uzelkov the architect who divorced his wife? He used to have a house in Svirebeyevsky Street . . . you must remember."

"I don't remember, sir."

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Dostoievski's Идиот

PART I - CHAPTER I

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.

Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.

When day dawned, two passengers in one of the third-class carriages found themselves opposite each other. Both were young fellows, both were rather poorly dressed, both had remarkable faces, and both were evidently anxious to start a conversation. If they had but known why, at this particular moment, they were both remarkable persons, they would undoubtedly have wondered at the strange chance which had set them down opposite to one another in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw Railway Company.

One of them was a young fellow of about twenty-seven, not tall, with black curling hair, and small, grey, fiery eyes. His nose was broad and flat, and he had high cheek bones; his thin lips were constantly compressed into an impudent, ironical--it might almost be called a malicious--smile; but his forehead was high and well formed, and atoned for a good deal of the ugliness of the lower part of his face. A special feature of this physiognomy....
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Scut

După fiecare teză, olimpiadă judeţeană, examen, îmi întrebam invariant mezina :

- Cu scut sau pe scut ?
(tipologie spartană : învingi sau mori )

- Sub scut !, îmi răspundea ea.
[până azi, nu se exista pentru aceasta sintagmă nici o interpretare istorică ]
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Așadár

Avantajele utilizarii 'mass-média' contemporane.

On-line

Estimând corelarea funcţională între dezvoltarea instrumentelor informatice şi capacitatea de concentrare intelectuală, examinând evoluarea timpului de reflexie - consider lecturarea on-line un exerciţiu intelectual util.

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Matematiceáscă,