19,039 views
"We manage ourselves": this word is one of the great drifts of our language and its use, because Romanians have made it an ideal of behavior. What does "manage ourselves" mean? To dodge obstacles, rules, institutions, to squeeze through. That is, we don't want to change them anymore, because if we change them, we get confused. An interview with Andrei Pleșu puts you in the difficulty of finding a title that doesn't lose anything, of transcribing in such a way that the orality and the ever-living idea are rendered even in writing. Although he doses his public appearances much more carefully, or perhaps precisely because of this fact, Andrei Pleșu has a special intellectual generosity, with which, incidentally, I began the interview: when he writes, he writes to also take a step towards the public that he calls unspecialized, but the salt of culture, the one who gives body and makes culture become contagious. This does not mean, however, to write only what the public wants to read, on the contrary. As for how we write today, in newspapers and everywhere, everyone writes about everything, Caragiale has a very nice saying: the Romanian who can read cannot help but write. It's like that, a national vice sometimes. The interview had as a starting point two volumes recently reissued by Humanitas Publishing House, Masterpieces in Dialogue and The Eye and Things.