A.M.: Bonds must have been created among these solitudes that are of a quality less and less likely to be obtained today.

Andrei Pleşu: Sure. We now tend to replace our friendships with ?partnerships?. I believe friendship to be a vital matter for the life of the spirit, for the realisation of what is best in each of us. Păltiniş needs to be understood in these terms too. It was the background against which a very special sort of human relationship developed. Friendship is different from partnership, different from collaboration, and surely different from the ?gang?. It is vitally important that one can run an informal seminar on Plotinus while somebody else is making coffee or preparing sandwiches by his side, and digressions are welcome, so that everybody?s personal life enters an Einklang with philosophical debate. Such an experience is an organic, integral one. It is not one of strict specialisation. We did not specialise in any direction in Păltiniş. We were not the conscientious students of a professional master. We were that now and again, too, but this is not what defined our relationship in Păltiniş. We were a group that opted for a shared complete experience during certain time intervals. Noica would sometimes call these intervals, function of how many days they lasted, Trismeron, Hexameron, Decameron. They were ?days?, we could say ?works and days?. But those ?days? meant whatever is part of a day: dinner, walks, chattering, amusement and so on.

A.M.: It becomes transparent in the Păltiniş Diary that he felt somehow responsible for your destiny, just as you yourselves felt responsible in a way for one another?s destiny.

Andrei Pleşu: He in particular would take our destinies upon himself and of course that was a challenge for us too; we would talk a lot, even when he wasn?t around, and, without vanity or tenseness, we would consider what we had to do. The uniqueness of the episode is also determined by the initial resemblance of the participants. You don?t get together with someone unless you are already together with him in some sense, or respond to him already. Gabriel and I are quite different persons, but we do have something essential in common, which is the premise of a strong bond and makes common experience possible. This is, again, a gift, even though Noica thought he was the cause of it, simply because he had decided that we should become friends. He might not have succeeded in that. Not all of Noica?s projects were successful, especially when it came to people. Yet, with us, Gabriel and I, the project was successful. And I suppose that, in a larger sense, even though it?s not the same type of relationship, it worked with people like Sorel Vieru, as well as with the group of Andrei Cornea, Radu Bercea, Thomas Kleininger and so on.