Things turned out differently. But they did turn out somehow: we caught this fever of establishing institutions, which he had too, but in a hostile milieu. He kept repeating, ?I could set up foundations in plenty.? He always lived with the frustration of not being able to give a body to his projects. We ourselves, while in Păltiniş, took over something of his unembodied projects; we would conceive editorial plans, imagine philosophical associations? We never got to actually achieve any of these things, but the mere thinking of what they would be like made us happy. After 1989, the moment had come for us to put those projects into practice. I would say that at least some of the inspired dreaming in Păltiniş finally came true, since Gabriel Liiceanu has realised a great editorial project and has thus been able to publish books that were essential to our formation and that might shape others too. It so happened, or we made it happen so, that all of us who lived in Păltiniş ultimately managed to found something. I?d say that the New Europe College is itself a sort of Păltiniş differently situated, adjusted so as to suit present conditions. It is not a school for wisdom, yet the idea of an intellectual community and of open debate on which it is founded comes from my Păltiniş experience.

A.M.: Coming back to that young man?s letter you mentioned. It?s worth noticing that in those times, even in countries like Czechoslovakia ? where the opposition clearly shaped and expressed political thought ? the technical skill of government, the pragmatic ability to efficiently organise things was not ensured by the preceding theoretical reflections. Vaclav Havel himself said it, during a Bucharest encounter with Emil Constantinescu and Nicolae Manolescu.

Andrei Pleşu: Indeed. Yet, we may well raise the question of our potential guilt here. In Păltiniş there was no project for another world, nothing was conceived of in terms of preparatory strategy. Such projects did exist in other countries of the ?communist camp?. People or even whole categories of people did exist there who could approximate, even though only theoretically or mentally, a possible change, who could envisage it in political terms. There were no such people here. That is why, as far as we are concerned, we may well keep up the question mark on our reluctance to think in practical terms of the probable state of affairs after the change. Take Poland. They proved capable of political thinking that was much more practical and strategically substantial. Another variant is the Hungarian one: they did not have a project like the Poles, but they had a communist government that adjusted itself to new trends, allowing a minimal reform project to work slight changes into its own body of assumptions. And that led to a less dramatic turning point. The idea of reform was not alien to people in the very leading apparatus. Or, Romania had neither a well-articulated opposition outside government, as Poland did, nor a reforming wing inside government, as it happened in Hungary. And this is why we are still in transit today.