As a matter of fact, the very title of my book, The Tescani Diary, is slightly ironical. I told myself that, although I was living a different type of event, I could try and make Tescani an echo of Păltiniş, just as a minor theme echoes a major one. For what I set for myself there was a life of natural rhythms, I might say. I decided not to be serious but as to my readings and my most intimate concerns. I decided to let myself carried away by the immediate level of experience. By what met the eye. By the nature around. By several people. By several prima facies experiences. In writing this Diary, I did not seek for any deep probing, I did not care about profundities, even though there might be some here and there in the text. In short, although Tescani was less than Păltiniş in terms of scope covered - if only for the simple reason that I was alone -, although the moment had a different make, although my presence there was due to different reasons, in spite of all these differences, the model was there, underlying the whole experience.

A.M.: It was also there implicit in the grace allowing you, in times of danger and loneliness, to write about things you enjoy. The wisdom lying at the core of the Constantin Noica model was here being tested and put to work.

Andrei Pleşu: Undoubtedly. Noica taught a very important lesson ? one of which there isn?t much talk today, for if there were, the quite severe current analysis of the political echo his presence had would take on an altogether different quality. For it was precisely a lesson with political import. In the mental space of Păltiniş, the concept that was systematically ?deconstructed? ? if I were to use current vocabulary ? was that of victim. The language and psychology of Păltiniş refused this element. We did not go there as victims of communism or as anticommunist combatants. What drove us there was precisely the feeling that there were values and commitments that could free you from the vicious circle executioner-victim, aggressor-aggressed, dictator-terrorised population. We broke out of this circle and lived joyfully and free at a level that, for us, at that moment, was the supreme one. Tescani made me feel that this lesson worked. And not only at a mental level. It proved palpably efficient. I was talking of pragmatic strategies, of putting things into practice. Not for one single moment did I experience the Tescani episode from the position of the victim, of the ?doomed? character living a drama. My experience was, on the contrary, one of relaxation and of the effortless, quite spontaneous refusal of the status of the victim. Which is disappointing to some of the readers of the Tescani Diary. I met people who told me, ?I bought the book with the hope of finding there, besides an on-going under-textual Jeremiad, whole pages of political ?opposition?, of militant anticommunist discourse. But I didn?t.? What they found there was some merely sketched brushstrokes. This is one of the effects of my ?inability?, rather than willed decision, to interiorise the status of a victim.